Emotional Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence: High Achievers Do It; Low Achievers Don’t

In its broadest definition, leadership is the influence one has on another’s behavior such as a leader and follower. Leaders influence behavioral change in followers to go further, try harder, and do better than anyone ever thought possible. As a compelling force for behavioral change, leadership effects change at the emotional level where lasting change takes root and flourishes. The process of leading creates a symbiotic relationship between leader and follower when leaders take into consideration follower diversity they join the team. Followers come in all shapes, sizes, backgrounds and belief systems. They come with a variety of talents, gifts, and abilities as well as emotional maturity. The plight of a leader is to meet followers at their point of vulnerability and compel them to move past that point to reach homeostasis. The primary difference between effective, high achieving leaders and ineffective, low achieving leaders is the ability to move followers beyond their emotional point of vulnerability in a concerted effort to address follower emotions through emotional leadership. Using Reuven BarOn’s Five Realms of Emotional Intelligence and 15 underlying scales as a filter, this paper compares the effective traits of high achieving emotional leaders and the ineffective traits of low achieving emotional leaders in an effort to emphasize the importance of emotional leadership through emotional intelligence