LEADING WITH HEART

Emotional Intelligence plays a big part in leadership and succession

 We have all heard stories about business

succession plans going sideways. There

are a lot of reasons for

that and I believe the lack of emotional

intelligence on the team is a big factor.

I saw it in my own business. I sold my

business to three people who worked for me

and we became a succession leadership

team. We had a fourth person that was on

that team that had low emotional

intelligence. He could not understand how

his decisions and his emotions affected

not only the team but also the rest of

the company. We worked with him in trying to

increase that Emotional Intelligence

because you can increase your

Emotional Intelligence if you want to

and if you try. He decided that it

wasn't really an issue, just couldn't see

it so again that's emotional

intelligence self-awareness and he was asked to exit

the company. We saw him as a deterrent to

our successful execution of the business succession plan.

 I do believe that Emotional

Intelligence plays a huge part in

leadership and in your leadership

team for business succession.

 

Going back to that discussion about why a leader

may not succeed in that role. Part of it

is emotionalself-awareness so you have to be aware

of your emotions and how they affect

others and be able to understand how the

decision making and the interactions

make a difference in your leadership

skills. Also improved Communications. Communication is a huge

piece of leadership as well as a huge

piece of Emotional Intelligence.

High Emotional intelligent people encourage

open and clear Communications and leaders can

articulate their vision and expectations

more effectively when they have high

emotionalintelligence. This is all pieces that

that help with that business succession

plan.

 

Also a couple other pieces are empathy

and relationship building. A lot of

people are not sure what empathy really

is but empathy means that you can

understand and relate to something

that someone is going through or is

saying so it's a little different than

sympathy whereas sympathy is like oh

I'm so sorry but empathy is you really

feel it as a good leader and is able to

understand and feel what their team

members are feeling or maybe going

through either on the job or

personally. My experience with empathy

is that if you are really strong in

empathy  it could get in the way of

of that leadership so you really must

control that a little bit and have just

the right amount but again that's part

of Emotional Intelligence and it can be

learned and controlled. The other piece of it is

conflict resolution. We all know that as

business owners, there's going to be

conflict, there's going to be conflict

between employees, between employee and

manager, employee and owner whatever it

is but high Emotional Intelligence leaders are

able to resolve that conflict easily.

Part of that is communication and

empathy so conflict resolution is a big

part of leadership and also with

business succession.

So I think aboutmyself and my

business succession team. It

wasn't always smooth every situation was

not smooth, especially as we got closer

to the end and I started having

emotions about selling the

business, not them necessarily but about

my own 31 years of owning that business.

They were so good at conflict

resolution that it really was never a

conflict that we could not talk out. Again communication and

empathy came into play there as well

because we were all empathetic about

where we were in the journey because we

were on that journey

together.

Adaptability and resilience are

other huge pieces of leadership and

also is a huge piece of leadership in a

businesssuccession process. You have to

have strong Emotional Intelligence and

be very adaptable and resilient in that

process of business succession

and Leadership.

If you think about there's two components

 in business succession: The leadership of the

existing team that's there as well as

your business succession team. There's

a lot of different components there and

you really must be resilient and

adaptable as well as able to build trust.

 

Building trust

 

 

A HUGE High

Emotional Intelligence

piece is being able to build trust. We've

all met people that we're just

immediately drawn to and part of

that is trust and they are able to build

our trust quickly and a lot of times if

you really examine them, they have high

Emotional Intelligence and they're able

to cultivate that trust through

consistent and empathetic interactions.

That has a lot to do with emotional

intelligence as well and being a good

leader is being able to be trusted by

the people that you lead. They want to trust

you and you need to build that trust.

Trust is very important in a leadership

role and in business succession.

I think business succession and

Leadership go hand in hand with a

leadership team that is part of the

succession. You have a leadership team

that may not be part of this succession

but you are still on that leadership

team, then you have the rest of the

employees. There's a lot of

pieces with leadership and

business succession to think about.

 

How do you see leadership in your business

 

How do you see leadership in relation

to business succession? If you are

thinking about business succession in

your own business are the people that

are going to take over your business, are

they good leaders? How do you know that

they're good leaders? An assessment of that can be

done either with a coach or maybe an

Emotional Intelligence assessment might

be the right thing for your leaders to

take part in and be able to tell

if they are going to be able to take

those steps forward to own your

Business.

Assessing your leaders

 

 

I am an Emotional Intelligence

coach and I give leaders assessments and

then I can help them to understand

what the outcome of that assessment is.

So, if you're interested in me helping

you with that I'd be glad to do that. I

also have created a

course on business succession the

filling the Gap piece. I don't help

people with valuations and that

type of thing but once you sign that

paperwork now you have your team members that are going

to buy your business and they could be

employees like I did, or they could be

family members how do you teach them how to own

that business?

That's where my course fills in that Gap

so, take a look at

www.hellbenttosell.com

to see my course and also some emotional

intelligence information.