Unpacking a Track: The Emotionally Intelligent Leader
Lee Davis, Training and Organizational Development Consultant
Leadership Advantage organizes its content into 41 tracks, each of which features a rich selection of assets in different formats or mediums. All tracks have a consistent organizational structure, making them easier to navigate as you gain familiarity. Once you launch a track, you’re taken to a summary page that includes a brief description of the track, a dashboard of The Essentials, an index, and related resources. This allows you to quickly evaluate a topic and jump to areas of interest.
As an example, with the track for The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, you’d be presented with the following screen.
The Essentials
As shown above, The Essentials consists of five buttons to choose from.
- Do You Need It? provides a brief list of objectives along with a set of questions to help you determine how well you already know the subject. Based on those items, you can quickly determine if pursuing this track is a good fit for your needs and level of experience. For The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, two of the questions are “Do you know the characteristics of an emotionally intelligent leader?” and “Do you know the four main human emotions, and the pros and cons of each?”
- The Core Message summarizes the key learning points and thought-leader insights from the Explore in Depth section and can be completed in 20 minutes or less. With The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, this section defines the emotions of sadness, anger, happiness, and fear and their advantages or disadvantages in the workplace; discusses the two domains of emotional competence (personal and relational); and features two short videos.
- Explore in Depth presents available content in an easily navigable accordion format, all of which can be completed in two hours or less. For The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, the main headings are The Evolution of Emotional Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence at Work, The Emotionally Competent Leader, and Developing Emotional Competence; as with other tracks, there is also a summary and additional resources. Under each of the main headings, you’ll find a variety of assets, including book summaries, videos, case studies, and short readings on key concepts.
- Challenge Yourself puts you in an interactive problem-solving simulation. With this track, the simulation involves coming back from vacation and finding that one of your cost-saving proposals has been severely undermined by someone you considered to be a friend.
- Take the Test opens a post-assessment that can be completed in fifteen minutes or less. Take note: Unless you’re fulfilling a certificate requirement, you are not required to take any assessments. They are simply provided for those who wish to gauge their knowledge in this way.
Of course, you do not have to proceed through The Essentials in a linear fashion. To my mind, The Essentials is a powerful way to access a track because you can quickly gauge your grasp of a subject and then explore the other options accordingly. If this approach doesn’t seem like a good fit for your learning style, there is another way.
Track Index
Each track includes an index that organizes all of the track’s content and assets by type of approach, as shown below. The screenshot below from The Emotionally Intelligent Leader also illustrates the abundance of content; the index for this track alone lists 11 key concepts, 15 videos, 10 tools and self-assessments, and 31 Word documents, along with other assets.
While a multitude of videos could quickly feel overwhelming, the videos in Leadership Advantage are hyper-targeted; most are 2–4 minutes long and focus on a single key concept. For instance, the titles of three of the short videos found in this track are “What Brain Research Says About Leadership,” “Relationship Management: Don’t Win the Battle to Lose the War,” and “Characteristics of High EQ Leaders.”
Leader-Led Activities
One last benefit that makes Leadership Advantage a truly remarkable resource is leader-led activities, which provide a bridge between your individual Leadership Advantage learning and development opportunities for your whole team.
For The Emotionally Intelligent Leader, the leader-led activities include a discussion guide, an application guide, and two facilitation guides. The facilitation guide on Relational Competencies is recommended for use with a team or work group and suggests track content you can review in preparation. Further, the guide provides bullets points to use for slides or talking points during the facilitation along with a self-assessment and resource document you can download and print to share with your team.
Any leader who has ever attempted to facilitate a development or team-building activity with their staff will appreciate how time-consuming and complex such an endeavor can be. With Leadership Advantage, the tools and resources for these kinds of activities are at your fingertips. Moreover, you have the opportunity to access material ahead of time to bolster both your confidence and your knowledge.
A Takeaway
I hope that unpacking this track has helped you better understand the kind of learning and development opportunities that are provided through Leadership Advantage. I offer this quote from the book summary of Daniel Goleman’s Working With Emotional Intelligence, which is included in The Emotionally Intelligent Leader track:
The notion of emotional self-control does not mean denying or repressing true feelings. “Bad” moods, for instance, have their uses; anger, sadness and fear can become sources of creativity, energy and connectedness. Anger can be an intense source of motivation, particularly when it stems from the urge to right an injustice or inequity. Shared sadness can knit people together. And the urgency born of anxiety — if not overwhelming —can prod the creative spirit.
What a profound insight into how emotions we perceive as negative can be a productive force. Now imagine what you and your team could do with a greater awareness of emotions and the tools to discuss and develop personal and relational competencies in the workplace.
