Emotional Intelligence & Emergency Response – Part 2

We are pleased to offer this talk by Dan Goleman called Emotional Intelligence and Emergency Response. Whether you are a manager leading a team through a time of crisis, or a first responder handling a dangerous emergency, Goleman’s guidance provides a framework which may be used to prepare for such an event. Following his lecture, Goleman leads a discussion with Barry Dorn of the Harvard School of Public Health and Leonard Marcus of the Harvard National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.

Section 2 – Four Key Skill Domains For Leadership
In this section Dan Goleman discusses four important areas of expertise that are essential to effective leadership:

1) Emotional Self-Awareness - Recognizing your own inner state is the first step to being able to draw on past successes and failures. Maintaining access to this decision matrix allows for informed, clear-headed decisions in the heat of the crisis.

2) Emotional Self-Management - Because this decision-matrix is non-verbal, staying cool in the moment (and avoiding the “amygdala-hijack” that we heard about in the last section) allows a leader to trust his gut sense of how to handle the challenging situation.

3) Empathy – How adept you are at seeing things from various perspectives can determine your own effectiveness as a leader during emergency situations as well as during the team-building (prework) phase.

4) Leadership style – Of the five styles that Goleman mentions here (Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Consensus, and Command & Control), there is no one single style that will serve you well in all situations. Knowing how to utilize them in different situations is the key to tapping into the potential of every person and improving your team’s Group IQ.