Jo Ilfeld, PhD, CEO of Incite To Leadership, helps CEOs of high-growth, high-impact companies build unstoppable leadership teams.
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I teach leadership intelligence in an executive MBA program. Every year, as another class graduates, there is so much I still want to teach them. The truth is that if you’re growing and shifting throughout your career, your leadership is constantly being tested, and hopefully leveling up. Yet it's not enough to rely on on-the-job growth; in my career as an executive leadership coach, I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders, and the biggest differential for success is having a continued focus on increasing your leadership intelligence. So I encourage my eMBAs, and you, to keep designing your leadership journey to allow new possibilities to open up for you.
Dr. Jo’s Top Five Recommendations For Growing Your Leadership Intelligence
1. Read one article a week.
It can be about leadership, teams, emotional intelligence, difficult conversations, etc. During school, you continuously read and experiment with new ideas. Yet often once you settle into a career, your learning focuses on your functional area and industry. I encourage you to subscribe to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, McKinsey’s newsletter and Strategy+Business. These are my favorites, but choose ones that speak to you.
Pick one article each week that seems relevant to what you’re currently facing. Reading one weekly article adds up. In a year, you’ll have 52 new ideas and thought leaders' voices circulating around your brain. This will give you an edge over other leaders who stop honing their craft.
2. Find a way to reset during your day.
As my students know, and as I've written about on my company blog, taking a conscious pause where you allow your more rational brain to come online can be invaluable during high-stakes conversations. A conscious pause can be just that: a few deep breaths, a sip of water or just feeling your feet on the floor.
While conscious pauses are invaluable in a triggering moment, also try weaving them into each workday to help moderate daily stress. Recent research points to the toll of accruing microstresses throughout your day. It impacts you, and it impacts those who work (and live) with you. The best antidote is to create intentional breaks where your nervous system can reset closer to normal. The best way is to go outside and take a short walk; even walking to get coffee can be effective if you look around you as you walk and breathe in the fresh air—that means not looking at your phone the whole time!
Depending on your level of stress, you might need several resets in a day. A few moments like this sprinkled throughout your day allow you to come back to center regularly, so you’re starting from that centered place before getting pulled into your next fire drill.
3. Notice how you make others feel.
A key part of leadership is how you communicate ideas, plans and emotions with others. Whether or not you have a team reporting to you, work requires that you constantly negotiate with others to make bigger things happen than you could do on your own.
It’s not enough to have the best ideas in the room if you can’t convey them in a way that gets others on board. EQ does matter and the first step is regularly taking stock of how you impact others. Do others agree to help you even though it adds to their long to-do list? Do you get quick responses to your emails and Slacks? When you speak in meetings, do you see nods and interest or crossed arms and inattention?
One of the biggest signs that your leadership intelligence needs attention is when you struggle to enroll others in your vision and plans, big and small. So look around during your work day and note whether others are responding to you in the way you would like. If not, pay special attention to recommendations 2 and 4.
4. Continue to invest in your network.
Your network is your personal gold. Your network can give you feedback when you’re struggling, help you to brainstorm new ideas and provide a new set of resources you might not know about.
I’ve learned so much about how to build a great network from my colleague Michael Melcher’s new book Your Invisible Network, and one key idea stands out: You should be investing in your network weekly, not just when you’re mobilizing for a job search. Pay it forward and be a resource to others around you first. This will create a strong network to support your own growth.
5. Do a yearly self-assessment.
For the eMBA program, my students have to do a comprehensive self-assessment, a SWOT-like appraisal of their personal strengths, weaknesses, values and opportunities for growth. They’ll tell you it’s a lot of work—and it is. But revisiting your self-assessment yearly gives you time to reflect, see where you've grown and check that the things you wanted to improve are still relevant for where you are now.
Just as a daily reset allows you to show up as your best self during each day, a yearly self-assessment allows you to make sure that your attention and efforts are following your personal values and vision (and not anyone else’s). To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Revisiting your yearly assessment is a great way to ensure that you know, at least directionally, where you want to go and that you are aligning your efforts toward that compass point.
Here's a short self-assessment opportunity now:
As you read my recommendations, which ones are you already doing? Is there one you're not doing that spoke to you the loudest? Would you be willing to focus on that one for the next few months?
Final Thoughts
While these five recommendations for growing your leadership intelligence build on each other nicely, start with one. And start small. Small changes in your leadership intelligence can have outsize results in your workplace (and life) effectiveness.
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