Maria Fernanda Dipp - Entrepreneurial Leadership

Maria Fernanda Dipp - Entrepreneurial Leadership  - 14th September, 2017

Assignments for Class #2 "What Makes a Leader"

According to the article “What Makes a Leader?”, written by Daniel Goleman, what makes a real leader is a high degree of emotional intelligence. As stated in the piece, emotional intelligence is the key to successful leadership, and it can be learned. The article also emphasizes that building EI is not easy and will not happen without genuine desire and hard effort. I strongly agree with Daniel Goleman, and I believe for the reasons explored above.

First, the way we live and work is constantly on transformation and people had to become more creative to follow those changes. In my opinion, technical excellence is no longer the main skill of a good leader. What counts now is the way people approach the world and deal with others around, specially their teams.

Also, emotional Intelligence is a balance between reason and emotion and explores areas such as decision making, interpersonal relationships or conflict management. Therefore, IE is directly linked to effective leadership! When working as a team, a leader has to perceive and knows how to listen to others. This involves managing emotions and knowing how to motivate your team. Emotional Intelligence helps to develop people and ideas and therefore the main characteristic of a respected and admired leader.

For all those reasons, one of my favorites CEO is Howard Schultz (Starbucks). For me is an example of Emotional Intelligence, so I decided to do a little research. He is a person who have developed the four capacities that Goleman outlined for EI: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.