The Importance of a Leader's Social Competence

Table of Contents

Introduction..................................................................................................................... 3

Leadership and Emotional Intelligence.......................................................................................................... ...........5

Case Study: Octavian Paler................................................................................ 8

About Octavian Paler - the personality........................................................................................................ ....................8

Octavian Paler - the Opinion Leader........................................................................................................ .........................9

Conclusions..................................................................................................................... 12 Bibliography

Introduction

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader."

John Quincy Adams

Who are our leaders? What determines us to name certain people we encounter, as being leaders? Or, if we come to think of it, what is exactly a leader?

Over the years, I have observed from personal experiences that we have the tendency of calling "leader" the persons that impress us; those that induce us feelings of passion and are able to stimulate us to give our best in a certain topic/ field. When it comes to trying to explain why a certain leader is successful we get to talk about strategy, vision or other innovative ideas.

But, we rarely think about the emotions that leaders induce to their interlocutors and furthermore, think about the emotions they have inside and how they control them. No matter the goal a leader sets for himself (creating strategies, increasing sales etc.) their success always depends on how he acts.

For exemplifying this, I am thinking about the leader of a company going through a crisis. In this case, the leader's objective is to motivate his team for creating a strategy in order to overcome this situation. What will happen to the team if the leader starts shouting and blaming people around him for the situation? Most probably, people will feel scared about losing their jobs and most probably lose their productivity. But, a leader who is able to master his emotions and talk to his team motivating them to overcome this in a soft tone will have much better results.

I chose to start the introduction with a quote from the sixth President of the United States because in my opinion, it is the best definition for a leader.

I chose to present this topic because I strongly believe in the power of emotions especially when it comes to leadership. I admire a lot people that are able to inspire others with vision and passion. Although we (employees) do not pay much attention to it we really feel that the emotions shown by our boss, influences our emotions and behavior in a very high percentage. Usually we choose not to talk about this because emotions are perceived as something very personal and it is not easy to express them. Most often, if a leader raises feelings of enthusiasm and passion, that person will have some excellent performances. On the contrary, if he will raise some anxiety and negative feelings, that person will lose its productivity.

In the first part of my project, I chose to write about leadership today and to which extent social competencies in the context of Emotional Intelligence play an important role in their behavior and their success.

In the second part, I presented a leader of opinion in Romania, Octavian Paler, an well-known writer whose role as a leader is disputed by many, but also praised by others. I will try to present the reasons which I consider make him a leader and what role played social competences in his career and image.

I will conclude this project with some short conclusions regarding the importance of social competences for a leader.

Leadership and Emotional Intelligence

"Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, lie in the eye of the beholder."

Laurence J. Peter

Along history, in any culture or in any period of time, the leader of a human group was always the one towards everyone looked for security and clarity when facing uncertainties or threats. I dare say that the leader is considered kind of like the emotional guidance of the group.

Nevertheless, until a while back, companies barely made the difference between managers and leaders.

Today, we start thinking about emotional intelligence, how to develop employees competences through trainings, coaching them to improve their performance and developing different sets of competences in order to better evaluate new recruits.

Things have evolved a lot, and now, people stopped looking only at results, and started evaluating the person behind it as well. When people look for a job today, besides the paycheck, they also look for development opportunities and work environment. The organizational hierarchy is looking more and more less decentralized and organizational flow of communication is becoming less and less formal.

And, along with all these changes, the notion of leadership also suffered many changes.

Today we see in a clearer way that is not just about strategy and vision, it's also about emotions. And, in fact these are the most important trigger.

Although a while back managers did not pay much attention to emotions because these did not bring any success on the business table, today the "Generation Y" leaders inspire through a great deal of autonomy and look in the members of their team for potential and competences.

So, what makes them so different besides the changing times and the development of technology? In my opinion, the chance they have to develop their emotions and channel them towards fulfilling an objective.

As I stated in the introductory part of this project, the social competences play a very important role