Emotionally Intelligent Servant Leaders…a Compassionate Facilitator of Learning

By Dr Andree Swanson
 

One evening, I was exasperated over the loss of another student.  No, the student did not die, did not even move to another state or city.  This student was a loss in the program at the on ground school where I was teaching.  This student could not manage the rigor of higher education, did not come to class, did not submit work on time, and did not even try.  My mentor, Dr. Robert Throop, author of Reaching Your Potential: Personal and Professional Development, told me “you can’t save everyone!”  Throop told me that much like patients who have cancer, even though you try to save the patient (or in this case, a student), you lose some patients (students) some of the time. 

Since that date, over 15 years ago, I have been in higher education in a variety of capacities, mostly in the online arena.  I have seen many ideas to retain and support students.  Yet these ideas are like medicating the symptom without finding the root cause of the disease.  A few of them work and are often good, but a more empathetic facilitator may be more appropriate for the adult learners.  A paradigm shift must occur from getting the faculty member from the “sage on the stage” to the compassionate facilitator of learning.

 Emotional Intelligence in the Online Classroom 

In 2008, Berenson, Boyles and Weaver after doing research on emotional intelligence as a predictor for success, they concluded that knowing the soft skills attributes to student success.  If the emotional intelligence skill improves student success, woudn’t an emotionally intelligent instructor improve student success, which would, in turn, improve retention?

Many studies have been published on how individuals with high emotional intelligence can enhance and increase the potential for positive outcomes.  Those outcomes can be in the online classroom.  An example is that people can work to increase their emotional intelligence, thus, improving performance.  So, what is the performance for a compassionate facilitator of learning?   Helping the students instead of enforcing obstacles.  Adult learners WILL have obstacles, but the obstacles are not insurmountable. 

Emotional intelligence is a learned and practiced skill.  Daniel Goleman stated that for individuals in leadership positions, 85% of their competencies are in the emotionally intelligent domain.  Compassionate faculty can be trained in improving their emotional intelligence.

 Servant Leadership in the Online Classroom 

 Many faculty members may not admit this, but they are authoritarian in nature.  With courses being short, they lay down the ground rules early.  NO LATE WORK.  Ten percent deduction for each day late, etc.  Not only does this cause students stress, the professors are stressed by their own guidelines.

From my own experience, I was the instructor who stayed up until 12:01 (in your time zone) and by 12:06 I had posted all of my zeros for the next day.  Off to bed now for a good rest!  I reveled in deducting points per each day late.  This is how I will establish my grade variance, I thought.  Oftentimes, I was thankful for those that posted late just so that everyone would not “earn” the same grade.  Not only did this build stress on my students, it was very stressful for me.

It was about this time that I learned of the teachings of Robert Greenleaf, author of The Servant as Leader.   Greenleaf stated, “A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong.”  Dr. Niall Ferguson, the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, said, “As a teacher, my strategy is to encourage questioning.  I’m the least authoritarian professor you’ll ever meet.”  Some of the traits of a servant leader include humility, good listening skills, empathy, and commitment to the people who are followers.

The Compassionate Facilitator of Learning Model

  Step 1 – Learn more about improving your emotional intelligence and seek to bring these qualities into the classroom.

 Step 2 -- Humble yourself.  Establish yourself as an expert in the field.  Engage with the student in a way that shares this expertise but present yourself with humility.  This is the “you get more bees with honey” approach.

 Step 3 – Empathize with your students.  Remember the times when your baby was sick, your mother was dying, you just had a car accident.  Stuff happens.  Give the student a break.  That one break might be the one that student needs.

 Step 4 – Improve your listening skills (even in the online classroom).  Are you really reading what the student is writing to you?  When apply the Socratic method are you listening to what your student is saying?  Can you hear the real issue when the student says, “I don’t understand?”

Step 5 – Commitment to the students.  The bottom line is what you are being paid to do.  Grade papers?  Yes.  Submit your grades on time.  Yes.  Nevertheless, the most important aspect of an online faculty member’s job is helping the student be successful.

The other day Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated talk show host, said the most important thing that parents can do is to raise children who are successful in their own right.  As online faculty members to achieve our mission is to be able to go to sleep at night and not count the zeros as they rest on your pillow.  Our daily mission is to help students achieve his or her dream.

The Emotionally and Socially Intelligent Leader

Researchers have explored different genres of leadership success for some time. They have come to some interesting conclusions of what makes one leader more successful over another. Intelligence, cognitive flexibility, and skill have provided only partial explanations. Research by Singh (2013) further lends credibility that leaders with high emotional and social intelligence are capable of influencing organizations to achieve objectives at a level

Leadership can be seen as a social skill which encourages strong followership. It is associated with emotional intelligence factors such as attitude, confidence, respect, and trustworthiness (Fehd, 2001).  Through positive actions, leaders foster the success of others and encourage beneficial human-to-human relationships. They have the ability to disarm negativity and work toward stronger goal achievement. 

Leaders work around a shared vision. It is the selling of this vision that truly helps people to adjust their behaviors toward a specific end. It is often necessary for leaders to engage in collegiality to create collaboration that allows for enough subordinate power to become part of the vision realization process (Singh, 2008). As employees begin to understand the vision and create synergy toward its achievement releasing additional power can act as both a reward and an efficiency generator.

Leadership is about influencing others. There are many options of power usage but those that can influence others create self-perpetuating growth. Leadership involves the influencing of others to act toward the attainment of a goal through the use of social relations versus simple structural constraints (Hellriegel, et. al., 2006). In such situations administrative activities should enhance social leadership but not be the foundation of such leadership. When administrative leadership is restrictive and limiting it runs the risk of discontentment and breakdown. 

Superior performance is often seen in the realm of skills but this doesn’t explain in meaningful depth previous success stories. According to Singh & Manser (2008), around two-thirds of competencies linked to superior performance are emotional and social qualities that exist in the realm of self-confidence, persistence, empathy, flexibility, and the ability to work with others. Therefore, leaders can perform when they are cable of understanding and working with the various human elements by relying on their high emotional intelligence.

This leaves some wondering what emotional intelligence is. According to Caruso (1999), emotional intelligence can be clarified as, “EI is the ability to use emotions to help you solve problems and live a more effective life. Emotional intelligence without intelligence, or intelligence without emotional intelligence, is only part of a solution. The complete solution is the head working with the heart” (p. 26). Thinking and emotion work together to create the highest levels of leadership performance and environmental navigation. 

EI and social intelligence come together and can be considered a single construct of emotional and social intelligence. Such leaders have the following abilities (Orme & Bar-on (2002):

1. Understand and express emotions appropriately.
2. Understand the feelings of others and establish interpersonal relationships.
3. Cope with new situations and solve problems on a personal and interpersonal nature.
4. Be optimistic, positive, and self-motivated toward goals. 

To test this social leadership concept Singh (2013) used a sample of 474 participants from 200 organizations. The survey included 55 questions that ranked the strength of observable EI characteristics. They found that the following concepts had the highest rankings of leadership:

Communication

Relationships

Trust

Leadership

Empathy

Conflict Management

Professor Prakash Singh argues that to move the bottom line of employees from dependency to independence requires the ability to bring them into a shared vision of reality. Administrative structures are designed for management/control purposes but interpersonal leadership is designed to bring people willingly into productive actions. The ability to communication, create trust, foster relationships, provide a level of empathy, and manage conflicts as they rise is important for encouraging people to see a more productive perspective. When the emotionally and socially intelligent leader builds relationships around a vision, employee satisfaction level rises. 

Previous research has indicated the employee satisfaction is the drawing in of employees to fulfill grander purposes for the organization. It is a process of being part of something greater than oneself in an attempt to participate in the bounded rationality of organizational objectives. When employees are drawn as individuals into the success of an organization and can contribute in their own unique ways they can raise their performance and skill levels in a way that can be hedged by leaders to enhance the firm. The positive of leadership is like the catalyzing agent that bridges the gap between the administrative factors and the economic-social needs of the employees. 

Caruso, D. & Salovey, P. (2003). The emotionally intelligent manager. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass.

Fehd, L. 2001. Emotional intelligence: An executive handbook. Austin: Good Pages.

Hellriegel, D., Jackson, S.E., Slocum, J., Staude, G., Amos, T., Klopper, H.B., Louw, L. & Oosthuizen, T. (2006). Management. Oxford: Cape Town.

Orme, G. & Bar-On, R. 2002. The contribution of emotional intelligence to individual and organisational effectiveness. Competency and Emotional Intelligence, 9, 23-28.

Singh, P. (2013). A collegial approach in understanding leadership as a social skill. International business & economics research journal, 12 (5). 

Singh, P. & Manser, P. (2008). Correlation between the perceived emotionally intelligent interpersonal behaviors of school principals and the job satisfaction of their teachers. The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture & Change Management, 8(1), 189-200.