The late Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour says, “I cannot hand over leadership to emotion, lest it open the door to a fragility that I strive to deny.”
When we try to apply this statement to the professional field and the business world, we will notice that it is correct, even if only partially, because giving emotion the loudest voice will corrupt many interests, starting from appointing incompetent individuals through the absence of moral and material equality between employees, all the way to making fateful emotional decisions that may be... A major reason for the collapse of all pillars of the institution.
But the question is: What if organizations exploited this energy generated by emotions in their leaders in a more intelligent way?
Perhaps, precisely from here, what is known as emotional intelligence has become one of the most important skills upon which successful institutions are based today, in addition to the hard skills that its individuals are armed with. There is much historical evidence of this. In 2001, American businessman Douglas Conant assumed the position of CEO of Campbell Soup Company. Specializing in the food and beverage industry, the company was then suffering from a sharp decline in profits, as it lost half of its market value and was suffering damage at all levels caused by a series of forced layoffs, to the point that one of the leaders of Gallup, the leading organization in the field of analysis and consulting, described the environment in... Campbell described it as the worst working environment he had seen among companies ranked among the 500 largest companies in the United States by revenue.
To address all this chaos, Douglas began his work by focusing on the human element and enhancing its value. He focused on dealing with him as a human being and not just a number that can be replaced or negated at any moment.
From this standpoint, he began his career in his new position with a pledge that seemed very simple on the surface: “Campbell valuing people, people valuing Campbell.” Campbell values people, and people value Campbell. This decade-long journey of mutual appreciation paid off, as Douglas Conant exited the company in 2011, leaving it in a completely different position than it had been ten years before. The company's profits increased, its cumulative return to shareholders rose, and it received awards. Diverse due to its excellence on various levels.
Perhaps one of the facts behind this transformation is that Douglas, throughout this period, sent more than 30,000 handwritten letters of thanks to employees at a rate of 10 letters per day, thus creating a success factor that goes beyond material concepts, plans, strategies, and the language of numbers, and that is only because he raised the status of the person before the employee.
Something almost similar was done by the Indian woman Indra Nooyi, who held first place for three consecutive years in Fortune magazine’s ranking of the most influential women in the world, but this time it was the “human touch” with the families of the employees, as immediately after her appointment as CEO of PepsiCo, she went to her hometown. In India to visit her mother, a large crowd of friends and relatives arrived as a result, not to congratulate Nooyi herself as she thought, but to congratulate her mother. This situation motivated her to write letters dedicated to the families of her employees, and it is no wonder that the company’s shares rose by 78% during the period. Its mandate, in which profits also increased from $35 billion in 2006 to approximately $63.5 billion in 2017, with an increase in annual net profits from $2.7 billion to $6.5 billion.
In conclusion, it is true that firmness in management is inevitable, but the most important thing that leaders should pay special attention to is that firmness and strictness do not conflict with emotional intelligence, or more precisely with human interaction, because possessing this soft skill will not only make you understand your feelings and those of others. Your team in a deeper way. Rather, it builds your knowledge about when you should be firm, and when you are expected to be gentle and gentle, because the relationship, above all, is not the relationship of a leader with an employee as much as it is a relationship of a human being with a human being, and even if there is knowledge on both sides that there is an interest in the middle, this It does not grant the authority to perform this interest through repulsive methods and unfair practices that lack the ABCs of proper dealing in the first place, which will not only corrupt the interest alone, such that the harm is limited to the employee if he is laid off, for example, but will extend to the possibility of the institution collapsing completely, especially when we consider the fact that Harvard Business Magazine Review, a specialist in the field of business, stated in a previous report that the mere “poor communication” between leaders and employees is the silent killer of large companies.
