” I don't have to hand over the leadership to an emotion, so as not to open the door to the fragility that I am striving to banish,”says the late Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour.
When we try to apply this speech to the professional sphere and the business world, we will notice that it agrees with the right, even partially, because giving emotion the loudest voice will spoil several interests ranging from hiring incompetent individuals through the absence of moral and material equality between employees to making fateful emotional decisions that may be the main reason for the collapse of all the pillars of the organization.
But the question is: what if institutions used this energy generated by the emotions of their leaders in a smarter way
Perhaps, precisely from here, what is known as emotional intelligence has become one of the most important skills that underpin successful organizations today, as well as the hard skills with which their personnel are armed, and there are many historical evidences of this. in 2001, American businessman Douglas Conant took over as CEO of Campbell Soup, specialized in the food and beverage industry, and the company was then suffering From a sharp decline in the level of profits, where it lost half of its market value and was suffering damage at all levels left by a series of forced layoffs, to the point that one of the leaders of Gallup, a leading institution in the field of analytics and consulting, describes the board at Campbell as The worst working environment he has seen among companies ranked among the top 500 companies in the USA in terms of revenue.
To address all this chaos, Douglas began his work by focusing on the human element and enhancing its value.. Focus on treating him as a human being and not just a number that can be replaced or negated at any moment.
With this in mind, he began his career in his new position with a pledge that at first glance seemed very simple : ” Campbell valuing people, people valuing Campbell”.. Campbell appreciates people, and people appreciate Campbell. Douglas Conant left the company in 2011, leaving it in a completely different situation than it was ten years earlier, the company's profits increased, the cumulative return to shareholders increased, and it received various awards for its excellence on various levels.
Perhaps one of the facts behind this transformation is that throughout this period Douglas sent more than 30 thousand handwritten thank-you letters to employees at a rate of 10 letters a day, thus making a success factor that goes beyond physical concepts, plans, strategies and the language of numbers, just because he raised the human being before the employee.
Almost a similar thing was done by the Indian Indra Nooyi, winner of the 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 employees, as immediately after her appointment as CEO of PepsiCo she went to her hometown in India in order to visit her mother, and After that, a large crowd of friends and relatives not to congratulate Nooyi herself, as she thought, but to congratulate her mother, and that attitude motivated her to write letters dedicated to the families of her employees, no wonder that the company's shares rose by 78% during her tenure, in which profits also increased from 35 billion dollars in 2006 To approximately 63.5 billion in 2017 with an increase in annual net profit 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 rigor do not interfere with emotional intelligence or more precisely with human handling, because having this soft skill will not only make you understand your feelings and the feelings of your team more deeply, but also build your knowledge about when You must be firm, and when leniency and kindness are expected from you, because the relationship above all is not a leader's relationship with an employee as much as it is a human relationship with a human being, and even if there is knowledge on both sides that there is an interest in the middle, this does not give the authority to perform this interest For example, it will extend to the possibility of the collapse of the organization completely, especially when we consider the fact that Harvard Business Review, specialized 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.
