Leaders – What to Work On When You Don't Know What to Work On

The Leadership Blindspot

Have you ever wondered why you struggle to collaborate effectively with the most technically brilliant person on your team? Or why that manager with average qualifications inspires extraordinary loyalty from their staff?

These leadership puzzles often stem from something that technical expertise and traditional credentials can't measure – emotional intelligence in the workplace. While what you know and who you know have traditionally dominated conversations about professional success, research now confirms that emotional intelligence skills play a far greater role in determining leadership effectiveness and organizational achievement.

But the real challenge for leaders isn't knowing that emotional intelligence matters – it's identifying exactly which emotional intelligence skills they personally need to develop.

The Missing Link: Business Emotional Intelligence

Traditional approaches to improving leadership often miss the mark. Endlessly pursuing "self-awareness" or soliciting potentially painful feedback from peers might help you identify specific actions to change, but these approaches rarely address the root beliefs driving those behaviors.

This is where Business Emotional Intelligence (Business EQ) becomes crucial. Unlike general intelligence or general emotional intelligence, Business EQ specifically focuses on the emotions and behaviors that directly impact workplace performance and leadership effectiveness.

The most powerful tool for developing Business EQ is an assessment that provides a practical roadmap – not just insights about your personality, but actionable guidance on which specific emotional intelligence areas will most improve your leadership impact.

The 8 Behavioral Clusters That Predict Success

After extensive research into various assessment tools, we've found that the Emotions and Behaviors at Work (EBW) assessment stands apart by measuring eight critical behavioral clusters proven to predict success in the workplace:

1. Decision Making - Your willingness to make decisions, need for control, and comfort level with decision-making responsibility
2. Drive - Your energy level, passion, enthusiasm for work, optimism, and need for achievement and challenge
3. Influence - Your drive to influence others, persuade them, be heard, and have an impact
4. Adaptability - Your desire for and enjoyment of variety in the workplace; capacity to keep an open mind and be flexible with different and creative approaches
5. Empathy - Your ability to recognize, be sensitive to, and consider others' feelings, needs, and perspectives
6. Stress Resilience - Your capability to relax and deal with day-to-day work pressures; comfort level with showing and managing emotions
7. Conscientiousness - Your focus on details, organization, and follow-through
8. Self-Awareness - The foundation of Business Emotional Intelligence; understanding your own emotions and behaviors and their impact on others

These eight clusters provide a comprehensive framework for understanding how emotions manifest in workplace behaviors – and more importantly, which specific areas you should focus on to maximize your leadership impact.

Why Traditional Assessments Fall Short

Most personality and emotional intelligence assessments provide interesting insights but fail to deliver practical, workplace-specific guidance. They often:

• Measure broad social and emotional competencies rather than business-specific behaviors
• Lack clear benchmarks for workplace success
• Provide results that are difficult to translate into action
• Focus on personality traits rather than behaviors that can be developed
• Offer limited guidance for team dynamics and organizational impact

A truly effective Business EQ assessment should provide specific, actionable information about the emotional behaviors that directly impact your work performance, presented on an easy-to-understand scale that clearly identifies your development priorities.

The EBW Advantage

The EBW assessment was created in 1997 by Dr. Stephen Walker and Dr. Neil Scott when tasked with designing emotional intelligence assessment centers for Warwick University's MBA program. Since then, it has been continuously refined by psychologists and experts through rigorous research into diversity, inclusivity, and fairness.

What makes the EBW assessment stand out is not just its focus on Business Emotional Intelligence, but its integration with unique tools and powerful programs that enable leaders and teams to understand how to change the way they work together to improve performance.

Today, the EBW is used globally by major corporations like American Express, HSBC, Disney, and British Airways, as well as public sector organizations like The Home Office and NHS – delivering measurable improvements in leadership effectiveness and team performance.

Real Results: How Leaders Use EBW

At AndreaBednar.com, we use the EBW assessment in two powerful ways:

For Individual Leaders: The assessment shines light on leadership blind spots, helping us home in on the specific areas most important for your professional growth. Instead of guessing where to focus your development efforts, you receive data-driven insights about which emotional intelligence skills will most improve your leadership impact.

For Teams: The EBW assessment reveals how team members interact and work together, clearly identifying areas where they share similar behaviors, where they differ, and the best path forward. This creates personal accountability for each person's actions and behaviors – with an impact that cannot be overstated.

The ROI becomes clear as leaders learn to understand themselves and their team members on a deeper level, creating more interpersonal collaboration, producing better results, and sometimes transforming their lives. When leaders understand the impact of their leadership style and the culture it creates, along with specific practices to improve, they know exactly what capabilities to develop for success.

Next Steps: Discover Your Emotional Intelligence

Ready to identify the specific emotional intelligence skills that will transform your leadership effectiveness?

For Individual Leaders: Click HERE to take the EBW assessment and receive a 90-minute personalized virtual debrief with a professional executive coach who will help you translate your results into a practical development plan.

For Teams: Click HERE to learn more about our team assessment process and how understanding emotional intelligence can dramatically improve your team's performance and collaboration.

Stop guessing what to work on. Discover the emotional intelligence advantages that will take your leadership to the next level.