I LOVE this question!

I did a great podcast for The Leader’s Huddle with Micah Klein yesterday and we talked about this very topic. I gave a lot of my perspective on the topic of emotional intelligence. Emotional Intelligence is the capability of individuals to recognize their own and other people’s emotions, discern between different feelings and label them appropriately, use emotional information to guide thinking and behavior, and manage and/or adjust emotions to adapt to environments or achieve one’s goal(s). Emotional intelligence means that you can restrain and control your emotions when you need to- you can adapt to certain situations quickly, make quick, sound decisions in a complex environment, and you have the capacity to create true, VISIONARY changes as a leader. I see it as a component of resiliency, but I really think it needs to be added to doctrine specifically so that it can be addressed on it’s own.

I highly recommend reading LTC(R) Sewell’s article (there’s a book too) on Emotional Intelligence and Military Leaders. We want our leaders to be agile, adaptable, empathetic, etc. But we fall short in recognizing that we try to depict them as hard skills innate in leaders. They’re not. You can be the good idea fairy of your unit, be competent, knowledgeable, and motivated. But you will NOT be a true transformational leader until you’ve managed the art of connecting and leading your Soldiers with the principles discussed in EI (I’m going to make a separate topic haha- I could talk forever!)

For those of you in combat arms branches, and even other support branches, AMEDD is a 100% completely different world. I think everyone should be using emotional intelligence in their coaching/teaching/mentoring but I won’t be ignorant to the fact that some branches are just less receptive to it. Some simplify EI and EQ as being too “touchy/feely”, when in reality, the emotional component of leadership is something I think we are severely lacking across the board in the military.

I have seen infantry officers scream at their Soldiers to get things done. That would probably never fly in a hospital unit. You wouldn’t see that in a CSH. The composition of our companies is vastly different than an infantry unit. A CPT is sort of like a SPC around my world, since there are so many higher ranking Officers. I think there has to be a lot more diplomacy and conflict management when you’re dealing with taking care of patients. Rank cannot be seen as a rigid structure because when junior leaders don’t feel like they can speak up, lives are often at stake. Medical errors are made. We also work heavily with civilians- unions, worker’s comp, position descriptions, and a whole slew of legal requirements in healthcare that we have to abide by, as established by The Joint Commission. We are heavily regulated by civilian agencies and are also dealing a lot more directly with Congress and the new(ish) Defense Health Agency setup. We work heavily with other branches – especially the Air Force.

My perspective on branch-dependent leadership styles is that yes, they do exist. There are times and places for certain leadership styles. I highly recommend doing personality testing with your units to gage what kind of personalities are present in your Soldiers/Civilians. This should drive how you lead. An emotionally intelligent leader knows how to empower and lead people based on THEIR personality strengths/weaknesses, not the leaders. We miss this point often. This is how you see certain Soldiers completely failing under one leader, and then absolutely thriving under the next. A lot of times, that’s because the new leader was emotionally intelligent in shaping their philosophy.