Key Points

• Emotional intelligence is a hugely important trait for good business leaders.
• There is no question that emotional intelligence and Lean Six Sigma go hand-in-hand.
• Having the right amount of emotional intelligence can also benefit you in your personal life.

It won’t surprise anyone to learn that leadership is one of the most basic yet fundamental qualities in the business world. Anytime there is a discussion about how well a company’s leadership can contribute to its success, it’s the leaders that everyone looks to create an environment that sets employees up for success and growth. 

The same goes for emotional intelligence, a quality that can make for better leaders, especially in a Lean Six Sigma environment. When you have all of these qualities wrapped into one, you have someone who can understand and manage emotions and then knows how to use them to advance the lean philosophy of improving quality, increasing customer value, and eliminating waste. 

Leadership and Lean Six Sigma

As you move into a fast-paced and ever-changing business world, it is no surprise that organizations and companies are turning to Lean Six Sigma to make improvements. Of course, to dive deeper, leadership and Lean Six Sigma are so intertwined because a good leader, maybe even a great leader, understands that adopting LSS is a management strategy to help drive everyone across an organization toward improving processes. 

Understanding Emotional Intelligence

As Daniel Goleman, who helped conceptualize the idea of emotional intelligence, defines it, it’s all about being self-aware, self-regulating, motivated, empathetic, and having solid social skills. Leaders with emotional intelligence will know that navigating their emotions will be critically important to influencing their teams. 

One core concept is self-awareness, as those who understand emotional intelligence in a leadership role know their emotional triggers and biases. In a Lean Six Sigma world, this awareness will help ensure that decisions are objective and data-driven. Maintaining emotional stability will also help inspire confidence in teams. 

The Role of Emotional Intelligence In Lean Six Sigma

All principles tied to Lean Six Sigma revolve around data-driven problem solving, reducing waste, and increasing overall organizational efficiency. As all of these are critical, they involve overcoming resistance to change inside an organization while looking to help align cross-functional teams to work together toward a common goal. It’s here that emotional intelligence plays a significant role. 

Enhancing Collaboration

Collaboration requires an emotionally intelligent leader capable of bringing together often opposing personalities and having them all work together. Emotional intelligence will have someone address concerns while building trust without allowing the momentum of a project to falter, potentially missing timelines. 

Improved Decision-Making

If you are emotionally intelligent and a leader, you should be able to recognize and manage when emotions are involved in making reactive decisions. These decisions can quickly derail a project, often for good, so emotional intelligence will lend itself to someone who can make smart, objective, and impartial decisions under pressure. 

Navigating Change Resistance 

Another focal point of emotional intelligence is the ability to empathize with other team members who might feel concerned about changes taking place. In these instances, the most emotionally intelligent leaders will listen to concerns and work toward building up trust levels to reduce any concerns, eliminate fear, and build enough alignment with those who are worried to help project momentum. 

Building Trust

One final reason emotional intelligence matters is that it allows leaders to show they are self-aware of what their decisions are doing to the team and team members around them. Leaders will enable themselves to be vulnerable by showing empathy and building team trust. In many ways, trust is the foundation of any successful Lean Six Sigma initiative. 

Driving Employee Engagement

Considering how leaders can connect with employees personally is an outstanding opportunity to help them better connect to Lean Six Sigma work. As employees’ emotional needs are addressed, such as job security or worrying about losing some of their responsibilities, they can be helped and guided toward a new sense of purpose within an organization. This would help employees feel more invested in process improvements, which leads to higher productivity. 

Continuous Improvement

Leaders with high emotional intelligence are among the best choices for helping to build a continuous improvement culture. These individuals know the importance of learning from any failures they are a part of and celebrating team and organizational successes. An emotionally intelligent leader knows that teams need to be encouraged to take risks while feeling free from repercussions they might otherwise be worried about if a project doesn’t succeed. 

Applying Emotional Intelligence In Lean Six Sigma Phases

Define Phase

One of the best aspects of incorporating emotional intelligence in the define phase is ensuring all stakeholders are aligned around clear project goals and scopes. Leaders with strong social skills can articulate a project’s purpose in a way that resonates with everyone, from executives down. 

Good leaders will start listening to concerns in this phase and addressing these fears to build up trust that outstanding leadership can work with. An emotionally intelligent, driven leader will emphasize different stakeholders, like job security or resource constraints, and help tackle these subjects to get buy-in from all necessary stakeholders. 

Social skills will be essential during stakeholder meetings to help ensure that everyone’s voice is heard. In a Lead Six Sigma project world, a shared vision should also help build a sense of ownership, which is necessary for driving projects forward. 

Measure Phase

In the measure phase, you get into the meat and potatoes of a Lean Six Sigma world, where you focus on collecting data. This area could be particularly tough for leaders without emotional intelligence when they realize they have to navigate a world where individuals in an organization are unfamiliar with data analysis. 

In this phase, emotionally intelligent leaders will want to address any of these anxieties and provide appropriate guidance on how to learn data-intelligent methods. This should hopefully boost team members’ confidence and allow them to play a critical role in the Lean Six Sigma work. 

The hope is that emotionally intelligent leaders will be patient with any stakeholder struggling with data collection challenges. These leaders should be calm and incorporate a problem-solving mindset that helps teams be methodical in addressing problems as they arise. 

Analyze Phase

When you get to the analysis phase, you will start looking at root-cause analysis, which often comes with time constraints and can create a heightened pressure level. In these instances, leaders who know how to regulate their emotions, which prevents them from jumping to quick conclusions, will be among the best leaders in an organization. This is where creating a sense of inclusivity and curiosity will be super important. 

Any leader who discovers a team member feeling overwhelmed by data or interpreting data findings will need reassurance. This would be opposed to reassigning a project right away, which would only be construed as not having the “right stuff,” which would be a real morale killer across a whole team. 

Regarding social skills, emotionally intelligent leaders in a Lean Six Sigma world will help ensure that all perspectives are considered during analysis. The more diverse the perspectives, the more likely teams are to be successful, as all avenues can be viewed and the right path determined. Lastly, a self-awareness aspect ensures leaders leave their own assumptions about data at the door so they remain objective to a diversified set of views. 

Improve Phase

With the improve phase, you can focus on designing and implementing solutions to overhaul the existing workflow. Emotionally intelligent leaders will know how these changes impact team members and can help control the emotions that result from potentially major changes. 

Of course, emotional intelligence also ensures that leaders communicate any changes positively, so team concerns are quickly addressed. Leaders should ask for feedback and begin a dialogue that builds trust to ensure that these changes are successfully adopted as they roll out. 

Returning to self-regulation, good leaders will know how to manage their frustrations by being a model of patience and focus. 

Control Phase

The control phase of Lean Six Sigma will ensure that the long-term benefits are visualized and understood. Emotionally intelligent leaders will be needed to help show the connection between the work being done today and how it will lead to a more successful organization. 

Delivering this message will draw on level-header social skills so that the value of new processes can be incorporated in a way that will resonate with the work a team is doing. As there is likely to be resistance to change, empathetic leaders will know that teams will be aggravated and annoyed, so they will address these changes by providing the proper support for employees struggling with change. 

Useful Tools and Concepts

You might consider Lean Six Sigma training and certification after considering everything related to emotional intelligence and Lean Six Sigma. This will help you understand how emotional intelligence fits into a critical process improvement philosophy. 

In addition, you could consider looking even closer at Six Sigma and Lean and understanding the real difference. While they sound the same, these are two different process improvement strategies that companies consider very differently. 

Conclusion

Emotional intelligence will undoubtedly play a critical role in any Lean Six Sigma process. Regardless of which phase a company is in, empathetic leaders are likely to be the most successful. Those who can motivate their team and help assure them during times of change will be better off than leaders who are just barking orders and expecting results. 

The image featured at the top of this post is ©Ground Picture/Shutterstock.com.