Leading with Emotional Skill

Emotional Intelligence, the Emotional Skill Loop, and Leadership Under Pressure

von Jim A. McCleskey

148 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Leadership gets hardest when emotions run high, information is incomplete, and someone still has to decide what happens next. Leading with Emotional Skill is a practical, research-based guide to using emotional intelligence where it matters most: under pressure, in conflict, during change, and in the everyday conversations that shape trust, performance, and culture.

The author draws on more than three decades of emotional intelligence and leadership research to separate useful evidence from popular hype. Emotional intelligence is not presented as a superpower, a personality label, or a substitute for competence, judgment, ethics, or accountability. Instead, it is treated as a set of practical abilities that help leaders notice emotional information, test first interpretations, choose better responses, and recover when they get something wrong.

At the center of the book is the Emotional Skill Loop: Notice. Test. Choose. Act. Review. Repair when needed.

This simple framework gives leaders a repeatable way to slow impulsive reactions without becoming indecisive. Through realistic workplace examples, the book shows how emotional skill affects judgment, trust, communication, conflict, and leadership under pressure.

Readers will learn how to recognize emotional signals without pretending to read minds, manage their own reactions, make better decisions under stress, use empathy without abandoning accountability, build trust, handle difficult conversations, lead teams through change, communicate across distance and difference, lead without formal authority, and recognize the limits and darker uses of emotional intelligence.

The book also addresses remote work, cultural differences, AI-mediated communication, psychological safety, leadership development, and emotionally intelligent organizational culture.

A practical ninety-day development plan helps readers turn ideas into observable behavior. The Emotional Skill Field Guide provides a quick-reference version of the book for difficult conversations, bad-news situations, repair, and high-pressure moments.

This is not a book about becoming endlessly calm, agreeable, or emotionally expressive. Strong leadership sometimes requires empathy. Sometimes it requires a boundary, a difficult truth, or a fast decision.

The goal is not to feel less. The goal is to lead more deliberately. For managers, executives, educators, entrepreneurs, team leaders, and anyone responsible for influencing others, Leading with Emotional Skill offers a practical approach to becoming the kind of leader people can trust when the pressure is real.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175988070
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 21.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published