I’m currently taking a course called Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence on Coursera. The course is taught by Richard Boyatzis, the professor of Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University.

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll share some of the interesting things I’ve learned from this course.

Dr. Boyatzis started the course by sharing some shocking facts about leadership.

About 50% of people in leadership and management positions are not adding any value.

20 - 30% are adding value in one person’s point of view.

Many people aren’t good at leading, yet other people emulate them. It’s difficult to become an effective leader if you don’t understand what leadership is all about and it’s difficult to understand it if you’ve never worked with an effective leader before.

Fortunately, many of us have experience working with both competent and incompetent leaders. Dr. Boyatzis invited the students to do an exercise - to think about a leader who brought the best in them, and a leader who failed to do that. After reflecting on how these two types of leaders made me feel, one thing that for some reason hadn’t occured to me until that point became obvious:

Leadership is not a person - it’s a relationship.

In the next blog post, I’ll cover what separates effective leaders (or resonant leaders, which is what Dr. Boyatzis calls them) from the less effective, dissonant leaders.