Coaching Yourself to Leadership: Five Key Strategies for Becoming an Integrated Leader

EQ and Relational Competence

Researchers at the Stone Center at Wellesley College, interested in the psychology of women and the subject of women’s leadership, have been building a body of work known as “relational cultural theory.” Joyce Fletcher, one of the Center’s researchers, describes the basic tenets of this theory in her book Disappearing Acts. She says that growth comes from interactions in which there is “mutual empathy and mutual empowerment.” In order to develop relationally, she believes that people need the strengths of “empathy, vulnerability, the ability to experience and express emotion, the ability to participate in the development of another, and an expectation that relational interactions can yield mutual growth.”

Diversity: ...