As a patriotic Nigerian who wishes her fatherland success and prosperity in this ‘Renewed Hope’ cabinet of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, I found it most necessary to extend my sincere congratulations to all the new ministers that have been sworn-in and assigned portfolios on Monday August 21, 2023.
I celebrate with them all and dare say this fresh national assignments given to them are testimonies of their unrivalled records of achievements in the past which inspired Mr. President to bring them on board in stirring the ship of Nigeria to greater glory as well accentuating socio-economic advancement with the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Federation.
However, whilst many of you have commendably kicked the ground running in less than twenty-four hours after your inauguration as Minister, it is important for you to show service to the nation devoid of vindictiveness, animosity, nepotism, avarice, and more importantly to imbibe the culture of being emotionally intelligent in dealing with the huge task ahead.
What is emotional intelligence? It instigates growth, innovation, and creativity in corporate governance. It constantly motivates team members and leaders to put their best foot forward. Emotional intelligence helps leaders and the led to make the right decisions in difficult times and ultimately to get the buy-in of the people into the government programmes and policies.
Being politically savvy is critical to getting and maintaining high-level leadership roles. While some people don’t want to engage in the political nature of organizations, it is a normal and natural part of how systems function.
The psychology of organizational politics influences how things operate. As Dale Carnegie says, “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic but creatures of emotions.” When we deal with emotions, they are often riddled with unconscious bias, insecurities and can lead to needing to compromise between what we want and what another person wants.
Therefore, emotional intelligence is a key skill in developing good political savvy. It is equally the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.
Permit me to break down emotional intelligence into four components:
A. Self-awareness: Knowing yourself, your own strengths and weaknesses, and being self-confident
B. Self-management: Managing your own emotional state so that you don’t always act out when you are emotional
C. Social awareness: Understanding the environment around you and other people, what’s going on for them and showing empathy
D. Relationship management: Conflict resolution, influence, negotiations and change management
Political savvy as a leader is all about leveraging emotional intelligence so that you can handle sensitive and emotional situations at work. Political savvy takes a lot of understanding about yourself, the environment around you and how to navigate and influence that environment for the best outcome.
So, what are the key skills needed for political savvy?
1. Be sincere. Show integrity, authenticity and genuineness when meeting, speaking to and getting to know people around you.
2. Understand the Ministry and how it functions. Be aware of how things are running in the organization. When you are in a meeting, watch where are people sitting, who’s speaking, who’s speaking after that person, what questions they are asking, etc. The more you watch what is happening in the organization, the more you realize what the implicit rules are and, therefore, how to navigate within them.
3. Build a strong network. Create relationships and build support across the Ministries (not just within your own team/group) in order to learn how to interact with different kinds of people, the needs or motivations of other parts of the organization and provide a give and take of information/support to each other.
4. Learn to influence others. Influence means that you can communicate well, share a vision of something you want to do and have people follow. The stronger your interpersonal relationships are, the more you are going to be able to bring them along your way of thinking while still taking into consideration what is important to them. People who influence are not overtly political, but they play the game fairly.
5. Don’t say everything on your mind. Learn to manage your emotional state. Know when to speak and when not to speak, but mainly what to say in order to help people understand you properly.
Being politically savvy can be a lot of work. Being emotionally intelligent is critical to building up these skills, but they are learnable by becoming more astute in learning from the Ministries you found yourself and how to maneuver within it.
Once again, I congratulate all our Ministers and I pray they will all add values to their respective Ministries in the best interest of our country all of us in diaspora wish them well and I pray that President Tinubu’s ‘Renewed Hope’ agenda would be championed and sustained without regret.
-Olokode-Ayelabola, a resident of Ireland is the Chairperson/Convener of Asiwaju 4 Renewed Hope ’23, she wrote via kemiayelabola@gmail.com
