Emerging in the 1990s, emotional intelligence became an “important area of study in psychology” that allowed researchers the ability to assess the impact of a person’s traits on leadership (Northouse, 2021, p. 38, para 2). The emotional aspect of the term looks at a person’s ability to understand emotions that resonate within themselves and the people around them, in order to apply what has been learned to complete different tasks in life (p. 38). The intelligence aspect refers to the ability to learn new information and then apply it to life tasks (p. 38). Emotional intelligence stems from being able to express and perceive emotions in order to facilitate thinking and to be able to manage internal emotions in accordance with relationships with others (p. 38). As a leader, it is optimum to understand how your emotions affect others, and how the follower’s emotions affect the leader’s ability to make effective decisions.
Knowing what we know now about emotional intelligence, watching a football game a couple of weeks ago on January 16, 2022, made me think about whether football coaches could benefit from more emotional intelligence training. After looking at Goleman’s approach to emotional intelligence, which identifies a set of personal and social competencies that include self-awareness, confidence, empathy, conscientiousness, and self-regulation (Northouse, 2021, p. 38); what I witnessed during this game was a clear disconnect with one of these traits and the coach.
During a wild card football game in Tampa Bay, Florida, Bruce Arians struck the helmet of the Bucs safety, Andrew Adams. As a leader and coach of a national football team, this shouldn’t happen. Arian’s simple answer to the situation of doing it to get the player’s attention, didn’t satisfy the critics in the NFL world. The optics of the situation was that Arians lost his cool and took it out on a player (Prasad, 2022). In the NFL, coaches are expected to lead by example (Buhler, 2022) and have the emotional intelligence to understand the game in order to keep the player’s and coaches’ emotions in check to win the game. This didn’t happen during this game and Arians was fined $50000 because of it (Buhler, 2022). The personal competency that lacked in this situation and signaled a clear disconnect for me was the lack of self-regulation. What self-regulation means to me is that a person can regulate their actions and emotions without the help of someone else, and this clearly isn’t that. Arians couldn’t understand the moment and regulate his emotions in accordance with the league protocol and was unaware of how his actions were perceived, showing there were clear deficiencies in his emotional intelligence.
I know that there are times when many of us can not keep our emotions in check and understand the emotions of those around us, but at the level of an NFL coach, this is unacceptable. They are getting paid to manage emotions in order to win games. One good thing about this situation though is the fact the Arians can learn from this mistake and become a better leader. It turns out that emotional intelligence is not a fixed trait and “can be improved through training” by enabling leaders to define their emotions and then learn how to regulate them (Northouse, 2021, p. 39, para 2).
With situations like this becoming more prevalent, as with this case and other similar situations, such as Urban Meyer kicking another player just a few weeks ago (Buhler, 2022), I believe that NFL coaches could benefit from more emotional intelligence training.
References:
Buhler, J. (2022, January 22). NFL drops the hammer on Bruce Arians for hitting his own player. Fansided. Retrieved from https://fansided.com/2022/01/22/nfl-fines-bruce-arians-hitting-andrew-adams-buccaneers/
Northouse, P.G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and Practice. 9th Edition. Los Angeles: Sage Publications
Prasad, A. (2022, January 17). Bruce Arians addresses hitting player in the helmet during wild card game. Fansided. Retrieved from https://fansided.com/2022/01/17/bruce-arians-addresses-hitting-player-helmet-wild-card-game/
Great post!
I really liked your topic, and it definitely got me thinking as well. This made me think back on the accusations Urban Meyer faced upon allegedly kicking one of his players too. It is no secret that some of these NFL coaches have quite the temper, and take their frustrations out in very negative and sometimes abusive manners.
Your statement regarding the fine Arians faced made me wonder if we as a society, should be less concerned with cleaning up mistakes and more concerned with ensuring these mistakes never happen. These coaches make an absorbent amount of money, and most likely assume fines with every indiscretion. This obviously has not stopped these events from happening. With this in mind, I think you’re right that NFL coaches could benefit from a heightened emotional intelligence.
I also wonder if the players would benefit from this same emotional intelligence training. The commonality I find within these two examples (Arians and Meyers) is that they were both NFL concerns. I can only imagine what college and even high school players endure from their coaches. These players are not as empowered and confident as the pros, and so I’m sure they feel as though this kind of abuse is somewhat of a due to be paid. I think if they were made more aware of the importance of emotional intelligence they might feel more emboldened to spot mistreatment and speak out against it.
I think the most challenging aspect of this plan would be its execution. I wonder how many coaches (and players) would actually take this kind of training to heart. Football is a very passionate and somewhat primal experience. To your point, this leads to very raw and heated emotions that are sometimes very challenging to control. We want to ensure the safety of all involved, but we also want to preserve the spirit and passion of the game. So yes, I do think that there needs to be more emotional intelligence from these coaches but I think this kind of training goes deeper than a seminar or booklet. This kind of work begins with us as a society deciding what is acceptable and what is not, and the outrage against Arians and Meyer suggests that we are headed in the right direction.
All great points!
Hannah