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Daniel Goleman
Every businessperson knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled
executive who was promoted into a leadership position only to fail at the job.
And they also know a story about someone with solid but not extraordinary
intellectual abilities and technical skills who was promoted into a similar
position and then soared.
Such anecdotes support the widespread belief that identifying individuals with
the right stuff to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the
personal styles of superb leaders vary: Some leaders are subdued and
analytical; others shout their manifestos from the mountaintops. And just as
important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most
mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds
require a more forceful authority.
I have found, however, that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial
way: They all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional
intelligence. It s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do
matter, but mainly as threshold capabilities ; that is, they are the
entry-level requirements for executive positions. But my research, along with
other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua
non of leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the
world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but
he still won t make a great leader.
In the course of the past year, my colleagues and I have focused on how
emotional intelligence operates at work. We have examined the relationship
between emotional intelligence and effective performance, especially in
leaders. And we have observed how emotional intelligence shows itself on the
job. How can you tell if someone has high emotional intelligence, for example,
and how can you recognize it in yourself? In the following pages, we ll explore
these questions, taking each of the components of emotional intelligence
self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill in turn.
Evaluating Emotional Intelligence
Most large companies today have employed trained psychologists to develop what
are known as competency models to aid them in identifying, training, and
promoting likely stars in the leadership firmament. The psychologists have also
developed such models for lower-level positions. And in recent years, I have
analyzed competency models from 188 companies, most of which were large and
global and included the likes of Lucent Technologies, British Airways, and
Credit Suisse.
In carrying out this work, my objective was to determine which personal
capabilities drove outstanding performance within these organizations, and to
what degree they did so. I grouped capabilities into three categories: purely
technical skills like accounting and business planning; cognitive abilities
like analytical reasoning; and competencies demonstrating emotional
intelligence, such as the ability to work with others and effectiveness in
leading change.
To create some of the competency models, psychologists asked senior managers at
the companies to identify the capabilities that typified the organization s
most outstanding leaders. To create other models, the psychologists used
objective criteria, such as a division s profitability, to differentiate the
star performers at senior levels within their organizations from the average
ones. Those individuals were then extensively interviewed and tested, and their
capabilities were compared. This process resulted in the creation of lists of
ingredients for highly effective leaders. The lists ranged in length from seven
to 15 items and included such ingredients as initiative and strategic vision.
When I analyzed all this data, I found dramatic results. To be sure, intellect
was a driver of outstanding performance. Cognitive skills such as big-picture
thinking and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I
calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as
ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice
as important as the others for jobs at all levels.
Moreover, my analysis showed that emotional intelligence played an increasingly
important role at the highest levels of the company, where differences in
technical skills are of negligible importance. In other words, the higher the
rank of a person considered to be a star performer, the more emotional
intelligence capabilities showed up as the reason for his or her effectiveness.
When I compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership
positions, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to
emotional intelligence factors rather than cognitive abilities.
Other researchers have confirmed that emotional intelligence not only
distinguishes outstanding leaders but can also be linked to strong performance.
The findings of the late David McClelland, the renowned researcher in human and
organizational behavior, are a good example. In a 1996 study of a global food
and beverage company, McClelland found that when senior managers had a critical
mass of emotional intelligence capabilities, their divisions outperformed
yearly earnings goals by 20%. Meanwhile, division leaders without that critical
mass underperformed by almost the same amount. McClelland s findings,
interestingly, held as true in the company s U.S. divisions as in its divisions
in Asia and Europe.
In short, the numbers are beginning to tell us a persuasive story about the
link between a company s success and the emotional intelligence of its leaders.
And just as important, research is also demonstrating that people can, if they
take the right approach, develop their emotional intelligence. (See the sidebar
Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned? )
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the first component of emotional intelligence which makes
sense when one considers that the Delphic oracle gave the advice to know
thyself thousands of years ago. Self-awareness means having a deep
understanding of one s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives.
People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor
unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest with themselves and with
others.
People who have a high degree of self-awareness recognize how their feelings
affect them, other people, and their job performance. Thus, a self-aware person
who knows that tight deadlines bring out the worst in him plans his time
carefully and gets his work done well in advance. Another person with high
self-awareness will be able to work with a demanding client. She will
understand the client s impact on her moods and the deeper reasons for her
frustration. Their trivial demands take us away from the real work that needs
to be done, she might explain. And she will go one step further and turn her
anger into something constructive.
Self-awareness extends to a person s understanding of his or her values and
goals. Someone who is highly self-aware knows where he is headed and why; so,
for example, he will be able to be firm in turning down a job offer that is
tempting financially but does not fit with his principles or long-term goals. A
person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on inner
turmoil by treading on buried values. The money looked good so I signed on,
someone might say two years into a job, but the work means so little to me
that I m constantly bored. The decisions of self-aware people mesh with their
values; consequently, they often find work to be energizing.
How can one recognize self-awareness? First and foremost, it shows itself as
candor and an ability to assess oneself realistically. People with high
self-awareness are able to speak accurately and openly although not necessarily
effusively or confessionally about their emotions and the impact they have on
their work. For instance, one manager I know of was skeptical about a new
personal-shopper service that her company, a major department-store chain, was
about to introduce. Without prompting from her team or her boss, she offered
them an explanation: It s hard for me to get behind the rollout of this
service, she admitted, because I really wanted to run the project, but I wasn
t selected. Bear with me while I deal with that. The manager did indeed
examine her feelings; a week later, she was supporting the project fully.
Such self-knowledge often shows itself in the hiring process. Ask a candidate
to describe a time he got carried away by his feelings and did something he
later regretted. Self-aware candidates will be frank in admitting to failure
and will often tell their tales with a smile. One of the hallmarks of
self-awareness is a self-deprecating sense of humor.
Self-awareness can also be identified during performance reviews. Self-aware
people know and are comfortable talking about their limitations and strengths,
and they often demonstrate a thirst for constructive criticism. By contrast,
people with low self-awareness interpret the message that they need to improve
as a threat or a sign of failure.
Self-aware people can also be recognized by their self-confidence. They have a
firm grasp of their capabilities and are less likely to set themselves up to
fail by, for example, overstretching on assignments. They know, too, when to
ask for help. And the risks they take on the job are calculated. They won t ask
for a challenge that they know they can t handle alone. They ll play to their
strengths.
Consider the actions of a midlevel employee who was invited to sit in on a
strategy meeting with her company s top executives. Although she was the most
junior person in the room, she did not sit there quietly, listening in
awestruck or fearful silence. She knew she had a head for clear logic and the
skill to present ideas persuasively, and she offered cogent suggestions about
the company s strategy. At the same time, her self-awareness stopped her from
wandering into territory where she knew she was weak.
Despite the value of having self-aware people in the workplace, my research
indicates that senior executives don t often give self-awareness the credit it
deserves when they look for potential leaders. Many executives mistake candor
about feelings for wimpiness and fail to give due respect to employees who
openly acknowledge their shortcomings. Such people are too readily dismissed as
not tough enough to lead others.
In fact, the opposite is true. In the first place, people generally admire and
respect candor. Furthermore, leaders are constantly required to make judgment
calls that require a candid assessment of capabilities their own and those of
others. Do we have the management expertise to acquire a competitor? Can we
launch a new product within six months? People who assess themselves honestly
that is, self-aware people are well suited to do the same for the organizations
they run.
Self-Regulation
Biological impulses drive our emotions. We cannot do away with them but we can
do much to manage them. Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner
conversation, is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from
being prisoners of our feelings. People engaged in such a conversation feel bad
moods and emotional impulses just as everyone else does, but they find ways to
control them and even to channel them in useful ways.
Imagine an executive who has just watched a team of his employees present a
botched analysis to the company s board of directors. In the gloom that
follows, the executive might find himself tempted to pound on the table in
anger or kick over a chair. He could leap up and scream at the group. Or he
might maintain a grim silence, glaring at everyone before stalking off.
But if he had a gift for self-regulation, he would choose a different approach.
He would pick his words carefully, acknowledging the team s poor performance
without rushing to any hasty judgment. He would then step back to consider the
reasons for the failure. Are they personal a lack of effort? Are there any
mitigating factors? What was his role in the debacle? After considering these
questions, he would call the team together, lay out the incident s
consequences, and offer his feelings about it. He would then present his
analysis of the problem and a well-considered solution.
Why does self-regulation matter so much for leaders? First of all, people who
are in control of their feelings and impulses that is, people who are
reasonable are able to create an environment of trust and fairness. In such an
environment, politics and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity is
high. Talented people flock to the organization and aren t tempted to leave.
And self-regulation has a trickle-down effect. No one wants to be known as a
hothead when the boss is known for her calm approach. Fewer bad moods at the
top mean fewer throughout the organization.
Second, self-regulation is important for competitive reasons. Everyone knows
that business today is rife with ambiguity and change. Companies merge and
break apart regularly. Technology transforms work at a dizzying pace. People
who have mastered their emotions are able to roll with the changes. When a new
program is announced, they don t panic; instead, they are able to suspend
judgment, seek out information, and listen to the executives as they explain
the new program. As the initiative moves forward, these people are able to move
with it.
Sometimes they even lead the way. Consider the case of a manager at a large
manufacturing company. Like her colleagues, she had used a certain software
program for five years. The program drove how she collected and reported data
and how she thought about the company s strategy. One day, senior executives
announced that a new program was to be installed that would radically change
how information was gathered and assessed within the organization. While many
people in the company complained bitterly about how disruptive the change would
be, the manager mulled over the reasons for the new program and was convinced
of its potential to improve performance. She eagerly attended training sessions
some of her colleagues refused to do so and was eventually promoted to run
several divisions, in part because she used the new technology so effectively.
I want to push the importance of self-regulation to leadership even further and
make the case that it enhances integrity, which is not only a personal virtue
but also an organizational strength. Many of the bad things that happen in
companies are a function of impulsive behavior. People rarely plan to
exaggerate profits, pad expense accounts, dip into the till, or abuse power for
selfish ends. Instead, an opportunity presents itself, and people with low
impulse control just say yes.
By contrast, consider the behavior of the senior executive at a large food
company. The executive was scrupulously honest in his negotiations with local
distributors. He would routinely lay out his cost structure in detail, thereby
giving the distributors a realistic understanding of the company s pricing.
This approach meant the executive couldn t always drive a hard bargain. Now, on
occasion, he felt the urge to increase profits by withholding information about
the company s costs. But he challenged that impulse he saw that it made more
sense in the long run to counteract it. His emotional self-regulation paid off
in strong, lasting relationships with distributors that benefited the company
more than any short-term financial gains would have.
The signs of emotional self-regulation, therefore, are easy to see: a
propensity for reflection and thoughtfulness; comfort with ambiguity and
change; and integrity an ability to say no to impulsive urges.
Like self-awareness, self-regulation often does not get its due. People who can
master their emotions are sometimes seen as cold fish their considered
responses are taken as a lack of passion. People with fiery temperaments are
frequently thought of as classic leaders their outbursts are considered
hallmarks of charisma and power. But when such people make it to the top, their
impulsiveness often works against them. In my research, extreme displays of
negative emotion have never emerged as a driver of good leadership.
Motivation
If there is one trait that virtually all effective leaders have, it is
motivation. They are driven to achieve beyond expectations their own and
everyone else s. The key word here is achieve. Plenty of people are motivated
by external factors, such as a big salary or the status that comes from having
an impressive title or being part of a prestigious company. By contrast, those
with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve
for the sake of achievement.
If you are looking for leaders, how can you identify people who are motivated
by the drive to achieve rather than by external rewards? The first sign is a
passion for the work itself such people seek out creative challenges, love to
learn, and take great pride in a job well done. They also display an unflagging
energy to do things better. People with such energy often seem restless with
the status quo. They are persistent with their questions about why things are
done one way rather than another; they are eager to explore new approaches to
their work.
A cosmetics company manager, for example, was frustrated that he had to wait
two weeks to get sales results from people in the field. He finally tracked
down an automated phone system that would beep each of his salespeople at 5 pm
every day. An automated message then prompted them to punch in their numbers
how many calls and sales they had made that day. The system shortened the
feedback time on sales results from weeks to hours.
That story illustrates two other common traits of people who are driven to
achieve. They are forever raising the performance bar, and they like to keep
score. Take the performance bar first. During performance reviews, people with
high levels of motivation might ask to be stretched by their superiors. Of
course, an employee who combines self-awareness with internal motivation will
recognize her limits but she won t settle for objectives that seem too easy to
fulfill.
And it follows naturally that people who are driven to do better also want a
way of tracking progress their own, their team s, and their company s. Whereas
people with low achievement motivation are often fuzzy about results, those
with high achievement motivation often keep score by tracking such hard
measures as profitability or market share. I know of a money manager who starts
and ends his day on the Internet, gauging the performance of his stock fund
against four industry-set benchmarks.
Interestingly, people with high motivation remain optimistic even when the
score is against them. In such cases, self-regulation combines with achievement
motivation to overcome the frustration and depression that come after a setback
or failure. Take the case of an another portfolio manager at a large investment
company. After several successful years, her fund tumbled for three consecutive
quarters, leading three large institutional clients to shift their business
elsewhere.
Some executives would have blamed the nosedive on circumstances outside their
control; others might have seen the setback as evidence of personal failure.
This portfolio manager, however, saw an opportunity to prove she could lead a
turnaround. Two years later, when she was promoted to a very senior level in
the company, she described the experience as the best thing that ever happened
to me; I learned so much from it.
Executives trying to recognize high levels of achievement motivation in their
people can look for one last piece of evidence: commitment to the organization.
When people love their jobs for the work itself, they often feel committed to
the organizations that make that work possible. Committed employees are likely
to stay with an organization even when they are pursued by headhunters waving
money.
It s not difficult to understand how and why a motivation to achieve translates
into strong leadership. If you set the performance bar high for yourself, you
will do the same for the organization when you are in a position to do so.
Likewise, a drive to surpass goals and an interest in keeping score can be
contagious. Leaders with these traits can often build a team of managers around
them with the same traits. And of course, optimism and organizational
commitment are fundamental to leadership just try to imagine running a company
without them.
Empathy
Of all the dimensions of emotional intelligence, empathy is the most easily
recognized. We have all felt the empathy of a sensitive teacher or friend; we
have all been struck by its absence in an unfeeling coach or boss. But when it
comes to business, we rarely hear people praised, let alone rewarded, for their
empathy. The very word seems unbusinesslike, out of place amid the tough
realities of the marketplace.
But empathy doesn t mean a kind of I m OK, you re OK mushiness. For a leader,
that is, it doesn t mean adopting other people s emotions as one s own and
trying to please everybody. That would be a nightmare it would make action
impossible. Rather, empathy means thoughtfully considering employees feelings
along with other factors in the process of making intelligent decisions.
For an example of empathy in action, consider what happened when two giant
brokerage companies merged, creating redundant jobs in all their divisions. One
division manager called his people together and gave a gloomy speech that
emphasized the number of people who would soon be fired. The manager of another
division gave his people a different kind of speech. He was up-front about his
own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat
everyone fairly.
The difference between these two managers was empathy. The first manager was
too worried about his own fate to consider the feelings of his anxiety-stricken
colleagues. The second knew intuitively what his people were feeling, and he
acknowledged their fears with his words. Is it any surprise that the first
manager saw his division sink as many demoralized people, especially the most
talented, departed? By contrast, the second manager continued to be a strong
leader, his best people stayed, and his division remained as productive as
ever.
Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at
least three reasons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of
globalization; and the growing need to retain talent.
Consider the challenge of leading a team. As anyone who has ever been a part of
one can attest, teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. They are often
charged with reaching a consensus which is hard enough with two people and much
more difficult as the numbers increase. Even in groups with as few as four or
five members, alliances form and clashing agendas get set. A team s leader must
be able to sense and understand the viewpoints of everyone around the table.
That s exactly what a marketing manager at a large information technology
company was able to do when she was appointed to lead a troubled team. The
group was in turmoil, overloaded by work and missing deadlines. Tensions were
high among the members. Tinkering with procedures was not enough to bring the
group together and make it an effective part of the company.
So the manager took several steps. In a series of one-on-one sessions, she took
the time to listen to everyone in the group what was frustrating them, how they
rated their colleagues, whether they felt they had been ignored. And then she
directed the team in a way that brought it together: She encouraged people to
speak more openly about their frustrations, and she helped people raise
constructive complaints during meetings. In short, her empathy allowed her to
understand her team s emotional makeup. The result was not just heightened
collaboration among members but also added business, as the team was called on
for help by a wider range of internal clients.
Globalization is another reason for the rising importance of empathy for
business leaders. Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and
misunderstandings. Empathy is an antidote. People who have it are attuned to
subtleties in body language; they can hear the message beneath the words being
spoken. Beyond that, they have a deep understanding of both the existence and
the importance of cultural and ethnic differences.
Consider the case of an American consultant whose team had just pitched a
project to a potential Japanese client. In its dealings with Americans, the
team was accustomed to being bombarded with questions after such a proposal,
but this time it was greeted with a long silence. Other members of the team,
taking the silence as disapproval, were ready to pack and leave. The lead
consultant gestured them to stop. Although he was not particularly familiar
with Japanese culture, he read the client s face and posture and sensed not
rejection but interest even deep consideration. He was right: When the client
finally spoke, it was to give the consulting firm the job.
Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in
today s information economy. Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and
keep good people, but today the stakes are higher. When good people leave, they
take the company s knowledge with them.
That s where coaching and mentoring come in. It has repeatedly been shown that
coaching and mentoring pay off not just in better performance but also in
increased job satisfaction and decreased turnover. But what makes coaching and
mentoring work best is the nature of the relationship. Outstanding coaches and
mentors get inside the heads of the people they are helping. They sense how to
give effective feedback. They know when to push for better performance and when
to hold back. In the way they motivate their prot g s, they demonstrate empathy
in action.
In what is probably sounding like a refrain, let me repeat that empathy doesn t
get much respect in business. People wonder how leaders can make hard decisions
if they are feeling for all the people who will be affected. But leaders with
empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: They use their
knowledge to improve their companies in subtle but important ways.
Social Skill
The first three components of emotional intelligence are self-management
skills. The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a person s ability to
manage relationships with others. As a component of emotional intelligence,
social skill is not as simple as it sounds. It s not just a matter of
friendliness, although people with high levels of social skill are rarely
mean-spirited. Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving
people in the direction you desire, whether that s agreement on a new marketing
strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.
Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances, and they
have a knack for finding common ground with people of all kinds a knack for
building rapport. That doesn t mean they socialize continually; it means they
work according to the assumption that nothing important gets done alone. Such
people have a network in place when the time for action comes.
Social skill is the culmination of the other dimensions of emotional
intelligence. People tend to be very effective at managing relationships when
they can understand and control their own emotions and can empathize with the
feelings of others. Even motivation contributes to social skill. Remember that
people who are driven to achieve tend to be optimistic, even in the face of
setbacks or failure. When people are upbeat, their glow is cast upon
conversations and other social encounters. They are popular, and for good
reason.
Because it is the outcome of the other dimensions of emotional intelligence,
social skill is recognizable on the job in many ways that will by now sound
familiar. Socially skilled people, for instance, are adept at managing teams
that s their empathy at work. Likewise, they are expert persuaders a
manifestation of self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy combined. Given
those skills, good persuaders know when to make an emotional plea, for
instance, and when an appeal to reason will work better. And motivation, when
publicly visible, makes such people excellent collaborators; their passion for
the work spreads to others, and they are driven to find solutions.
But sometimes social skill shows itself in ways the other emotional
intelligence components do not. For instance, socially skilled people may at
times appear not to be working while at work. They seem to be idly schmoozing
chatting in the hallways with colleagues or joking around with people who are
not even connected to their real jobs. Socially skilled people, however, don
t think it makes sense to arbitrarily limit the scope of their relationships.
They build bonds widely because they know that in these fluid times, they may
need help someday from people they are just getting to know today.
For example, consider the case of an executive in the strategy department of a
global computer manufacturer. By 1993, he was convinced that the company s
future lay with the Internet. Over the course of the next year, he found
kindred spirits and used his social skill to stitch together a virtual
community that cut across levels, divisions, and nations. He then used this de
facto team to put up a corporate Web site, among the first by a major company.
And, on his own initiative, with no budget or formal status, he signed up the
company to participate in an annual Internet industry convention. Calling on
his allies and persuading various divisions to donate funds, he recruited more
than 50 people from a dozen different units to represent the company at the
convention.
Management took notice: Within a year of the conference, the executive s team
formed the basis for the company s first Internet division, and he was formally
put in charge of it. To get there, the executive had ignored conventional
boundaries, forging and maintaining connections with people in every corner of
the organization.
Is social skill considered a key leadership capability in most companies? The
answer is yes, especially when compared with the other components of emotional
intelligence. People seem to know intuitively that leaders need to manage
relationships effectively; no leader is an island. After all, the leader s task
is to get work done through other people, and social skill makes that possible.
A leader who cannot express her empathy may as well not have it at all. And a
leader s motivation will be useless if he cannot communicate his passion to the
organization. Social skill allows leaders to put their emotional intelligence
to work.
It would be foolish to assert that good-old-fashioned IQ and technical ability
are not important ingredients in strong leadership. But the recipe would not be
complete without emotional intelligence. It was once thought that the
components of emotional intelligence were nice to have in business leaders.
But now we know that, for the sake of performance, these are ingredients that
leaders need to have.
It is fortunate, then, that emotional intelligence can be learned. The process
is not easy. It takes time and, most of all, commitment. But the benefits that
come from having a well-developed emotional intelligence, both for the
individual and for the organization, make it worth the effort.
A version of this article appeared in the January 2004 issue of Harvard
Business Review.
Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional
Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal
Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and author of The Brain and
Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: Selected Writings. His
latest book is A Force For Good: The Dalai Lama s Vision for Our World.
Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?
For ages, people have debated if leaders are born or made. So too goes the
debate about emotional intelligence. Are people born with certain levels of
empathy, for example, or do they acquire empathy as a result of life s
experiences? The answer is both. Scientific inquiry strongly suggests that
there is a genetic component to emotional intelligence. Psychological and
developmental research indicates that nurture plays a role as well. How much of
each perhaps will never be known, but research and practice clearly demonstrate
that emotional intelligence can be learned.
One thing is certain: Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an
old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity. Yet even with maturity, some
people still need training to enhance their emotional intelligence.
Unfortunately, far too many training programs that intend to build leadership
skills including emotional intelligence are a waste of time and money. The
problem is simple: They focus on the wrong part of the brain.
Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neurotransmitters of the brain s
limbic system, which governs feelings, impulses, and drives. Research indicates
that the limbic system learns best through motivation, extended practice, and
feedback. Compare this with the kind of learning that goes on in the neocortex,
which governs analytical and technical ability. The neocortex grasps concepts
and logic. It is the part of the brain that figures out how to use a computer
or make a sales call by reading a book. Not surprisingly but mistakenly it is
also the part of the brain targeted by most training programs aimed at
enhancing emotional intelligence. When such programs take, in effect, a
neocortical approach, my research with the Consortium for Research on Emotional
Intelligence in Organizations has shown they can even have a negative impact on
people s job performance.
To enhance emotional intelligence, organizations must refocus their training to
include the limbic system. They must help people break old behavioral habits
and establish new ones. That not only takes much more time than conventional
training programs, it also requires an individualized approach.
Imagine an executive who is thought to be low on empathy by her colleagues.
Part of that deficit shows itself as an inability to listen; she interrupts
people and doesn t pay close attention to what they re saying. To fix the
problem, the executive needs to be motivated to change, and then she needs
practice and feedback from others in the company. A colleague or coach could be
tapped to let the executive know when she has been observed failing to listen.
She would then have to replay the incident and give a better response; that is,
demonstrate her ability to absorb what others are saying. And the executive
could be directed to observe certain executives who listen well and to mimic
their behavior.
With persistence and practice, such a process can lead to lasting results. I
know one Wall Street executive who sought to improve his empathy specifically
his ability to read people s reactions and see their perspectives. Before
beginning his quest, the executive s subordinates were terrified of working
with him. People even went so far as to hide bad news from him. Naturally, he
was shocked when finally confronted with these facts. He went home and told his
family but they only confirmed what he had heard at work. When their opinions
on any given subject did not mesh with his, they, too, were frightened of him.
Enlisting the help of a coach, the executive went to work to heighten his
empathy through practice and feedback. His first step was to take a vacation to
a foreign country where he did not speak the language. While there, he
monitored his reactions to the unfamiliar and his openness to people who were
different from him. When he returned home, humbled by his week abroad, the
executive asked his coach to shadow him for parts of the day, several times a
week, to critique how he treated people with new or different perspectives. At
the same time, he consciously used on-the-job interactions as opportunities to
practice hearing ideas that differed from his. Finally, the executive had
himself videotaped in meetings and asked those who worked for and with him to
critique his ability to acknowledge and understand the feelings of others. It
took several months, but the executive s emotional intelligence did ultimately
rise, and the improvement was reflected in his overall performance on the job.
It s important to emphasize that building one s emotional intelligence cannot
will not happen without sincere desire and concerted effort. A brief seminar
won t help; nor can one buy a how-to manual. It is much harder to learn to
empathize to internalize empathy as a natural response to people than it is to
become adept at regression analysis. But it can be done. Nothing great was
ever achieved without enthusiasm, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. If your goal is
to become a real leader, these words can serve as a guidepost in your efforts
to develop high emotional intelligence.