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What Makes a Leader?

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
How Emotional
Leadership SkillIntelligence Became a Key
 Andrea Ovans
APRIL 28, 2015
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ANDREW NGUYEN

Anyone trying to come up to speed on emotional intelligence would have a pretty easy time of it
since the concept is remarkably recent, and its application to business newer still. The term was
coined in 1990 in a research paper by two psychology professors, John D. Mayer of UNH and
Peter Salovey of Yale. Some years later, Mayer defined it in HBR this way:

From a scientific (rather than a popular) standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to
accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send
about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions. It doesn’t necessarily
include the qualities (like optimism, initiative, and self-confidence) that some popular definitions
ascribe to it.

It took almost a decade after the term was coined for Rutgers psychologist Daniel Goleman to
establish the importance of emotional intelligence to business leadership. In 1998, in what has
become one of HBR’s most enduring articles, “What Makes a Leader,” he states unequivocally:

The most effective leaders are all 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…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. 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.

The article then goes on to introduce five components of emotional intelligence that allow
individuals to recognize, connect with, and learn from their own and other people’s mental
states:

 Self-awareness
 Self-regulation
 Motivation (defined as “a passion for work that goes
beyond money and status”)
 Empathy for others
 Social skills, such as proficiency in managing
relationships and building networks

An understanding of what exactly constitutes emotional intelligence is important not only

because the capacity is so central to leadership but because people strong in some of its elements
can be utterly lacking in others, sometimes to disastrous effect. You can see Salovey, now
Yale’s provost, making this point vividly in a talk he gave at a 2010 leadership conference in
which he describes how a single picture (which we can’t even see) illustrates the remarkable
disparity in the emotional intelligence of President Clinton, who was so remarkable in his
empathy and yet so devoid of self-control.

In subsequent work, Goleman focuses more deeply on these various elements of emotional
intelligence. In 2001, with Case Western Reserve professor Richard Boyatzis and U.Penn faculty
member Annie McKee, he explored the contagious nature of emotions at work, and the link
between leaders’ emotional states and their companies’ financial success in “Primal Leadership.”
In 2008, in “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership,” Goleman and Boyatzis take a
closer look at the mechanisms of social intelligence (the wellsprings of empathy and social
skills). And most recently, in “The Focused Leader,” Goleman applies advances in neuroscience
research to explain how leaders can increase each element of emotional intelligence by
understanding and improving the various ways they focus their attention, both expansively and
narrowly.
It is perhaps an indication of how young this field is (or perhaps how fundamental Goleman’s
typology is to it) that pretty much the entire canon of thinking on the subject in HBR also focuses
on one or another of these elements of emotional intelligence as Goleman laid them out.

FURTHER READING

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HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

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In “Cultural Intelligence,” for instance, Elaine Mosakowiski of the University of Colorado,

Boulder, and LBS professor Christopher Earley take an in-depth look at one important social
skill, the ability to adjust to different contexts, offering a diagnostic to help you gauge your
abilities and a six-step process for improving them. In “Contextual Intelligence,” HBS professor
Tarun Khanna examines how leaders develop what Goleman calls “cognitive empathy,” the
aspect of social intelligence that “enables leaders to pick up implied norms and learn the unique
mental models of a new culture.” In Emotional Agility, consultants Susan David and Christina
Congleton, focus on one aspect of self-regulation, detailing a process for recognizing and
rechanneling your negative emotions, an idea echoed in Kellogg school professor Leigh
Thompson and U. Chicago behavioral science professor Tanya Menon’s approach to coping
with envy at work. And in “Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups,” Steven Wolff of
Marist College, and another CWR professor, Vanessa Urch Druskat, examine how emotional
intelligence is manifested in and strengthens teams.

The year that Mayer and Salovey coined the term emotional intelligence was the same year
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was invented, making it possible for the first time
to see what was happening in the brain while it was in action. Goleman’s work is infused with
these insights, and HBR has reported on the most surprising research in this area, particularly in
the last five years:

 on the mechanisms of charisma,

 on what’s happening at a physical level when you
understand what another person is saying,
 on when emotional reasoning trumps IQ,
 (and conversely when anger poisons decision
making);
 on when flattery works and when it doesn’t,
 and on the merits of gossip in fostering social
networks.
And just this month, HBR’s editors reported on the strong link between empathetic leaders and
financial performance. Collectively they form an impressive and growing body of evidence
suggesting the integrated nature of our rational and emotional selves and the impossibility and
inadvisability of separating the two at work.

Still, it is sign that the field is reaching a certain level of maturity that we are beginning to see
some counterarguments. Most notably, a Wharton professor, Adam Grant, who in his own
research has reported a lack of correlation between scores on tests of emotional intelligence and
business results. While Goleman and others contest his methods, Mayer himself pointed out in
2002 HBR article that “emotional intelligence isn’t the only way to attain success as a leader. A
brilliant strategist who can maximize profits may be able to hire and keep talented employees
even if he or she doesn’t have strong personal connections with them.” But building those strong
connections is still probably a safer bet than ignoring them.

Two decades before Daniel Goleman first wrote about emotional intelligence in the pages of
HBR, he met his holiness the 14th Dalai Lama at Amherst College, who mentioned to the young
science journalist for the New York Times that he was interested in meeting with scientists. Thus
began a long, rich friendship as Goleman became involved over the years in arranging a series of
what he calls “extended dialogues” between the Buddhist spiritual leader and researchers in
fields ranging from ecology to neuroscience. Over the next 30 years, as Goleman has pursued his
own work as a psychologist and business thinker, he has come to see the Dalai Lama as a highly
uncommon leader. And so he was understandably delighted when, on the occasion of his friend’s
80th birthday, he was asked to write a book describing the Dalai Lama’s compassionate approach
to addressing the world’s most intractable problems. Due out in June, Force for Good, which
draws both on Goleman’s background in cognitive science and his long relationship with the
Dalai Lama, is both an exploration of the science and the power of compassion and a call to
action. Curious about the book and about how the Dalai Lama’s views on compassion informed
Goleman’s thinking on emotional intelligence, I caught up with Goleman over the phone. What
follows are edited excerpts from our conversation.

HBR. Let’s start with some definitions here. What is compassion, as you are describing it?
It sounds a lot like empathy, one of the major components of emotional intelligence. Is
there a difference?

Goleman: Yes, an important difference. As I’ve written about recently in HBR, three kinds of
empathy are important to emotional intelligence: cognitive empathy – the ability to understand
another person’s point of view; emotional empathy – the ability to feel what someone else feels;
and empathic concern – the ability to sense what another person needs from you. Cultivating all
three kinds of empathy, which originate in different parts of the brain, is important for building
social relationships.

But compassion takes empathy a step further. When you feel compassion, you feel distress when
you witness someone else in distress — and because of that you want to help that person.

Why draw this distinction?

Simply put, compassion makes the difference between understanding and caring. It’s the kind of
love that a parent has for a child. Cultivating it more broadly means extending that to the other
people in our lives and to people we encounter.

I think that in the workplace, that attitude has a hugely positive effect, whether it’s in how we
relate to our peers or how we are as a leader, or how we relate to clients and customers. A
positive disposition toward another person creates the kind of resonance that builds trust and
loyalty and makes interactions harmonious. And the opposite of that — when you do nothing to
show that you care — creates distrust, disharmony, and causes huge dysfunction at home and in
business.

When you put it that way, it’s hard to disagree that if you treat people well things would go
better than if don’t or that if you cared about them they would care a lot more about you.
So why do you think that just doesn’t happen naturally? Is this a cultural thing? Or a
misplaced confusion about when competition is appropriate?

I think too often there’s a muddle in people’s thinking that if I’m nice to another person or if I
have their interests at heart it means that I don’t have my own interests at heart. The pathology of
that is, “Well, I’ll just care about me and not the other person.” And that, of course, is the kind of
attitude that leads to lots of problems in the business realm and in the personal realm. But
compassion also includes yourself. If we see that if we protect ourselves and make sure we’re
okay — and also be sure the other person is okay — that creates a different framework for
working with other people and for cooperating with other people.

Could you give me an example of how that might work in the business world?

There’s research that was done on star salespeople and on client managers, which found that the
lowest level of performance was a kind of “I’m going to get the best deal I can now, and I don’t
care how this affects the other person” attitude, which means that you might make the sale but
that you lose the relationship. But at the top end, the stars were typified by the attitude, “I am
working for the client as well as myself. I’m going to be completely straight with them, and I’m
going to act as their advisor. If the deal I have is not the best deal they can get I’m going to let
them know because that’s going to strengthen the relationship, even though I might lose this
specific sale.” And I think that captures the difference between the “me first” and the “let’s all do
well” attitude that I’m getting at.

How would we cultivate compassion if we’re just not feeling it?

Neuroscientists have been studying compassion recently, and places like Stanford, Yale,
Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, among others, have been testing
methodologies for increasing compassion. Right now there’s a kind of a trend toward
incorporating mindfulness into the workplace, and it turns out there’s data from the Max Planck
Institute showing that enhancing mindfulness does have an effect in brain function, but that the
circuitry that’s affected is not the circuitry for concern or compassion. In other words, there’s no
automatic boost in compassion from mindfulness alone.
Still, in the traditional methods of meditation that mindfulness in the workplace is based on, the
two were always linked, so that you would practice mindfulness in a context in which you also
cultivate compassion.

YOU AND YOUR TEAM

 Emotional Intelligence

Feelings matter at work

Stanford, for example, has developed a program incorporating secularized versions of methods
that have originally come from religious practices. It involves a meditation in which you
cultivate an attitude of loving kindness, or of concern, or of compassion, toward people. First
you do this for yourself. Then for people you love. And then for people you just know. And
finally for everyone. And this has the effect of priming the circuitry responsible for compassion
within the brain, so that you are more inclined to act that way when the opportunity arises.

You’ve remarked that the Dalai Lama is a very distinctive kind of leader. Is there
something we could learn from his unique form of leadership, as leaders ourselves?

Observing him over the years, and then doing this book for which I interviewed him extensively,
and of course being immersed in leadership literature myself, three things struck me.

One is that he’s not beholden to any organization at all. He’s not in any business. He’s not a
party leader. He’s a citizen of the world at large. And this has freed him to tackle the largest
problems we face. I think that to the extent that a leader is beholden to a particular organization
or outcome, that creates a kind of myopia of what’s possible and what matters; focus narrows to
the next quarter’s results or the next election. He’s way beyond that. He thinks in terms of
generations and of what’s best for humanity as a whole. Because his vision is so expansive, he
can take on the largest challenges, rather than small, narrowly defined ones.

So I think there’s a lesson here for all of us, which is to ask ourselves if there is something that
limits our vision — that limits our capacity to care? And is there a way to enlarge it?

The second is that he gathers information from everywhere. He meets with heads of state and he
meets with beggars. He’s getting information from people at every level of society worldwide.
This casting a large net lets him understand situations in a very deep way, and he can analyze
them in many different ways and come up with solutions that aren’t confined by anyone. And I
think that’s another lesson everyday leaders can take from him.

And the third would be the scope of his compassion, which I think is an ideal that we could strive
for: it’s pretty unlimited— he seems to care about everybody, and the world at large.

You’ve called the book a call to action. What do you hope people will do after reading it?
 The book is a call to action, but it is a very reasoned call to action. The Dalai Lama is a great
believer in a deep analysis of problems and letting solutions come from that analysis. And then
he is also passionate about people acting now. Not feeling passive, not feeling helpless, not
feeling, “What’s the point; I won’t live to see the benefit” but rather to start changes now even if
the change won’t come to fruition until future generations.

And so my hope, as is his, is to help people understand what they can do in the face of problems
that are so vast— creating a more inclusive economy; making work meaningful; doing good and
not just well; cleaning up injustice and unfairness, corruption and collusion in society, whether in
business, politics or religion; helping the environment heal; the hope that one day conflict will be
settled by dialogue rather than war.

These are very big issues. But everyone can do something to move things in the right direction,
even if it’s just reaching across the divide and becoming friendly with someone who belongs to
some other group. That actually has a very powerful end result: that is, if you have two groups
somewhere in the world that have deep enmity toward each other, and yet a few people in each
group like each other it turns out that’s because they’ve had personal contact — they have a
friend in that other group. So something as simple as reaching out across a divide is actually a
profound thing.

In each of these areas, with whatever leverage we have, the point is to use it, not just to stand
back.

How to Be Emotionally Intelligent

By Daniel Goleman
 April 7, 2015
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Image
CreditWesley Bedrosian for The New York Times

What makes a great leader? Knowledge, smarts and vision, to be sure. To that, Daniel
Goleman, author of “Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence,” would add
the ability to identify and monitor emotions — your own and others’ — and to manage
relationships. Qualities associated with such “emotional intelligence” distinguish the
best leaders in the corporate world, according to Mr. Goleman, a former New York
Times science reporter, a psychologist and co-director of a consortium at Rutgers
University to foster research on the role emotional intelligence plays in excellence.
He shares his short list of the competencies.

1. SELF-AWARENESS

Realistic self-confidence: You understand your own strengths and limitations;

you operate from competence and know when to rely on someone else on the
team.

Emotional insight: You understand your feelings. Being aware of what makes
you angry, for instance, can help you manage that anger.

2. SELF-MANAGEMENT

Resilience: You stay calm under pressure and recover quickly from upsets. You
don’t brood or panic. In a crisis, people look to the leader for reassurance; if
the leader is calm, they can be, too.
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Emotional balance: You keep any distressful feelings in check — instead of

blowing up at people, you let them know what’s wrong and what the solution
is.

Self-motivation: You keep moving toward distant goals despite setbacks.

3. EMPATHY

Cognitive and emotional empathy: Because you understand other perspectives,

you can put things in ways colleagues comprehend. And you welcome their
questions, just to be sure. Cognitive empathy, along with reading another
person’s feelings accurately, makes for effective communication.

Good listening: You pay full attention to the other person and take time to
understand what they are saying, without talking over them or hijacking the
agenda.

4. RELATIONSHIP SKILLS

Compelling communication: You put your points in persuasive, clear ways so

that people are motivated as well as clear about expectations.
Team playing: People feel relaxed working with you. One sign: They laugh
easily around you

April 21, 2015 Emotional intelligence

I just heard from the Harvard Business Review that three of my articles will be in the new “Ten
Must Reads” they are publishing – one on emotional intelligence. (Just between us, though, all of
my HBR articles are available already in a single volume, What Makes a Leader: Why
Emotional Intelligence Matters.)
As the HBR editors recognize, emotional intelligence is an active ingredient in great leadership.
But how do you know your level of emotional intelligence?
First of all, you should understand that, unlike IQ, no one can summarize your EQ in a single
number. Know someone with great self-confidence, but zero empathy, for example?
I think of emotional intelligence in terms of a profile of specific competencies that range across
four different areas of personal ability:

 self-awareness
 self-management
 empathy and social awareness
 and relationship management.

Nested within each of those four areas are specific, learned competencies that set the best leaders
and performers apart from average.
I listed some of these emotional intelligence competencies in a recent short article in the New
York Times (which went platinum: most e-mailed article that day). But if you want to see the
longer list, here you are, as given on the website of the Consortium for Research on Emotional
Intelligence in Organizations:
Self-Awareness concerns knowing one’s internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
The Self-Awareness cluster contains three competencies:

 Emotional Awareness: Recognizing one’s emotions and their effects.

 Accurate Self-Assessment: Knowing one’s strengths and limits.
 Self-Confidence: A strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.

Self-Management refers to managing ones’ internal states, impulses, and resources. The Self-
Management cluster contains six competencies:

 Emotional Self-Control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.

 Transparency: Maintaining integrity, acting congruently with one’s values.
 Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change.
 Achievement: Striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
 Initiative: Readiness to act on opportunities.
 Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks.
Social Awareness refers to how people handle relationships and awareness of others’ feelings,
needs, and concerns. The Social Awareness cluster contains three competencies:

 Empathy: Sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their
concerns.
 Organizational Awareness: Reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.
 Service Orientation: Anticipating, recognizing, and meeting customers’ needs.

Relationship Management concerns the skill or adeptness at inducing desirable responses in

others. The Relationship Management cluster contains six competencies:

 Developing Others: Sensing others’ development needs and bolstering their abilities.
 Inspirational Leadership: Inspiring and guiding individuals and groups.
 Change Catalyst: Initiating or managing change.
 Influence: Wielding effective tactics for persuasion.
 Conflict Management: Negotiating and resolving disagreements.
 Teamwork & Collaboration: Working with others toward shared goals. Creating group synergy
in pursuing collective goals.

Emotional Intelligence Coach

You can use this as a rough personal checklist if you like. But we are not always the best judge
of our own strengths and limits.
If you want the best appraisal of your own abilities, I recommend getting a 360-degree look. One
way is with the ESCI-360, which I co-designed with my colleague Richard Boyatzis at Case
Western and Hay Group. It’s based on this competency list, and will guide you through a process
(best done with a coach), that will help you gain more strength.
We don’t have a fixed profile of emotional intelligence – it’s an ability that can change
throughout life. That’s why the ESCI-360 and similar measures of emotional intelligence are best
used working with a coach.
Plus, it’s never too late to get better – if you are motivated. That’s good news for anyone who
wants to get better at this set of success skills.

Apply these concepts into your training program with Leadership: A Master Class Training
Guide. The collection offers more than nine hours of research findings, case studies and valuable
industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management,
leadership development, organizational research, workplace psychology, innovation, negotiation
and senior hiring.

Supplemental Reading
Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters
The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights
Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in
Organizations

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/how-to-be-emotionally-intelligent.html

https://hbr.org/2015/04/how-emotional-intelligence-became-a-key-leadership-skill

https://hbr.org/2015/05/what-the-dalai-lama-taught-daniel-goleman-about-emotional-intelligence