Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

When I was a youngster, I was the only kid I knew who had two parents who worked. It was the 50s, when the mode was for dads to work and moms to stay home. These days it’s hard to find families where both parents do not need to hold jobs.

As a result, couples with infants and toddlers face the tough task of finding quality day care. Some studies have shown that two ingredients of better day care are having workers who are well-trained, and a lower ratio of children to workers.

Now Sir Richard Bowlby, the son of the famous British child development theorist John Bowlby, adds a third ingredient: having someone at day care with whom your child can form a nurturing emotional bond.

Sir Richard emailed me after reading Social Intelligence to say, “Babies and toddlers in daycare avoid chronic separation anxiety if they can develop an emotional bond with one carer.”

Here he follows up on the work of his father which shows that especially during the first two-and-a-half years of life an empathic, responsive caretaker helps a child develop a basic sense of security in the world, one that becomes a basis of healthy relationships lifelong. I explored this idea – and updated it in terms of new neuroscience evidence – in Chapter Eleven of Social Intelligence.

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem. “Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

“The most important thing you can learn in this era of heightened global competition,” writes Thomas Friedman, author of the The World is Flat and an expert on globalization, “is how to learn.”

Being good at learning, Bill Brody, president of Johns Hopkins University tells me, is sure to be an enormous asset in this age of incessant change and innovation, and an era when jobs will become outmoded and new jobs invented more quickly than ever.

But how do you learn to learn? Friedman remembers his own favorite teachers. No matter the subject, they excited him about learning itself. In fact, he has long forgotten exactly what they taught him – but he remembers being excited about learning whatever it was. His point: “To learn how to learn, you have to love learning.”

That’s the key: how a teacher can help students learn to love learning – or, more generally, how one person can help another excel at whatever they do.

“I had an accountant who used to make me crazy,” a friend tells me. “So I switched to one who always makes me feel fine, no matter what we’re talking about.”

That we gravitate to people who we enjoy being with is obvious. When it comes to the business world, cranky store clerks drive away business, just as that off-putting accountant drove away my friend. But this dynamic for keeping customers and clients satisfied seems to be ignored time and again by businesses. Thus the need to keep finding new ways to make the same old case for hiring for, or developing, interpersonal intelligence skills in those who are at the front lines of customer or client service.

That seems to be the point of an article I read in the Journal of Services Marketing [19/7, 2005, 438-444] called “The impact of service provider emotional intelligence on customer satisfaction,” by Sally Kernback and Nicolar Schutte at the University of New England, in Australia.

They assessed three levels of EI in clerks. At the highest level, the clerk anticipated how the customer would feel, expressed his own feelings clearly, showed that he understood the consequences of these feelings, and acted in ways that led to a positive emotional outcome – presumably they both felt good at the end of the interaction.

Half a dozen mothers are watching videos of themselves caring for their toddlers, taped in their homes a week or two before. The videos present a montage of each of the mothers with their toddlers in warm moments. The soundtrack: the song “You Are so Beautiful.”

“That is the song,” the group leader tells them, “your children are singing to you.”

The point of the meetings is for each mother to become more aware of her strengths at mothering, and to try to get better at habits that need improvement. So over the ensuing weeks, they will see other videos that show their struggles at caregiving – being too intrusive, or tuned-out, or simply missing cues from their toddler about what’s needed.

The mothers study the videos of themselves and their toddlers, and get coached in how, for instance, to be more relaxed about letting their kids explore and play, or being more sensitive to when a two-year-old wants a hug of just the reassurance of sitting on her lap.

I’ve been hearing about schools that are beginning to offer teachers courses in social intelligence. This makes good sense. Social neuroscience makes clear that the emotional tone of a classroom can be set to a large extent by the teacher. This means that teachers are able to help students get and stay in better brain states for learning (see chapter 19 of Social Intelligence for details).

The neural wiring between our thinking and emotional centers, neuroscience tells us, means our feelings can either enhance or inhibit the brain’s ability to learn. And now the new field of social neuroscience has shown that while two people interact, their emotional centers impact each other, for better or for worse.

Taken together, these results have direct implications for creating educational approaches and social climates in schools that can boost students’ ability to learn. The best results come when students, teachers, and school leaders each take steps to become more emotionally self-aware and socially intelligent, as I argued in my article “The Socially Intelligent Leader,” in the September 2006, issue of Educational Leadership.

This could be best accomplished by creating training programs in social/emotional learning (or SEL) for teachers and school staff, like those now being offered for children (see CASEL.org for more info).