Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

I’ve just spoken to a friend who tells me that the tech company he works for, one of the world’s most well-known brand names, uses IQ or its surrogates – SAT, GMAT, GPA scores and the like – as critical requirement for employment – even if they were scores from many years ago. Basically, they are trying to ensure that their employees are the smartest people around.

But are the smartest the best in any given job? Not necessarily. Take two friends of mine. One, the most successful kid in my high school class, ended up as a CEO in the cable industry and retired after selling his company. He had been a B- student. The other, a kid I knew in my class at Amherst College, had perfect scores on his SATs – two 800s, and top numbers on three advanced placement tests. He now works for himself helping people set up their home computer systems.

If IQ predicted achievement in the working world, you’d expect the reverse career outcomes for my two friends. And that’s the problem: IQ is a mirage when it comes to how someone actually will perform on any given job. It tells you nothing about that person’s drive or self-mastery, their ability to collaborate or empathize, let alone their ethics.

In a high school English class the day’s topic was how to use commas, and the teacher was trying his best to hold his students’ attention. One student, Jessie, responded this way: she slipped her hand into her bag and discretely pulled out a catalog for a clothing store. In a sense, it was as though she had left one store in a mall for another. Students these days bring something like a consumer mentality to school; if they don’t find class intriguing or exciting, they tune out.

Today’s students are a tough audience. Increasingly, they seem to require added help getting engaged in learning, in part because they have become constant consumers of entertainment and sensation, always searching for new thrills. They carry music and games with them wherever they go, electronic aids to excite and please the brain. They look to the world around them to enchant and engross them. So when they walk into a classroom, there can be an inevitable let-down, if only by comparison to frenzy of the iPod or Gameboy they’ve just put away.

My book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence (co-authored with Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee) argues that resonant leaders, who exhibit attributes of emotional and social intelligence, are better able to connect with others most effectively – and so lead well. At the time we wrote the book, there was no specific study we could as yet cite that had been designed to test this idea. But now direct data is building

One new study found that nurses going through the intense stress of layoffs and reorganization in a budget-cutting health system were buffered when their leaders were resonant – and intensified when leaders were not. Resonant leaders can, for example, listen to workers’ negative feelings, and respond empathically and supportively, a crucial skill during chaotic times. In general, resonant leaders build positive work climates, while dissonant leaders are out of synch and out of touch, creating disharmony.

The study assessed the impact on nurses of the four resonant styles we describe in Primal Leadership – visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic – and the two dissonant ones, pace-setting and commanding. All the nurses felt pressured by the cutbacks, and that they were less able to give their patients the care they felt they should. But the nurses who had dissonant leaders reported three times the unmet patient care needs compared to those who had supportive leaders. And when leaders were dissonant, nurses reported feeling emotionally exhausted four times more frequently.