Daniel Goleman - Author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence

I’ve long argued that outstanding leadership requires a combination of self-mastery and social intelligence. What’s the difference? Self-mastery refers to how we handle ourselves; for those familiar with my model of emotional intelligence, self-mastery breaks down into self-awareness and self-control.

The leadership competencies that build on self-mastery include self-confidence, the drive to improve performance, staying calm under pressure, and a positive outlook. All these abilities can be seen at full force, for instance, in workers who are outstanding individual performers. The operative word here is “individual” – and that’s the rub. When it comes to leaders, effectiveness in relationships makes or breaks. Solo stars are often promoted to leadership positions and then flounder for lack of people skills.

When Claudio Fernando-Araoz, head of research for the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International, looked at CEOs who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany and Japan: those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise – but fired for lack of emotional intelligence. They simply could not win over, or sometimes even just get along with, their board of directors, or their direct reports, or others on whom their own success depended.

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.

“All the people in this room are motivated by power, prestige, or money. Which do you think is most important?”

That was the question asked of me recently by a managing director of a large European bank who had asked me to speak to about 200 top executives. Let’s take them one by one.

I remember David McClelland, my mentor years ago in grad school, making a crucial distinction among people who are motivated by power: whether they seek power simply to aggrandize themselves, or for something beyond themselves. The first group, the genuinely power-hungry, include “unhealthy” narcissists and Machiavellians – people who care only about their own goals, without caring about the consequences for other people of what they do (as I detail in the chapter on the “dark triad” in my book Social Intelligence).

In contrast, those with what McClelland called “socialized” power seek to influence others not just for their own goals, but for greater concerns – whether for their team, family, organization, or a cause. From an organizational point of view, people driven by personal power present a danger – they don’t care whether what they do furthers the common good. Those who wield socialized power, however, can be good or even great leaders.