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.

A recent comparison of the mental and physical health of Americans and Britons raises some intriguing questions. Consider these data points:

• Americans spend 2.5 more on health care than do Brits – yet have higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, lung disease, and cancer.
• The richest, healthiest Americans are as sick as the poorest Brits.
• Americans work far longer than Brits (and other Europeans), and are more likely to hold two jobs – virtually unheard of in Britain.

In searching for explanations, the focus goes to the fact that Americans seem to value wealth and work over social connections, in the view of a British epidemiology team, led by Sir Michael Marmot at the University College London Medical School. One reason for this, of course, can be seen in the lack of social safety nets Americans face. Compare Britain, which like most European countries, has a far more humane social system: in England, a student might pay about $3,000 a year for a university education (and in other European countries the government pays the whole thing); everyone who retires in Britain gets both a company and a government pension; health care is free. Americans, by contrast, live in fear of losing health care, not having enough money to retire on, or huge education bills.

George Lucas and Daniel Goleman discuss the many ways that social and emotional learning enhance the education process.  Read the interview at edutopia.org: http://www.edutopia.org/lucas-goleman-social-emotional-learning

In Social Intelligence I noted longterm trends that signal a gradual corrosion of opportunities for people to connect – networks of friendships shrinking, families spending less time together, a decline in social gatherings. Though many of us sense this trend toward a loss of connection, the data tracking it has been piecemeal.

Now that’s about to change. The National Conference on Citizenship, a group dedicated to promoting civic ties, is going to track how engaged with each other people are, as part of what it calls a “Civic Health Index.” The Index will track 40 key civic indicators measuring levels of political activity, civic knowledge, volunteering, trust, and charitable giving – in part, a measure of our collective social intelligence. The group sees the index as a way to track signs of weakness in the civic fabric, to more systematically measure the trends announced in Robert Putnam’s eloquently titled book, Bowling Alone. Well and good. But I’d like to see some efforts made to reverse the trend, rather than simply document it.

There was a revealing moment at the third annual “All Things Digital” conference, a gathering of super-techies, featuring digerati luminaries like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. As speakers took the stage, the dimness of the ballroom hall was illumined by the ghostly glow of laptop screens — attendees were using the building’s WiFi to check their e-mail and surf the Web even while presenters spoke.

Those glued to their screen were in what one called a state of “continuous partial attention,” a mental blurriness induced by an overload of information inputs from the speakers, the other people in the room, and the glow of their laptop screens. So the conference hosts unplugged the ballroom’s WiFi, that lifeblood of digital connectivity. Throughout the room there was an eerie electronic silence, as the screens blinked off.

But there was still WiFi out in the hall, where a knot of attendees decamped to post blogs announcing to the world what had just happened. Two camps emerged. One argued that people at the conference should be fully present, paying attention to what was going on in the room. The other side contended that they were being present, but to a wider social world, their virtual audience .

As I was in the final throes of getting a book into print, a woman at my publisher sent me an email that stopped me in my tracks.

I had met her just once, at a meeting. We were having an email exchange about some crucial detail, which I thought was being worked out well. Then she wrote: “It’s difficult to have this conversation by email. I sound strident and you sound exasperated.”

I was shocked to hear that I sounded exasperated.

But once she had named this snag in our communications, I realized that, indeed, there was something really “off.”

So we had a phone call that cleared everything up in a few minutes, ending on a friendly note.

The advantage a phone call or drop-by has over email will no doubt be greatest when there is trouble at hand. But the ways in which email may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place are becoming more apparent with the emergence of a new discipline: social neuroscience, the scientific study of what goes on in the brains of people as they interact with each other. These new findings have surfaced a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no channels online for the signals the brain’s social circuitry depends on to calibrate emotions and how to respond to them.