Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Ecological Intelligence

Leadership: Social Intelligence is Essential

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.

All this has made intuitive and theoretical sense to me. But I like data. So I’m pleased to see several new studies that confirm how essential social intelligence – as opposed to simple self-mastery – can be for leadership effectiveness. The findings:

• At a transportation company, those leaders strongest in the social intelligence competencies led greater revenue growth, compared to executives with strengths only in the self-mastery competencies.
• The same goes for banking: at a major nationwide bank, high social intelligence (but not self-mastery alone) predicted executive’s yearly performance appraisal, which in turn reflects business success.
• The value of social intelligence even applies to clergy: among Catholic priests,, greater social intelligence predicted more satisfied parishioners.

All these studies were based on the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI), which I helped my colleague Richard Boyatzis design. I’d like to see if other researchers verify this effect using other measures to replicate these findings. Any graduate students out there

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Resonant Leaders

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.

Nurses with resonant leaders reported improved emotional health, while those with dissonant leaders said their emotional health was declining. Of course resonant leaders are no substitute for adequate staffing and fair salaries – the overall negative impact of cutbacks on nurses’ morale and patient care was a given in the study. But it highlights the crucial difference social and emotional intelligence in leaders can make, particularly during a crisis and in high stress workplaces.

In Chapter 18 of Social Intelligence I elaborate on just why supportive leadership is particularly essential to prevent burnout in jobs like nursing, where people are asked to empathize with and respond to clients or patients in distress. This study found that nurses who experienced emotional exhaustion (a sure sign of incipient burnout) had more stress-triggered physical complaints themselves, and more unmet patient care needs; their emotional health and satisfaction with their jobs plummeted. Had I seen this study while writing the book, I would have cited it as helping make this case.

The study, done by a research group at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was published in the journal Nursing Research [January/February 2005].

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Power, Prestige or Money: What Drives Us

“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.

As for prestige, there’s another distinction: between those who seek glory through over-selling their merits, and those who get prestige through a well-earned reputation. The first motive leads people to hype themselves, fabricate, exaggerate. The second kind of reputation is more robust, since it comes as a natural byproduct of other people recognizing sound effort or good work.

Finally, money. Here McClelland had an intriguing insight. In his studies of the achievement motive – the drive to continually improve one’s own performance, he showed that this was the main driver in highly successful entrepreneurs. And the most successful among them regarded the money they made as a way of keeping score on how well they were doing, not as the end in itself. Their real driver was a very high internal standard of performance and the continual push to find ways to do even better.

However, I didn’t mention any of that in giving my answer to that director at the Spanish bank. Instead I told him that what I felt was most important as a motivator was a sense of meaning and purpose in what we do. If our efforts fit with our driving sense of values and life mission, then we will be energized. I’ve known many people who were caught up in the pursuit of money, power or prestige as ends in themselves, who only found that getting those things left them feeling empty – it was meaningless, a rat race. Of course Abraham Maslow pointed out that there is a hierarchy of human need – if you are poor, powerless, and suffering, then money and power make sense as goals. But once those are satisfied, other goals become more important – and a meaningful purpose or life mission trumps them all.

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