Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, Ecological Intelligence

Success: The Rest of the Story

In his fascinating new book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong case that people owe their success to a lot more than IQ.  He reviews data and offers convincing cases to show that above an IQ in the neighborhood of 110-115, IQ fails as a predictor of success in a career.  In other words, you need to be smart enough to handle the cognitive complexity of the information you need for a given role or job, be it engineering, law, medicine, or business. That’s the IQ around 115. But after reaching that threshold of “smart enough,” your intellect makes little difference.

That explains why, when Harvard’s Howard Gardner reviewed longitudinal data that follows people from their early years into their career, he concluded that IQ alone predicts just 6 to 10 percent of career success. That leaves lots of room for other factors, like luck and circumstance. Gladwell makes the case for these very factors, arguing that one’s cultural and family background offer habits and outlooks that, given fortunate historical circumstances, can make some people highly successful.

But there’s more to the story.

Gladwell illustrates the case for circumstance and luck with fascinating tidbits about success, like the fact that Bill Gates and Bill Joy, two titans of the computing industry, just happened to be lucky in getting access to some of the earliest computers around in a day when almost no one had even seen one – and then were able to practice thousands of hours writing computer code starting in their teen years, and so get a jump on the fledgling software industry.

Or the fact that an entire generation of Jewish immigrants around the turn of the century was able to bring business and craftsmen’s skills they had mastered in Europe into entrepreneurial success in America. Their industrious and enterprising habits then became a model that benefited their children, some of who were to become lawyers. Those who happened to be born around 1930 and had easy access to good schooling because their generation had relatively few children; on entering a career in law, many were turned down by the most prestigious law firms of their day, but then went on to become enormously successful because they were the first to get involved in litigation for corporate takeovers – a business those other, more haughty law firms disdained.

There’s little doubt that the mix of such lucky circumstance and personal backgrounds matter for success. But there’s more to the story. A maxim of social science tells us that in some respects, every person is like every other person, like some other people, and like no other person.  Gladwell has unpacked the middle range of factors, the ways certain groups or cohorts experience unique circumstances that can, with a bit of circumstantial luck, make them hugely successful.

But here’s where the rest of the story starts. Gladwell says nothing about individual differences within those groups or cohorts – why only some in that fortunate group go on to great success. He does not raise the next set of questions like: Why didn’t all the members of the school club that gave the young Bill Gates that early access to a computer become billionaires like him? Or why didn’t all the Jewish lawyers born in 1930 become huge successes like the handful of cases Gladwell focuses on?

Here a good part of the answer no doubt can be found in which individuals among those groups has a higher level of competencies like adaptability and initiative, the drive to continually improve performance, and empathy skills like sensing how another person thinks or feels. Such abilities give a person the drive to achieve, the initiative and the interpersonal effectiveness that success in a field like software (drive and initiative) and law (add in interpersonal effectiveness) require.

A massive amount of data collected by companies on their own people suggests that such personal abilities are the secret ingredient in success over and above those Gladwell describes so ably. The data I’m referring to derives from “competence modeling,” in which companies systematically analyze the abilities found in their stars (those in the top ten percent of performance by whatever metric makes sense for that specific job or role) but not found in counterparts who are mediocre.  A goodly amount of these abilities – like initiative, the drive to achieve, and empathy — are in the emotional intelligence domain. Competence studies show that the higher a person goes up the organizational ladder, the more prominent the role these personal abilities play in performance. In other words, the more successful someone is, the greater the contribution of this skill set to his or her triumph.

This is good news for anyone who would like to see success in life shared widely, rather than given to a lucky few who happen to be born into a fortunate, charmed set of circumstances. One way to give every child a greater chance for career success – and a good life in general – would be to have curricula in social and emotional learning (see www.casel.org) a standard part of schooling. Data shows that children who are systematically taught social and emotional skills like how to manage their distressing emotions better, empathize and collaborate do better: have fewer problems like substance abuse and violence, like school more and pay more attention in class – and score significantly better (11%, on average) on academic achievement test scores.

The best news: the benefits are greatest in those schools where children need this boost the most, like those from the poorest families. That’s the rest of the story of success.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 7 Comments »

Flame Out

At last there’s a way to cool down before we flame online; those folks at Google have come up with a remedy for emotional hijacks at the keyboard.

A “flame” occurs when we’re a bit agitated – frustrated, anxious, jealous, emotionally desperate – and compose an email, hit “Send” … and regret having sent it.

This happens particularly often online, as I’ve explained in Social Intelligence, because the brain circuitry that kicks in to keep us from embarrassing ourselves while face-to-face on the phone with someone gets no signals online.  The result has been called the “disinhibition” effect; what gets disinhibited is our emotional impulses.

The Google software helps by getting us to switch from the hot-tempered amygdala to our cool neocortex before we hit send.  It’s a neat little device that requires you do about 45 seconds of math problems before the “send” button will operate. Called “Mail Goggles,” the software operates only late at night and on weekends, when we presumably are most predisposed to sending regrettable messages in the heat of the moment.

As Jon Perlow, the software engineer who developed Goggles explains: “Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. Gmail can’t always prevent you from sending messages you might later regret, but today we’re launching a new Labs feature I wrote called Mail Goggles which may help.

“When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?”

To check out this virtual emotional intelligence enhancer:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/new-in-labs-stop-sending-mail-you-later.html

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 8 Comments »

Good Work!

What’s the connection between our work and leading a good life?

Howard Gardner and I (we’ve known each other since our grad school days) had the chance to explore this question when we got together near Cambridge for a taped conversation (you can listen in on Good Work: Aligning Skills and Values, available from www.MoreThanSound.net). We explored the implications of Howard’s recent research, done with William Damon at Stanford and Mike Csikszentmihalyi, famous for his studies of “flow.” The team has been studying the ways in which people are able to combine excellence in their job with expressing their values – what they call “good work” (see their website, www.goodworkproject.org).

This concept has helped me think through the relationship between emotional/social intelligence and people’s values. As mounting research suggests, this aspect of intelligence can contribute greatly to making someone an outstanding performer at work – for leaders, social intelligence strengths are especially crucial to success. But that says nothing about the values a person brings to their job.

The research on good work makes clear that there are a sub-set of people (hopefully large), who combine excellence at work with positive values.  When I asked Howard what he meant by “good” here, he said: “When we speak about ‘good’ work we speak about work that is excellent in quality, technically first rate; work that is engaging, personally meaningful, something that you really believe in and want to do;  and work that is ethical, work that constantly thinks about its implications for others, for the broader community. We talk about it as being responsible or ethical.  Think of them as an intertwined triple helix of three e’s:  excellence, engagement, and ethics.”

A high level of emotional and social intelligence, it seems to me, would provide the excellence and engagement in this equation – and, hopefully, set the stage for the third ingredient in good work, ethics.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 3 Comments »

What's Your Emotional Style?

Who among us has not gotten upset by an argument, an unsettling talk with our boss, or a bad grade?

And have you noticed that some of us get over these troubling encounters quickly, while others sulk or fume for a long time?

Just why people some people are better at recovery than others, and what that says about their brain function, was explained to me by Richard Davidson, the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Richie, as I’ve known him for years, was a graduate student with me long ago, and I’ve often written about his groundbreaking neuroscience research in my books. This time I chatted with him for an audio CD, “Training the Brain: Cultivating Emotional Skills.”

To be sure, there’s nothing wrong with being upset by life’s setbacks or troubles; we’re wired for that. But some of us flip out at the smallest provocation, or hang on to the distress long after. And those differences, Davidson believes, represent underlying brain function.

When it comes to having a hair trigger or to staying preoccupied by an upset long afterward, the circuits around the amygdala, the brain’s alarm for threat, danger and fear, are at play. As Davidson told me, when his lab use brain imaging with such people, he finds a distinctive pattern in the mechanisms that release cortisol, a key stress hormone.

As I’ve described in Social Intelligence cortisol can be helpful at loswer levels; it’s crucial for mobilizing us to meet the demands of the day. But when cortisol surges through the body at high levels and stays there, we get stuck in emotional overdrive. This, Davidson tells me, impacts our health.  David Spiegel at Stanford Medical School found that among women with metastatic breast cancer, those whose cortisol failed to go down at the end of the day ended up dying of cancer sooner.

People with phobias, Davidson finds, don’t have the problem of a prolonged stress response. Instead they have a super-quick amygdala response to what frightens them. That response trips with a wide range of innocuous things, too.  It doesn’t take people phobic of spiders, say, any longer to recover than it does other people. But their initial surge of fear is so great that are apprehensive of that response itself – and go to great lengths to avoid whatever might trigger it (hence the phobia).

Then there are people who have very strong emotional responses, but who may or may not recover quickly or have a hair trigger.  Davidson says that a strong response with a quick recovery may be quite adaptive emotionally.

Davidson’s intuition, he told me, is that people may gravitate to mates who have similar emotional styles – or perhaps drop partners whose style does not fit with their own. On the other hand, he conjectures, it would probably do well for someone prone to fits of anxiety to find an unflappable partner who might help them calm down.

And, he adds, whatever our emotional style, the very circuitry of the brain that determines it also happens to be the most plastic – that is, able to change with experience.

In our conversation he describes the good news: how mindfulness practice can help us modify these brain styles for the better.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 17 Comments »

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

Posted in Leadership, Social intelligence | 24 Comments »

Does America Need More Neighborhood Pubs?

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.

Even among the well-to-do, contentment remains elusive: No matter how much people earn, their desires grow with their earning power. This insatiable pleasure-seeking has been called by Daniel Kahneman the “hedonic treadmill,” meaning that no matter what you have now, the yearning for more will grow proportionately – keeping you on an endless spending spree. Intriguingly, the country with highest rates of contentment worldwide is Denmark – whose people also have the lowest expectations for material comforts.
Add to America’s cultural malaise the fact that our networks of friends seems to be shrinking. Between 1985 and 2005, the average number of confidantes people reported dropped from three to two. By contrast, British and other European cultures place more importance on social connections than money. In Britain, for instance, every neighborhood has a pub, a place where neighbors go most nights to get together. By contrast, Americans disappear into their homes, doors locked.

This shrinking of personal contact may itself take a health toll. Carnegie Mellon psychologist Sheldon Cohen has found the more personal relationships a person has, the more healthy they are.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 17 Comments »

Educating Hearts and Minds: An Interview with George Lucas

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

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social and emotional learning, Social intelligence | 4 Comments »

Getting Connected

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.

One might be to rethink our arrangements for housing the chronically sick and the elderly: We accelerate their isolation by stashing them away from family, friends, and the richiness of life. Why not, for example, put day care centers in elder care facilities, so that the very young – who love the full attention of a caring adult – can have access to isolated elders who delight in the company of the very young?

Posted in Social intelligence | 6 Comments »

Tech and Touch

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 .

The upside of connection-at-a-distance, of course, is that it can offer a human link to those far away. When done wisely, the benefits are ample. A priest told me about a funeral he conducted for the brother of two elderly sisters, who were themselves too frail to attend. So, via cell phone, the priest gave a soto voce you-are-there narration of the service at graveside, while another conduced the funeral. “Though it sounds awful, it was wonderful,” he told me. “The sisters were quite delighted to be included this way.”

And so two social realities vie for our attention: the flesh-and-blood world of those physically present, and the virtual universe of those we connect with digitally. While there are certainly arguments for staying connected to those we care about while we are at a distance, there is always a trade-off with the distractedness this wisp of an information stream induces, drawing our attention from people in the here and now.

There are, to be sure, both value and risks for education itself in these new technologies. The Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, which I co-founded, advocates boosting children’s social skills along with bringing the new technologies into classrooms. As the George Lucas Educational Foundation proposes, this would mean that as new technologies free teachers from rote tasks, they use that open time on their students’ social and emotional education. These are the human skills society needs to value more urgently, and so coach children in.

Technology makes interpersonal abilities all the more vital, because of the ways it threatens to erode emotional connectivity between people. Take one potential futuristic app emerging from collaboration between Dr. Carl Marci (a Harvard psychiatrist who monitors the physiology of therapist and patients during sessions) and techies at MIT’s famed Media Lab. They have developed an ingenious fanny pack that psychiatric patients can wear at home, 24 hours a day. Wireless technology monitors their physiology, from sweat response, muscle tension and heart rate, to the rate of their movements and subtleties of tone of voice. This device may one day herald psychiatry at a distance. The monitor would automatically alert a psychotherapist when, for instance, it recognized a pattern signaling that a patient has begun relapsing into depression — a virtual psychiatrist-on-call, 24 hours a day. Soon after talking with Dr. Marci, I happened to meet with a group of physicians at the same Harvard hospital, a task force to design the “outpatient practice of the future.” High tech systems for getting information about patients to the physician played a role, as did monitoring and contacts at a distance (though none as futuristic as Marci’s).

But as the conversation went on, another rule-of-thumb emerged: the more virtual the connections between doctor and patient, the greater the need for an actual human contact, a lifeline connecting every patient to a real person who knows them and understands their feelings and needs.

Posted in Social intelligence | 3 Comments »

Email With Care

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.

Face-to-face interactions are information-rich; we pick up how to take what someone says to us not just from their tone of voice and facial expression, but also their body language, pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say. Most crucially, our brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information-processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, email is emotionally lean-to-impoverished when it comes to sending the nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The words we type come to the other person denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

Email, of course, has a multitude of virtues: it’s quick and convenient, democratizes access, lets us stay in touch with loads of people we could never see or call. We can get huge amounts of work done together.
Nonetheless, when it comes to relying solely on email for communications at work, that absence of a channel for the brain’s emotional circuitry carries risks. Reviewing studies on email in the workplace from the new field of cyberpsychology in an article to be published in the Academy of Management Review next year [Jan. 2008], Kristin Byron at Syracuse University’s business school finds that, in general, emailing ups the likelihood of conflict and miscommunication. One reason: we tend to misinterpret positive email messages as more neutral, and neutral ones as more negative, than the sender intended. Even jokes are rated as less funny by recipients than by senders.
We fail to realize this largely because of egocentricity, according to a 2005 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. While sitting alone in a cubicle or basement writing emails, the sender “hears” in his own mind emotional overtones in what he’s writing, though none of those cues will be received by the person getting the message.

When we talk, my brain’s social radar picks up immediately that hint of stridency in your voice and automatically lowers my own tone of exasperation, all in the service of working things out. But when we email, there’s little-to-nothing by way of emotional valence to pick up. Email lacks those channels for the implicit meta-messages that, in conversation, give what we say its positive or negative spin.

On the upside, familiarity between sender and receiver pretty much cancels out these problems, according to findings by Joseph Walther at Michigan State University. People who know each other well, it turns out, rarely have these misunderstandings online.

These quirks of cyberpsychology are familiar to Clay Shirky, who teaches in New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. His expertise is social computing – software programs where multiple users interact, ranging from The Sims and FaceBook to listserves and chat rooms, to email. I asked Shirky what all this might imply for the multitudes of people who routinely work with others virtually, by email.

“When you communicate with a group you only know through electronic channels, it’s like having functional Asperger’s Syndrome – you are very logical and rational, but emotionally brittle,” Shirky said.

“I’m part of a farflung distributed network that at one point was designing a piece of software for sharing medical data. We worked mostly by conference calls and email, and it was going nowhere,” Shirky added. “So we finally said we’d all fly to Boston and get together for two days, just sit in a room and hash it out.”

During that meeting the team got an enormous amount of work done. And, Shirky recalls, “because the synchronization by email was so much better after the face-to-face piece, we actually hit the launch date.”
Shirky proposes that work groups whose members are widely distributed but need to have high levels of coordination, such as the computer security team protecting a global bank, do not need to get everyone in one room to reap the same benefit. Instead he proposes a “banyan model,” after the Asian tree that puts down roots from its branches. In this approach, Shirky said, “You put down little roots of face-to-face contact everywhere, to strategically augment electronic communications.”

Shirky advised the IT head of a global bank to routinely gather together small groups with one representative from each center for a day or two to get to know each other and get some work done. That way, when the security group in Singapore gets an email from the security people in London, someone there will be more likely to know the person sending it, and sense how to read that information with a lessened risk of misconstruing the message – or, worse, discounting it because of the “not-invented-here” syndrome.

Consider, too, the email-the-guy-down-the-hall effect: as email use increases in an organization, the overall volume of all other kinds of communication drops – particularly those routine friendly greetings that make people feel connected. But lacking these seemingly innocuous interactions, a 1998 article in Organizational Science concluded, people feel more disconnected from those they work with. Saying “Hi,” it turns out, really does matter; it’s social glue.

As Shirky puts it, “Social software” such as email “is not better than face-to-face contact; it’s only better than nothing.”

Further Resources:

• To hear Clay Shirky and Daniel Goleman in conversation about social computing: http://www.morethansound.net
• Kristin Byron, “Carrying Too Heavy a Load? The Communication and Miscommunication of Emotion in Emails,” (forthcoming, January, 2008), Academy of Management Review.
• M. Sarbaugh-Thompson and M.S. Feldman, “Electronic mail and organizational communication: Does saying “Hi” really Matter?” Organization Science, 9, 6, 1998. 685-698.
• J. Kruger et al. “Egocentrism over e-mail: can we communicate as well as we think?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 2005. 925-936.

Posted in Emotional intelligence, Social intelligence | 34 Comments »