The most effective leaders, we’ve long known, have more competence in emotional intelligence. It’s not your college degrees or IQ that make you an outstanding leader, but emotional intelligence abilities. Leaders who get the best results tend to show more strengths in key competencies in emotional intelligence.
Now the news comes that women, on average, are better at almost all these crucial leadership skills than are men on average. The two competencies where men and women had the least difference were emotional self-control and positive outlook. The largest difference was for self-awareness.
The other areas where women on average scored better than men:
One of my most basic assumptions about the relationship between mental effort and brain function has begun to crumble. Here’s why.
My earliest research interests as a psychologist were in the ways mental training can shape biological systems. My doctoral dissertation was a psychophysiological study of meditation as an intervention in stress reactivity; I found (as have many others since) that the practice of meditation seems to speed the rate of physiological recovery from a stressor.
My guiding assumptions included the standard premise that the mind-body relationship operates according to orderly, understandable principles. One such might be called the “dose-response” rule, that the more time put into a given method of training, the greater the result in the targeted biological system.»