Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 10
October 14, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Let’s Not Underrate Emotional Intelligence
“Passionate engineers or myopic entrepreneurs often lack certain EQ, but EQ is an indispensable trait of leaders that grow and scale companies,” observes a seasoned executive.
“Normally agree with you, but you couldn't be any more wrong on this. The LACK of emotional intelligence by management is a huge gap right now,” says a marketing consultant.
“Don’t ignore the negative effect on teams of a leader with low emotional intelligence,” objects a web designer.
All these comments are responses to an acerbic take-down of emotional intelligence on LinkedIn by Adam Grant. To be sure, many commentators agree with his points. But I don’t take Grant’s arguments very seriously. As these voices from the front lines attest, the blog’s critique misses the mark.
Anyone whose daily job makes her think about great performance will tell you emotional intelligence matters. And yet some academics doubt it matters much at all.
There are two realities going on here: the Ivory Tower world of academia, and the rubber-hits-the-road world of the workplace. Academia plays by a different set of rules of proof than do folks in the business world: what gets published in peer-reviewed journals, versus what actually works.
And therein lies the significant difference in these contrasting views of emotional intelligence. Academics are fastidious about their research methods, and analyze their data to see, for example, which variables correlate at what strength.
Someone in business has a more urgent question: What should I do Monday morning? How can I spot the top performers? What skills and competencies should we help people improve?
Let’s look more closely at the relationship between IQ and emotional intelligence. A century of IQ research shows intelligence predicts what job you can get. But once you’re in that position, everyone else you work with will have passed the same IQ requirement. Other abilities actually determine outstanding performance – especially emotional intelligence.
Still, if a computer can model everything you do in your job, emotional intelligence probably will not make or break your daily effectiveness. But even if you are a solo bench engineer coming up with a better widget, no one will pay attention to you unless you can communicate, persuade, and excite people about that widget – and that takes emotional intelligence.
Additionally, there are many assessments of emotional intelligence. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and some are best for a particular purpose like hiring, promotion, or development. The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence has evaluated the best ones.
The emotional intelligence assessment Grant chose to report on in his blog is based on the model most preferred in academia. It comes from the world of intelligence testing, and was designed to show that there are human abilities in the emotional realm that differ from IQ. (Though this might seem just like common sense, it has important theoretical meaning in the realm of psychological testing).
A different kind of assessment of emotional intelligence derives from personality tests. And a third starts with what matters in business: the competencies that make one person a star, and another mediocre.
A telling study looked at all the data on these three different varieties of emotional intelligence as predictors of job performance. It found that if you used measures of emotional intelligence from the second or third categories, you can measure how EQ enhances performance – but not if you used the measure cited in Grant’s article.
Maybe if you work entirely alone, and do not need to cooperate, influence, or empathize with anyone, a high IQ suffices for success.
But as one astute commentator on that blog put it: “People who do not have the right emotional skill set do not make it in the very professions you indicated that emotional intelligence is not required” – that is, engineering, accounting and science. He adds, “I would highly recommend speaking to professionals in the fields you mention before you write an article about what is important to them.”
Additional resources on developing emotional intelligence:
American Management Association's course Leading with Emotional Intelligence
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters
Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence - Selected Writings
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence
Now you can easily incorporate lessons from Leadership: A Master Class into your trainings with new comprehensive, customizable materials. View a sample .pdf of the training guide here.
Illustration: Bryant Paul Johnson
October 8, 2014
Daniel Goleman: The Art of Moving On
We all experience disappointments at work. Passed over for a promotion. Argument with a client or colleague. Office politics run amok. As a leader, your colleagues may see you as the cause of their frustrations – justified or not. Regardless of the source of grief, these distractions can impact performance on all levels. How can you help your team get past emotional roadblocks?
I spoke with my colleague, George Kohlrieser, a professor at IMD about high performance leadership in my master class series. During our discussion, he offered ways to rebound from difficult emotions.
“Bonding is crucial for any conflict management and negotiation. And remember, you don’t have to like someone to form a bond. You only need a common goal. However, there will always be a separation or disruption with bonding when there’s frustration or disappointment. When this happens, try to step out of the bond partially or completely. This allows you to open up to the grief process.
It’s helpful for leaders to understand how to go through the grief process for themselves and with others. People can be disappointed by all kinds of things: a negative piece of feedback, a failed contract, a change in a job, a transition. We all have to process these feelings before we can rebound.
In behavioral economics, this has been demonstrated by winners of the Nobel Economics Prize. Loss is more powerful in motivating the majority of people than benefit. To get over something quickly, use your mind's eye not to focus on the regret or the loss or the frustration; think of what's coming after to re-bond – and rebound.
The secret of high performance leadership is to get over something quickly, and help others get over something quickly to build a high bonding and cohesive state. To reach that desired state again, it’s very critical to understand grief. Leaders do not pay enough attention to grief. Organizations deny the massive amount of disappointment, frustrations and jealousies.
Grief follows a series of stages, not in sequence necessarily, but in a flow in which you go from denial to protest and anger, to sadness and missing, and to actual fear. That's the emotional part of grief. When you find people are angry, upset, depressed or filled with fear, they are in some form of grief. What is it? It can be a little thing blown out of proportion to something very serious like harassment. Then you go through the acceptance phase, on through to rationalization and the new attachment, then finally through forgiveness and gratitude.
Forgiveness is something we don't talk about very often as part of good leadership, but it’s another way to get over something. Quite often, a leader says, “Tell me what you think.” You say what you think, and he never forgives you. He'll hold it against you. Or you make a mistake and he can't get over something to be able to come back to the job.
Emotional intelligence involves empathy, but we cannot be empathetic if we can’t go through the grief process. This is what is often overlooked: the ability to feel compassion. Go through the process of whatever pain you have and then re-bond and reconnect."
Now you can easily incorporate lessons from Leadership: A Master Class into your trainings with new comprehensive, customizable materials. View a sample .pdf of the training guide here.
September 25, 2014
Daniel Goleman: The Valuable Data in Your Gut
The best business decisions take into account all the numbers and facts on the table, and then something from beyond the table: the brain’s total understanding of a deal.
This requires that we tune into brain circuitry that manages our entire life wisdom on the subject. The tricky part: none of this circuitry connects to the part of the brain that thinks in words. It connects largely to the gastrointestinal tract.
Specifically, we need to sense our gut feeling.
A study done at USC found that when highly successful entrepreneurs make decisions, they gather information as widely as possible, then check it against their gut sense. If it doesn’t feel right, they won’t go ahead, even if the numbers look good.
Gut sense is data, too. It tells us everything we can sense about a situation, such as whether a potential partner will be trustworthy. That’s crucial, but intangible information.
Malcom Gladwell made the argument for the importance of this kind of intuitive data in his book Blink.
In the emotional intelligence model, I talk about this in terms of self-awareness, the foundational ability of managing ourselves, tuning into others, and having effective relationships.
I’m often asked, “But how do you do this?”
One elegant method for fine-tuning our gut sense was developed by a philosopher at the University of Chicago, Eugene Gendlin. He calls it “focusing,” and it is a brilliant application of self-awareness. Gendlin was years ahead of the mindfulness movement that’s now sweeping through the business world. His method applies mindfulness of subtle sensations in the body, sensitizing us to the signals of our own gut sense.
Here’s a brief overview of Dr. Gendlin’s description of focusing from his website:
“The sensation in your body is called a ‘felt sense.’ It lies behind your thoughts and feelings. It is significant and full of meaning. Contacting the felt sense is the important first step of focusing.
Focusing is the ability to stay with the felt sense as it develops, to look at it with curiosity, without judging. Focusing is the ability to welcome what comes, to maintain a friendly attitude to whatever is inside you. Focusing is the ability to listen to that place that is trying to tell you something and to be ready to be surprised.
Focusing gives you a better capacity to confront difficult situations and find creative solutions.”
Read more about the six steps to focusing here.
Gendlin’s student, David Rome, has been teaching the method for years, and finally put it in a book so anyone can share this pathway to insight. If you want to know more, you can get a tutorial in Your Body Knows the Answer.
Or, even better, get a personal tutorial from Rome himself.
Additional resources:
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence
Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence
The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education
Illustration: Bryant Paul Johnson
September 21, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Starting a New Career? Consider Good Work
One reason Ebola has broken out so dangerously in countries like Sierra Leone traces to local customs that inadvertently spread the disease. One of these is the burial tradition where relatives kiss the deceased as a sign of respect.
But then a native health worker explained to locals why that was now a bad idea, and they came up with a neat solution: plant a banana tree with the deceased, and kiss the bananas instead of the person.
This works well within the set of local beliefs and eliminates one vector of the epidemic.
That brilliant insight was the result of methods that native health worker learned by being trained in ACT, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. I heard the story when I shared the stage with Steven Hayes, one of the therapy’s developers, at the Harvard Institute of Coaching conference.
Hayes mentioned the Ebola application only at the end of a presentation of his approach – but I thought it was the best part. This was, I told him, “good work,” a magical blend of doing what we do best, in alignment with our best values, in a way we enjoy.
Howard Gardner and his colleague define good work as a combination of the three Es: excellence, ethics, and engagement. When what we do becomes good work, we love what we do at every level: we feel competent, happy, and that our efforts have meaning.
I spoke with Howard a few years ago about good work as it relates to starting a career, or transitioning into a new one. He offered three solid tips to cultivate meaningful work prospects.
1. Decide what you really would like to spend your life doing. According to Howard, this is much more important than deciding what particular job to hold, as the employment landscape changes so quickly.
Let’s say you went into journalism with plans to work for a newspaper or magazine. Those outlets may not exist in their traditional forms now, but you still might want to write about interesting things. You want to investigate and talk to people. So you have to say “Where could I carry that out?” and be very, very flexible about the venue and the milieu, but not flexible about what you really get a kick out of and where you excel.
2. Think about people whom you admire and respect. Then think about people whom you don’t want to be like. Consider why you admire certain people and why you’re repelled by others. If you can’t think of people you admire, that’s a warning sign. It’s not necessarily a warning sign about you; it’s a warning sign about the culture around you. Perhaps you’re in a situation where you can’t admire anybody at all, or the people you admire don’t do anything related to what you do.
3. Consider where you want to work. Then ask yourself, “Is this the kind of place where I can see myself in others and where I can see others in me?” For example: Say you have job offers from both a small startup company you believe in, and a large corporation with a worrisome reputation for treating employees unfairly. You might make five times more money in the latter position, but does that reflect who you are and where you want to be?
If you’re a coach working with people in career transition, help them approach their search through the good work lens by asking them these three questions:
How much of what you do now is good work?
What could you do to boost that percentage?
How could you develop your career to maximize good work?
Learn more about Dr. Gardner's Good Work theory in my video series Leadership: A Master Class.
Additional Resources:
Good Work: Aligning Skills and Values
Talent Strategy with Claudio Fernández-Aráoz
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters
The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights
Illustration: Bryant Paul Johnson
September 10, 2014
Daniel Goleman: What are the Habits of a Systems Thinker?
Innate systems intelligence is present from our very early years. If nurtured, it can develop to surprising scope and depth in older students.
But the key to this progression is offering developmentally appropriate tools that enable students to articulate and hone their systems intelligence – whether through simple visual tools like a reinforcing feedback loop or software to build dynamic simulation models.
There is a natural interplay between tools and skills. As the old saying goes, “You need hammers to build houses but also to build carpenters.” Without usable tools, this innate systems intelligence lays fallow, much like our innate musical intelligence would if children were never given musical instruments.
Of course, it is actually worse because by the second or third grade, children would otherwise be immersed in the traditional academic process of separate, disconnected subjects and the pressure of performing on assignments given by the teacher, rather than understanding the challenges of real life.
Like all intelligence, systems intelligence must be developed or it will atrophy. So, it is little wonder that, for most children, there would be less and less evidence of this innate systems intelligence the further students go through traditional schooling.
This is why one of the major breakthroughs of the last twenty years is the development of a whole suite of these basic tools, created by innovative teachers across the pre-K-12 curriculum. Recently, educators have been recognizing tools for developing each habit. Here are some examples:
Habits of a Systems Thinker
Recognizes the importance of time delays when exploring cause and effect relationships
Finds where unintended consequences emerge
Changes perspectives to increase understanding
Identifies the circular nature of complex cause and effect relationships
Recognizes that a system’s structure generates its behavior
Uses understanding of system structure to identify higher leverage actions
Surfaces and tests assumptions
Checks results and changes actions if needed: successive approximation
Seeks to understand the big picture
The habits of a systems thinker are helping educators bring a coherent overall framework to a field that has had many pioneers in various school settings. We are now witnessing that seeing the big picture, identifying circles of causality, understanding how the structure of a system produces its behavior, and recognizing the benefits of looking at problems from different perspectives can help educators focus on deeper thinking skills across virtually all curricula and ages.
My new book with Peter Senge – The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education is now available. You can download the ebook here.
For additional information and resources about the Habits of a Systems Thinker, visit Systems Thinking in Schools, Waters Foundation: www.watersfoundation.org.
Additional Resources:
Rethinking Education: Educating Hearts and Minds
Bridging the Hearts and Minds of Youth
Illustration: Bryant Johnson
September 2, 2014
Daniel Goleman: How to Hear Your Inner Voice
After being diagnosed with the liver cancer that was to take his life a few years later, Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” But how do you hear “your inner voice,” that your heart and intuition somehow already know?
You need to depend on your body’s signals.
Monitoring of our internal organs is done by the insula, tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. The insula maps our body’s insides via circuitry linking to our gut, heart, liver, lungs—every organ has its specific spot. This lets the insula act as a control center for organ functions, sending signals to the heart to slow its beat, the lungs to take a deeper breath.
Attention turned inward toward any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to the particular area. Tune in to your heartbeat and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeat, in fact, has become a standard way to measure their self-awareness. The better people are at this, the bigger their insula.
The insula attunes us to more than just our organs; our very sense of how we are feeling depends on it. People who are oblivious to their own emotions (and also, tellingly, to how other people feel) have sluggish insula activity compared with the high activation found in people highly attuned to their inner emotional life. At the tuned-out extreme are those with alexithymia, who just don’t know what they feel, and can’t imagine what someone else might be feeling.
Listen to your gut
Our “gut feelings” are messages from the insula and other bottom-up circuits that simplify life decisions for us by guiding our attention toward smarter options. The better we are at reading these messages, the better our intuition.
Take that tug you might sometimes feel when you suspect you’re forgetting something important just as you’re leaving on a big trip. A marathon runner tells me of a time she was on her way to a race four hundred miles away. She felt that tug—and ignored it. But as she continued on down the freeway, it kept coming back. Then she realized what was tugging at her: she had forgotten her shoes!
A stop at a mall that was just about to close saved the day. But her new shoes were a different brand from the ones she normally wore. As she told me, “I have never been more sore!”
Somatic marker
Somatic marker is neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s term for the sensation in our body that tells us when a choice feels wrong or right. This bottom-up circuitry telegraphs its conclusions through our gut feelings, often long before the top-down circuits come to a more reasoned conclusion.
The ventromedial prefrontal area, a key part of this circuitry, guides our decision making when we face life’s most complex decisions, like who to marry or whether to buy a house. Such choices can’t be made by a cold, rational analysis. Instead we do better to simulate what it would feel like to choose A versus B. This brain area operates as that inner rudder.
There are two major streams of self-awareness: “me,” which builds narratives about our past and future; and “I,” which brings us into the immediate present. The “me” links together what we experience across time. The “I,” in stark contrast, exists only in the raw experience of our immediate moment.
The “I,” our most intimate sense of our self, reflects the piecemeal sum of our sensory impressions—particularly our body states. “I” builds from our brain’s system for mapping the body via the insula.
Such internal signals are our inner guides, helping us at many levels, from living a life in keeping with our guiding values to remembering our running shoes.
As a veteran performer at Cirque du Soleil told me, for their grueling routines performers strive for what she called “perfect practice,” where the laws of physical motion and rules of biomechanics come together with timing, angles, and speed, so you get “more perfect more of the time—you’re never perfect all of the time.”
And how do the performers know when they’re nearing perfection? “It’s the feeling. You know it in your joints before you know it in your head.”
Additional resources:
American Management Association's course Developing Your Emotional Intelligence (onsite or online)
Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence: To answer the call for practical techniques to increase focus, Dr. Goleman created a series of guided exercises to help people of all ages hone their concentration, stay calm and better manage emotions.
The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education: Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge provide educators with a rationale for incorporating three core skill sets in the classroom—understanding self, other, and the larger systems within which we operate—and show why these competencies are needed to help students navigate a fast-paced world of increasing distraction and growing interconnectedness.
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters: A compilation of my Harvard Business Review articles and other business journal writings in one volume. This often-cited, proven-effective material has become essential reading for leaders, coaches and educators committed to fostering stellar management, increasing performance, and driving innovation.
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence: This master class by Richard Boyatzis (co-author of Primal Leadership and Chair of Organizational Development at the Weatherhead School of Management) offers you the tools to become the leader you want to be—including exercises to reassess valuable and effective techniques.
Leadership: A Master Class: The eight-part video collection includes more than eight hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, organizational research, workplace psychology, negotiation and senior hiring. Corporate and educational licensing available.
Photo: robodread/Shutterstock.com
August 10, 2014
Daniel Goleman: The Case for Teaching Emotional Literacy in Schools
Self-Awareness Training
The children coming into their second grade classroom that morning arranged their chairs in a circle for a daily ritual: Their teacher asked every child to tell the class how they felt (unless they didn’t want to share this), and why they felt that way.
This simple exercise in a New Haven, CT elementary school was the first time I saw a lesson in emotional literacy.
Naming emotions accurately helps children be clearer about what is going on inside – essential both to making clearheaded decisions and to managing emotions throughout life.
Self-awareness – turning our attention to our inner world of thoughts and feelings – allows us to manage ourselves well. An inner focus lets us understand and handle our inner world, even when rocked by disturbing feelings. This is a life skill that keeps us on track throughout the years, and helps children become better learners.
For instance, when children tune in to what engages them, they connect with the intrinsic motivation that drives them. If a child is just following the teacher’s goals for what she should learn and not thinking much about her own goals, she can develop an attitude that school is all about other people’s agendas – and fail to tap her inner reservoir of motivation and engagement. On the other hand, attuned teachers can use students’ interests to excite them.
Self-awareness also has an ethical dimension. As we go through life, the sense that we are on course with our values becomes an inner rudder. In our life and career this can blossom into “good work” – a potent combination of what engages us, what matters to us, and what we can accomplish successfully.
In the school years, the equivalent is “good learning” – being engaged with what enthuses us and what feels important.
How It Works
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to continually grow and shape itself through repeated experiences, throughout life and particularly in childhood. The brain is the last organ of the body to become anatomically mature; it doesn't take its final shape till the mid-20s. Particularly during our early years, our experience – and the neural networks this activates – either strengthens this circuitry or winnows it.
For example, studies show that our minds wander about 50% of the time on average. At Emory University, volunteers were told to focus on one target – and of course after a while it would, of course, wander off.[i] But the volunteers would notice when it wandered, a moment of “meta-awareness,” and bring it back.
In this exercise, every time your mind wanders and you notice it has wandered, you re-focus on the target. In theory, each time you bring it back, it’s like a repetition of a triceps curl – but in the mental gym you're strengthening the circuitry for focusing, for salience, for ignoring distractions.
Such neuroplasticity in action presumably happens with all of the circuitry for social and emotional learning. The circuits for empathy and for managing yourself internally develop and grow throughout the childhood and teen years, and they can be cultivated so they develop along the best lines. That, from the perspective of brain science, is what SEL aims to do.
The ability to be mindful of impulse, to stay focused and ignore distractions, can be enhanced by the right lessons. This is especially important for doing well in school. The brain’s centers for learning operate at their peak when we are focused and calm. As we become upset, these centers work less well. In the grip of extreme agitation, we can only focus on what’s upsetting us – and learning shuts down. For these reasons, students learn best when they’re calm and concentrated.
Learn more about cultivating these abilities in the classroom with my new book with Peter Senge – The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education.You can download the ebook here.
Additional Focus-related resources:
Focus for Kids: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm
Focus for Teens: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm
Focus posters for the classroom
Additional reading:
[i] Wendy Hasenkamp et al., “Mind Wandering and Attention During Focused Meditation,” NeuroImage 59, no. 1 (2012): 750-760. The study found that the longer volunteers had been practitioners of mental exercises like this, the greater the connectivity in key attention circuitry.
Image: Bryant Johnson
August 5, 2014
Daniel Goleman: It’s Not IQ Part 2: Use the Triple Focus Approach to Education
Don’t tell the kids – or maybe we should.
There’s no doubt that IQ and motivation predict good grades. But when you enter the working world, IQ plays a different role: it sorts people into the jobs they can hold. Stellar work in school pays off in getting intellectually challenging jobs.
But once you are in a given job – say a manager – you are competing with people as smart as you. That’s when IQ loses its power to predict success, which starts to depend more on “non-cognitive” factors like persistence in pursuing your goals or social intelligence.
That paradox about IQ and success came as a revelation to me when I started to examine competence models, the studies done by companies themselves to identify the abilities that set their star performers apart from the average ones. Purely cognitive skills, like IQ or mastery of programming, say, matter less and less for outstanding performance the higher you go in the organization.
The take-home from competence models for K-12 education is a bit surprising: academic abilities, including expertise in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects, are “threshold” competencies, which help you qualify and keep a given job.
Why? Once you are in a job, most everyone at your level has more or less the same cognitive power. But some may be more confident, more disciplined, more empathic, more socially adept (e.g., a persuasive team member) or all of these. Those are the kinds of competencies that organizations find distinguish star performers from average.
So let’s reverse engineer competence models to see what we should be including in education for our kids. All the academic subjects stay: these are the baseline abilities everyone needs. But in addition, there are three major abilities kids need for success at work and in life.
Think of it as the Triple Focus.
1. Focus on yourself. This means self-awareness, which shows up on competence models in such abilities as realistic confidence, and self-management: staying cool under pressure, striving toward your goals despite setbacks, and self-motivation, among others.
The underlying neural ability here is “cognitive control,” which a 30-plus year follow up of school kids found predicted their adult financial success better than did their IQ or their parents’ socioeconomic standing.
2. Focus on others. This talent for empathy, communication, persuasion, and teamwork is crucial to the competencies of star performers.
3. Focus on systems. This allows understanding the dynamics of an organization, an economy, an industry or technology – and lets leaders come up with a vision. Kids also love to learn how the systems lens applies to their own interactions and to their families and schools.
So why don’t we teach kids the skills they will need to thrive in life?
Learn more about cultivating these abilities in the classroom with my new book with Peter Senge – The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education.You can download the ebook here.
You can also listen to my conversation with Peter about adopting systems thinking into your organization in Leading the Necessary Revolution.
Additional Focus-related resources:
Focus for Kids: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm
Focus for Teens: Enhancing Concentration, Caring and Calm
Focus posters for the classroom
Image: Bryant Paul Johnson
July 23, 2014
Daniel Goleman: How to Hire the Right Candidate
In response to last week’s article, “What Predicts Success? It’s Not Your IQ,” a commenter asked: “How can we better gauge emotional intelligence competencies while interviewing potential candidates?”
Who better to answer this question than my colleague and Leadership: A Master Class participant, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz. According to Claudio, the interview process should be the same whether you’re evaluating an external candidate for an open position or a colleague keen for promotion. You need to use the right assessment techniques and involve the right number of highly qualified and properly motivated interviewers.
What are the right assessment techniques?
Solid assessments require a combination of well-structured behavioral interviews and proper reference checks. Find out whether the person has previously demonstrated the behaviors you are looking for in similar settings in the past.
For instance, if a leader will need to strongly influence others not under his direct control, ask questions like:
- Have you ever been in a situation where you had to influence others who were not under your direct control?
- What was the situation?
- What was your exact role?
- What were the circumstances?
- What did you do exactly?
- How did you do it?
- What were the consequences?
Conduct thorough reference checks following the same line of questioning. Carefully decide who to call depending on what information you need. For example, former bosses will have more insight into a candidate’s strategic or results orientation, while peers are best for gauging influence, and subordinates for assessing leadership.
Who are the best assessors?
They are not “naturals,” but individuals who have been properly schooled in assessment. Educational institutions and organizations often leave people woefully unprepared. In a recent survey of executives attending a Harvard Business School program on talent management, 75% reported that they had not received assessment training.
The results of such neglect can be dramatic. Research has shown that, while the best professional interviewers have a “validity” (correlation between assessment and performance) of .7, the worst have slightly negative validity, being in fact worse than flipping a coin. As a leader, it’s your job to educate yourself and those around you on the best practices, since making good people decisions is not an art, but a craft that we all can learn.
Amazon has, for example, hundreds of dedicated internal recruiters, great training programs in assessment, and even a legion of certified “bar raisers,” skilled evaluators who hold full-time jobs in a range of departments but are also empowered to participate in assessing – and vetoing – candidates for other areas.
How many people should assess a candidate?
Say you aim to hire only people whose performance puts them in the top 10% of your candidate pool. Even if you were 90% accurate in your assessments (and nobody is that good), you would end up hiring the wrong people 50% of the times.
If, however, you add a second interviewer to assess only those candidates you had independently approved, your collective error rate would drop to 10%, while a third filter would bring it down to just 1%. Stop there! Because while adding successive filters reduces your risk of picking the wrong leader, the more filters you add, the greater your chances of making a “type II error” – not hiring the right candidate for the wrong reason.
How can you motivate yourself and your team to pick the best?
Amid our daily urgencies, the hard work of careful assessment often falls by the wayside. We fall back into trusting our guts (which really means our unconscious biases toward the similar, familiar, and comfortable.) Remember that managers should focus on measurable metrics, and give everyone incentives to make better people decisions. Systematically review your organization’s key hires and promotions to evaluate the judgment of those involved in the process. This will help you not only encourage good assessments but also confirm who among you are the best assessors, stay engaged with the hired candidates and, if necessary, give you the impetus to undo a bad appointment.
As Capital One’s CEO Richard Fairbank put it several years ago, “At most companies, people spend 2% of their time recruiting, and 75% managing their recruiting mistakes.” A small investment in learning how to better pick your candidates now will bring you huge personal and organizational dividends in the future.
Claudio’s latest book It's Not the How or the What but the Who - Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best is available now. You can also watch my conversation with him about talent strategy here.
Additional resources:
American Management Association's course Developing Your Emotional Intelligence (onsite or online throughout the summer)
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters: A compilation of my Harvard Business Review articles and other business journal writings in one volume. This often-cited, proven-effective material has become essential reading for leaders, coaches and educators committed to fostering stellar management, increasing performance, and driving innovation.
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence: This master class by Richard Boyatzis (co-author of Primal Leadership and Chair of Organizational Development at the Weatherhead School of Management) offers you the tools to become the leader you want to be—including exercises to reassess valuable and effective techniques.
Leadership: A Master Class: The eight-part video collection includes more than eight hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, organizational research, workplace psychology, negotiation and senior hiring. Corporate and educational licensing available.
Photo: creative commons licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by quinn.anya
Additional reading:
Eight Must-Have Competencies for Future Leaders
Leader Spotting: The Four Essential Traits
July 17, 2014
Daniel Goleman: What Predicts Success? It's Not Your IQ
The CEO of one of the world’s largest money management firms was puzzled. He wanted to know why there was a Bell curve for performance among his employees, with a few outstanding, most in the middle, and a few poor. After all, he hired only the best and brightest graduates from the top schools – shouldn’t they all be outstanding?
That same puzzle was explored in Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller David and Goliath, which I recently read. Malcolm was befuddled by the finding that many of those in the mid to low achievement spectrum of Ivy League schools did not turn out to be world leaders – despite their SAT scores being higher than even the best students at the so-so colleges, who fared better.
Gladwell and that CEO share a certain muddle in their reasoning: they assumed that academic abilities should predict how well we do in life. They don’t.
Gladwell proposes that the relatively poor performance of students who scored average grades at highly competitive schools suffer from a learned low self-confidence from being small fish in a big pond. That may be part of the picture, but there’s much more to it.
Studies at the University of Pennsylvania have found that students who don't have the highest IQs in their class but get high grades share an attitude called “grit.” They keep plugging away despite any setbacks or failures.
And a 30-year longitudinal study of more than a thousand kids – the gold standard for uncovering relationships between behavioral variables – found that those children with the best cognitive control had the greatest financial success in their 30s. Cognitive control predicted success better than a child’s IQ, and better than the wealth of the family they grew up in.
Cognitive control refers to the abilities to delay gratification in pursuit of your goals, maintaining impulse control, managing upsetting emotions well, holding focus, and possessing a readiness to learn. Grit requires good cognitive control. No wonder this results in financial and personal success.
To further understand what attributes actually predict success, a more satisfying answer lies in another kind of data altogether: competence models. These are studies done by companies themselves to identify the abilities of their star performers. Competence models pinpoint a constellation of abilities that include grit and cognitive control, but go beyond. The abilities that set stars apart from average at work cover the emotional intelligence spectrum: self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social effectiveness.
Both grit and cognitive control exemplify self-management, a key part of emotional intelligence. IQ and technical skills matter, of course: they are crucial threshold abilities, what you need to get the job done. But everyone you compete with at work has those same skill sets.
It’s the distinguishing competencies that are the crucial factor in workplace success: the variables that you find only in the star performers – and those are largely due to emotional intelligence.
These human skills include, for instance, confidence, striving for goals despite setbacks, staying cool under pressure, harmony and collaboration, persuasion and influence. Those are the competencies companies use to identify their star performers about twice as often as do purely cognitive skills (IQ or technical abilities) for jobs of all kinds.
The higher you go up the ladder, the more emotional intelligence matters: for top leadership positions they are about 80 to 90 percent of distinguishing competences.
That’s why I’ve argued we should be teaching these life skills to every student. It’s your expertise and intelligence that get you the job – but your emotional intelligence that makes you a success.
You can learn more about developing skills for future leaders in my new book with Peter Senge, The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education, available for pre-order here.
Additional resources:
American Management Association's course Developing Your Emotional Intelligence (onsite or online throughout the summer)
What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters: A compilation of my Harvard Business Review articles and other business journal writings in one volume. This often-cited, proven-effective material has become essential reading for leaders, coaches and educators committed to fostering stellar management, increasing performance, and driving innovation.
Resonant Leadership: Inspiring Others Through Emotional Intelligence: This master class by Richard Boyatzis (co-author of Primal Leadership and Chair of Organizational Development at the Weatherhead School of Management) offers you the tools to become the leader you want to be—including exercises to reassess valuable and effective techniques.
Leadership: A Master Class: The eight-part video collection includes more than eight hours of research findings, case studies and valuable industry expertise through in-depth interviews with respected leaders in executive management, organizational research, workplace psychology, negotiation and senior hiring. Corporate and educational licensing available.
Photo: Cvijun / shutterstock
