Daniel Goleman's Blog, page 11
July 9, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Know Your Stress Type
NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health conducted a nationwide poll in March and early April to find common sources of stress.
They surveyed more than 2,500 adults across the US, finding that the usual culprits topped the list: too many responsibilities, finances, and work issues. Personal health difficulties, as well as health problems in the family were also commonly cited.
One aspect of the study that caught my attention was how stress affects people's behavior, particularly in areas that can negatively impact health. People who reported a great deal of stress in the previous month cited difficulty sleeping. Eating less and exercising less were also common changes.
Stress hits each of us differently. Some of us feel it in our bodies. Others just can't stop worrying. Knowing how you experience stress can help you find the most effective methods to relax.
Back when I was doing research at Harvard, we called the kind of stress that expresses itself in the body “somatic,” for example, getting butterflies in your stomach, indigestion, a racing heart, or the jitters.
But some people are prone to experiencing their stress mentally. Worrisome thoughts that keep you up at night or that continually intrude into your focus during the day are defined as “cognitive” stress.
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School used the scale for cognitive and somatic anxiety that we devised at Harvard to sort patients who were being taught a variety of stress-fighting methods, including mindfulness meditation and yoga. The bottom line: there is no single best way to get there – each of us has our own path. Not everyone will benefit from a body-focused relaxer like yoga, just as meditation may not be the most effective way to fight stress for every person.
But finding a technique to help you relax is worth the effort. When we calm down from stress, we are shifting our nervous system from physiological arousal to the relaxation and recovery state known as parasympathetic activity. In this state, our minds are more open and clear, our heart rate slows, blood pressure lowers, and our muscles release tension.
Two tips on practicing relaxation techniques:
1. Shop around at first to find a method that you enjoy. You don't have to take a psychological test to find out which method will work best for you. Make the match through simple trial and error. After all, you are the final judge of what will help you.
2. Practice every day. Find a time in your daily routine that you can set aside just for this – whether during your drive to work or during personal quiet time first thing in the morning. If you develop a strong daily practice, you'll be able to call on it to help you calm down when you need to the most – right after those hassles that get you so tense in the first place.
The results may be subtle at first. You might find, for instance, you're no longer waking up at 4 a.m. obsessing about that rude person, or that you aren't yelling at the kids when they dawdle getting ready in the morning. It's harder to notice problems that don't happen than ones that do – but that's not such a bad thing.
I developed the CD Relax: 6 Techniques to Lower Your Stress to suit a variety of personal preferences. You're welcome to listen to sample guided exercises here and here. You can also watch my interview with LeadersIn on ways to manage a frazzled state.
Additional resources:
Be Mindful of the Emotions You Leave Behind
Don't Get Mad: Get Even-Keeled
Bringing Focus to People Problems
Understanding the Science of Moods at Work
Photo: Ollyy / shutterstock
July 1, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Eight Must-Have Competencies for Future Leaders
Leaders tomorrow will succeed with a different skill set than that of today’s best. Smart leaders will spot the mid-career folks with greatest potential to become those outstanding future executives. And wise organizations will make this a high priority mission.
But what will tomorrow’s leadership take?
In the June Harvard Business Review hiring guru Claudio Fernández-Aráoz says to spot those with high leadership potential look for four abilities: Openness and curiosity; recognition of new possibilities; persuasion and an unstoppable drive.
But those are not enough. While leaders tomorrow will need these capacities to adapt to a turbulent world, the fundamentals of leadership will not change. The reason: leadership relies on mobilizing human skills. Always has. Always will.
The distinguishing competencies – the ones that set star leaders apart from mediocre – are:
Strategic Orientation – being able to think analytically and come up with a strategy.
Market insight – understanding the market and the business.
Results Orientation – the drive to achieve results through constant improvement as assessed by sound metrics.
Customer Impact – passion for pleasing customers and clients.
Collaboration and influence – working well with others, including influencing those not in one’s line of command.
Organizational Development – developing strengths for the company by recruiting, retaining, and developing future leaders.
Team Leadership – Building winning groups.
Transformation Leadership – leading the way toward new goals.
The last six of these competencies fall into the emotional intelligence category – without the basics of self-mastery and relationship skills, a leader will flounder at them. They are quite familiar to me – for example, the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI), which I co-developed with Richard Boyatzis and Hay Group, available through certified coaches, assesses these leadership capacities in order to help executives and their coaches target how to develop further strengths.
But how do you spot these when you are hiring? Claudio recommends intensive interviews and thorough reference checks – preferably with people who know the candidate well and who are willing to be honest about whether they have displayed these abilities in their past posts.
Additional resources to develop emotionally intelligent management skills:
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:Valery Bareta / shutterstock
June 24, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Leader Spotting: The Four Essential Talents
What do you look for in tomorrow’s leaders? That question is crucial for the long-term health of any organization.
The only certainty about tomorrow’s business reality is that it will be “VUCA”: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. As the world changes, so do the abilities leaders will need. Yet there is a specific skill set that will match the demands of such a reality.
The hallmarks of these potential leaders are pinpointed by my friend and colleague, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz in “21 Century Talent Spotting,” the cover article of this month’s Harvard Business Review. Claudio, formerly director of research at the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International, has become the global guru on hiring, so his wisdom is all the more welcome.
What makes leaders successful today may not work so well in the future. So it’s not just the right skills, but the ability to master new ones that will count. High potentials, he finds, need:
Motivation – in particular, beyond ambition for themselves, embracing greater goals and putting in the time and work to continually improve their own performance. Selfishness does not cut it.
Curiosity – openness to new experiences and information, and an eagerness for feedback on how they are doing – including their own strengths and areas to improve. This requires openness to changes and to learning.
Engagement – leadership by spreading enthusiasm for a persuasive vision, the ability to connect with people emotionally and logically, and a passion for what they do.
Determination – being able to battle towards difficult goals, take on tough challenges, and recover quickly from setbacks.
These are the abilities that organizations need to spot today in those who will be candidates for leadership in the future. And companies will have to retain such high potential candidates, as well as build development methods that help them get even better.
Three forces, he says, will put a premium on future high potentials. Globalization means that companies will be competing for talent with others beyond their usual territory. A demographic shift signals a talent shortage: there are fewer 35-44 year-olds than the 50 and 60-somethings they will be replacing. Finally, companies have not put a premium on cultivating future leaders, and will have to upgrade their capabilities to keep and groom.
These are by no means new competencies – each has been around since companies began analyzing what talents set their star performers apart from average ones. I remember a study of highly successful entrepreneur done some years ago at the University of Southern California that showed curiosity – spreading a wide net in gathering information – was typical.
And even in the 1970s at Harvard was teaching would-be entrepreneurs (some in countries like India and Ethiopia) how to set smart goals, get continuous feedback on their performance, and find ways to improve.
Still, Claudio’s research puts new value on these four in the near future, as signifying a mid-career employee has the potential to rise to a leadership role and excel at it.
But there’s more. These alone are insufficient for outstanding leadership. Tune in to my next blog for eight more essential leadership abilities.
You can also stream my hour-long discussion about talent strategy with Claudio here.
Additional resources to develop emotionally intelligent management skills:
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: Ismagilov / shutterstock
June 19, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Be Mindful of the Emotions You Leave Behind
Whenever a meeting threatened to lapse into malaise, the president of a company would suddenly launch into a critique of someone at the table who could take it (usually the marketing director, who was his best friend). Then he would swiftly move on, having riveted the attention of everyone in the room. That tactic invariably revived the group’s failing focus with keen interest. He was herding those in attendance from boredom to engagement.
Displays of a leader’s displeasure make use of emotional contagion. If artfully calibrated, even a burst of pique can stir followers enough to capture their attention and motivate them. Many effective leaders sense that – like compliments – well-titrated doses of irritation can energize. The measure of how well calibrated a message of displeasure might be is whether it moves people toward their performance peak or plummets them past the tipping point into the zone where distress corrodes performance.
Not all emotional partners are equal. A power dynamic operates in emotional contagion, determining which person’s brain will more forcefully draw the other into its emotional orbit. Mirror neurons are leadership tools: Emotions flow with special strength from the more socially dominant person to the less.
One reason is that people in any group naturally pay more attention to and place more significance on what the most powerful person in that group says and does. That amplifies the force of whatever emotional message the leader may be sending, making her emotions particularly contagious. As I heard the head of a small organization say rather ruefully, “When my mind is full of anger, other people catch it like the flu.”
This emotional potency was tested when fifty-six heads of simulated work teams were themselves moved into a good or bad mood, and their subsequent emotional impact on the groups they led was assessed. Team members with upbeat leaders reported that they coordinated their work better, getting more done with less effort. On the other hand, the teams with grumpy bosses were thrown out of synch, making them inefficient. Worse, their panicked efforts to please the leader led to bad decisions and poorly chosen strategies.
While a boss’s artfully couched displeasure can be an effective goad, fuming is self-defeating as a leadership tactic. When leaders habitually use displays of bad moods to motivate, more work may seem to get done – but it will not necessarily be better work. And relentlessly foul moods corrode the emotional climate, sabotaging the brain’s ability to work at its best.
In this sense, leadership boils down to a series of social exchanges in which the leader can drive the other person’s emotions into a better or worse state. In high-quality exchanges, the team member feels the leader’s attention and empathy, support, and positivity. In low-quality interactions, he feels isolated and threatened.
Another powerful reason for leaders to be mindful of what they say to employees: people recall negative interactions with a boss with more intensity, in more detail, and more often than they do positive ones. The ease with which demotivation can be spread by a boss makes it all the more imperative for him to act in ways that make the emotions left behind uplifting ones.
Callousness from a boss not only heightens the risk of losing good people, it torpedoes cognitive efficiency. A socially intelligent leader helps people contain and recover from their emotional distress. If only from a business perspective, a leader would do well to react with empathy rather than indifference – and to act on it.
To learn more about superlative workplace communication and conflict resolution, register for the American Management Association course Leading with Emotional Intelligence (onsite or online throughout the summer).
Additional resources to develop emotionally intelligent management skills:
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.
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.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence: Focus uncovers the science of attention in all its varieties – presenting a groundbreaking look at this overlooked and underrated asset, and why it matters enormously for how we feel, and succeed, in life.
Photo: / shutterstock
June 9, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Teach the Key Ingredients for Leadership Success
There’s a major disconnect between what companies look for in their top performers and best leaders, and what students learn in school. Why don’t we better align these skill sets?
For instance, among educators there is lots of talk these days about “grit”: the tenacity to focus on working toward a goal despite obstacles and setbacks. It’s been found crucial in many ways – for instance in determining whether disadvantaged kids finish high school. That’s well and good.
But don’t think grit will make you an effective leader. Of course leaders need to be motivated – everyone does. But that’s not what makes them high-performing leaders.
Such self-motivation can help make you an outstanding individual performer – an accountant, say, or a programmer. But leadership requires an additional skill set: social intelligence.
In my model of emotional intelligence, grit falls under self-management, one of four essential leadership skills. The others are self-awareness – which is the basis for managing yourself – and empathy plus social skills.
A chronic complaint among companies who promote individuals to a leadership position who are excellent performers on their own is this: if they lack social intelligence, they will fail as leaders.
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a world expert on hiring, did a study of C-level leaders who were fired. The conclusion: they were hired for their intelligence and business expertise, but fired for weakness in emotional intelligence – usually the social variety.
“The best worker on the shop room floor can fail as a foreman for lack of social intelligence,” is how Edward Thorndike, the psychologist who first developed the concept, put it.
When I looked at competence studies done by companies to identify the skill sets of their outstanding performers – what sets top leaders apart from average – the vast majority fell in the emotional intelligence category.
With a fresh crop of college grads heading into a tight job market, I wish they had had help in developing their emotional intelligence skills during their studies. But with a very few exceptions colleges ignore this crucial skill set for success. Students acquire these abilities on their own time, and rather randomly, depending on happenstance.
As a trustee at MIT told me, when they did a study of the grads who had given the school the largest donations, the conclusion was that these had not been the top-of-the-class whizzes while in college. Instead they were good enough students (after all, they had gotten into MIT), but with strong side interests: often president of a club or sports team. Many had already showed entrepreneurial promise by starting their own small businesses on the side.
There are many successful programs on emotional intelligence for grade levels kindergarten through high school. These fall under the umbrella of “social and emotional learning.” One meta-analysis of more than 270,000 students showed that the courses boost pro-social behavior – e.g., behaving well in class – while lowering antisocial ones like bullying. Bonus: students’ achievement test scores jumped 11 percent.
Maybe it’s time to help all students at all levels get better at these life – and leadership – skills.
Additional Resources:
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.
The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights: Over the last decade and a half there has been a steady stream of new insights that further illuminate the dynamics of emotional intelligence. I explain what we now know about the brain basis of emotional intelligence, in clear and simple terms. This book will deepen your understanding of emotional intelligence and enhance your ability for its application.
Talent Strategy: Claudio Fernández-Aráoz explains the world-class best practices for senior hiring, executive searches, interviewing, committee searches, and EI testing.
Additional Reading:
Strategies to Enhance Focus at School, Work and Home
Photo: Brian A Jackson / shutterstock
June 5, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Don't Get Mad: Get Even-Keeled
Emotional fluctuations we experience in intimate relationships can often take similar form in the workplace. Criticisms are communicated as personal attacks, rather than concerns to be addressed. Daily irritations fuel disgust, sarcasm, and contempt. These situations result in defensiveness, dodging of responsibility, and a passive resistance that comes from feeling unfairly treated.
A common mistake we see in workplace communication is a generalized statement about someone’s work, such as, “You’re screwing up.” This leaves the recipient feeling helpless, angry, and underappreciated for the various tasks she’s completing successfully. And from the vantage point of emotional intelligence, this statement displays gross ignorance of the feelings it will trigger, and the devastating effect those feelings will have on a person’s motivation, energy, and confidence.
In a survey of managers asked to think back to times they blew up at employees, many recalled making personal attacks in the heat of the moment. The employees who received these reacted most often by becoming defensive, making excuses, or evading responsibility. They then avoided contact with the offending manager. The managers were only further dissatisfied, setting off a cycle that, in the business world, usually ends in the employee quitting or being fired.
J.R. Larson, a University of Illinois at Urbana psychologist, elaborates on this:
Most problems in an employee’s performance are not sudden; they develop slowly over time. When the boss fails to let his feelings be known promptly, it leads to his frustration building up slowly. Then, one day, he blows up about it. If the criticism had been given earlier on, the employee would have been able to correct the problem. Too often people criticize only when things boil over. That’s when they give the criticism in the worst way, in a tone of biting sarcasm, calling to mind a long list of grievances they had kept to themselves. Such attacks backfire. They are received as an affront, so the recipient becomes angry in return. It’s the worst way to motivate someone.’’
Harry Levinson, a psychoanalyst turned corporate consultant, offers the following advice on the art of the critique, which is heavily connected to the art of praise:
• Be specific. Pick an event that illustrates a key problem or pattern of deficiency, such as the inability to do certain parts of a job well. Focus on what the person did well, then be very clear about what was done poorly and how it could be changed. “Specificity,” Levinson points out, “is just as important for praise as for criticism. I won’t say that vague praise has no effect at all, but it doesn’t have much, and you can’t learn from it.”
• Offer a solution. The critique, like all useful feedback, should point to a way to fix the problem. It demoralizes people just to hear that they are acting unsatisfactorily without understanding how to improve. This critique should open the door to possibilities that the person did not realize were there, or sensitize her to deficiencies that need attention, but also requires suggestions about how to take care of these problems.
• Be present. Critiques, like praise, are most effective face-to-face and in private. People who are uncomfortable giving criticism – or offering praise – are likely to ease the burden on themselves by doing it at a distance, such as in a memo. But this makes the communication too impersonal, and robs the person receiving it of an opportunity for a response or clarification.
• Be sensitive. This is a call for empathy. Pay close attention to how you deliver the critique. Tune in to the impact of what you say on the person on the receiving end. Managers who have little empathy, Levinson points out, are most prone to giving feedback in a hurtful fashion. The net effect of such criticism is destructive: instead of resulting in corrective action, this callousness creates an emotional backlash of resentment, bitterness, defensiveness, and distance.
Levinson also offers some emotional counsel for those at the receiving end of criticism:
Regard the criticism as valuable information about your work, not as a personal attack.
Be wary of the impulse toward defensiveness instead of taking responsibility.
If the conversation becomes too upsetting, ask to resume the meeting later, after a period to absorb the difficult message and cool down a bit.
Take this as an opportunity to work with the critic to solve the problem.
To learn more about superlative workplace communication and conflict resolution, register for my American Management Association course Leading with Emotional Intelligence (onsite or online throughout the summer).
Additional resources to develop emotionally intelligent management skills:
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.
The HR and EI Collection: The combination of books and audio tools offers actionable findings on how leaders can foster group flow to maximize innovation, drive, and motivation to deliver bottom-line results.
Supplemental reading:
Getting Sophisticated About Emotional Intelligence
Bringing Focus to People Problems
How to Overcome a Survival Mode Culture
Photo: Everett Collection / shutterstock
May 28, 2014
Daniel Goleman: The Power of Positive Planning
If everything worked out perfectly in your life, what would you be doing in ten years?
That query invites us to consider what really matters to us, and how that might guide our lives. Pursuing this simple exercise encourages openness to new possibilities.
“Talking about your positive goals activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities. But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve.
His research has explored these contrasting effects in coaching. Boyatzis and colleagues scanned the brains of college students being interviewed. For some, the interview focused on positives: what they’d love to be doing in ten years, and what they hoped to gain from their college years. The brain scans revealed that during the positively focused interviews there was greater activity in the brain’s reward circuitry and areas for good feeling and happy memories. Think of this as a neural signature of the openness we feel when we are inspired by a vision.
For others the focus was more negative: how demanding they found their schedule and their assignments, difficulties making friends and fears about their performance. As the students wrestled with the more negative questions, their brains activated areas that generated anxiety, mental conflict, sadness.
A focus on our strengths, Boyatzis argues, urges us toward a desired future, and stimulates openness to new ideas, people, and plans. In contrast, spotlighting our weaknesses elicits a defensive sense of obligation and guilt, closing us down.
A positive lens keeps the joy in practice and learning – the reason even the most seasoned athletes and performers still enjoy practicing their craft. “You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive,” says Boyatzis.
Boyatzis makes the case that this positivity also applies to coaching – whether by a teacher, parent, boss, or an executive coach. A conversation that starts with a person’s hopes can result in a joyful learning exchange, one that supports that vision. This conversation might extract some concrete goals from the general vision, assess what it would take to accomplish those goals, and determine what capacities we need to improve to get there.
To get data on how well this works, Boyatzis does systematic ratings of those going through his course. Co-workers anonymously rate the students on a dozen specific behaviors that display one or more of the emotional intelligence competencies typical of high-performers (for example: “Understands others by listening attentively.”). Then Boyatzis tracks the students down years later, and has them rated again by those who now work with them.
“By now we’ve done 26 separate longitudinal studies,” Boyatzis tells me. “We’ve found that the improvements students make in their first round hold up as long as seven years later.”
Additional resources:
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.
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.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence: Focus uncovers the science of attention in all its varieties – presenting a groundbreaking look at this overlooked and underrated asset, and why it matters enormously for how we feel, and succeed, in life.
Supplemental reading:
Social Intelligence Competencies Predict Transformational Leadership Style and Effectiveness
Bringing Focus to People Problems
Can Self-Assessments Predict Effective Leadership?
What Makes for a Good Mindfulness Coach?
Photo: Stuart Jenner / shutterstock
May 22, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Bringing Focus to People Problems
You must know this moment well: you’re sitting at your keyboard intending to accomplish something when suddenly you’re reading a recipe for pan-baked oatmeal bread, checking the day’s ball game scores, or mulling over that conversation you had that turned a bit sour.
This mind wandering happens to me more than I like to admit. And according to a Harvard study that used an iPhone app to check what 2,250 people were thinking at random intervals, it happens to us all during almost 50% of our waking hours.
But there may be an upside to all this, in the view of social neuroscientists. That’s because the circuitry in the brain that lights up when our mind wanders mingles with the circuits for pondering our social and emotional lives. Very often our mind wanders to those areas of our lives where we have issues with those around us.
And that’s potentially a good thing. The mind wandering circuitry “directs us to think about other people’s minds – their thoughts, feelings, and goals,” as UCLA neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman puts it in his book Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. This “promotes understanding and empathy, cooperation and consideration.”
At least that’s the hope. But there are two ways to think about the people conundrums in our lives, one helpful and the other a dead-end. In the latter, we ruminate, repeating the same worried thought loops over and over without getting anywhere. That’s a recipe for depression.
But if we can reflect on what’s going on in some relationship to come up with potentially positive ways to resolve a problem, then our rumination turns positive.
This productive reflection is what should happen in psychotherapy, or during a long talk with a good friend. But we don’t always need to go into therapy or turn to others to find solutions.
The circuits for mind wandering are also active during our most creative moments: when we’re thinking on our own. These are the times we tend to uncover novel, innovative insights, and often land on inspired fixes for our people conundrums.
Consider this the next time you’re beating yourself up over some healthy woolgathering.
Additional Resources:
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence - Focus examines the overlooked and underrated asset of attention, and why it matters enormously for how we feel, and succeed, in life.
Wired to Connect: Dialogues on Social Intelligence - I talk with a variety of experts in their respective fields about maximizing our capacities to effectively negotiate complex social relationships and environments.
Working with Mindfulness - Mirabai Bush provides a range of guided audio exercises to practice before or after a meeting, when struggling with a difficult project or person, or when feeling distracted or frustrated.
Supplemental Reading:
Cultivate Focus to Avoid Social Gaffes
The Two Biggest Distractions - and What to Do About Them
Photo: ollyy / shutterstock
May 14, 2014
Daniel Goleman: Find Your Organization’s Rudder
Reactionary responses to turbulence – the global marketplace, competition, internal strife – can easily set organizations off course. Organizations need the capacities to be resilient, adaptive, and have confidence in the face of uncertainty. But those qualities often come from developing a solid identity, and having a clear vision of the group’s goals. I spoke with the founding chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, Peter Senge, in my Leadership: A Master Class about ways organizations can find their rudder.
“System sciences use the term resilience to characterize ecosystems and living systems that have adaptive capabilities. What does that look and feel like in most organizations?
Share the power of knowledge
First, there would be a fairly level distribution of power and authority, because successful adaptations can emerge from anywhere in the organization. If you're trying to drive things from the top down, you're making a bet that these players are the only source of ideas and solutions. But in a more adaptive system, something important may develop at any level. Without a fairly even distribution of power and authority, you may miss an opportunity.
Open communication
Secondly, there has to be a culture of mutual respect and appreciation so that knowledge can transfer. Competitive coworkers can squash an idea before it even gets off the ground. Something really adaptive can take shape, yet somebody else is busy trying to kill or deny it. In a more respectful atmosphere, other team members may say, ‘Wow! That's really interesting. How do you do that? Well, we have a problem, would you be able to help us?’
Make the mission meaningful
And lastly, people have to think they're doing something that matters. That's easy to say, and every company has mission and vision statements. But if your team hasn’t internalized these statements, it’s not real. It’s just jargon. If you view your role as a ‘cog in a wheel,’ you are less motivated to care about the organization’s path to success. Encourage people to think about and share ways to make the organization a truly worthwhile place to work. You may just discover a valuable solution you didn’t expect to find.”
Additional resources:
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.
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.
The HR and EI Collection: The combination of books and audio tools offers actionable findings on how leaders can foster group flow to maximize innovation, drive, and motivation to deliver bottom-line results.
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.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence: Focus uncovers the science of attention in all its varieties – presenting a groundbreaking look at this overlooked and underrated asset, and why it matters enormously for how we feel, and succeed, in life.
Leading the Necessary Revolution: Building Alignment in Your Business for Sustainability: Sustainability is the biggest business opportunity in 50 years. Some managers clearly see their chance to be ahead of this curve. The single biggest challenge facing them now is creating alignment – explaining their vision in a compelling, motivational way – to get from the conceptual stage to critical action. Peter Senge has been helping organizations learn for decades – and he’s found that no matter where you are in your firm, you can drive the shift to sustainability – if you have the right approach, tools, and vision.
Additional reading:
Forging Good Work into a Rewarding Career
How to Overcome a Survival Mode Culture
How Leaders Can Overcome Obstacles for Change
The Active Ingredients for Innovation
Photo: d13 / shutterstock
May 7, 2014
Daniel Goleman: How to Overcome a Survival Mode Culture
Secure bases are environments that protect, nurture - and most importantly - provide motivation. They allow us to take intelligent risks and challenge ourselves. During childhood, parents are responsible for establishing a secure base at home, and teachers are expected to do the same in the classroom. It shouldn’t end here though. It’s important we remember that leaders need to cultivate a similarly secure emotional dynamic in the workplace.
George Kohlrieser—psychologist, professor of leadership at IMD in Switzerland, and participant in my Leadership: A Master Class video series—observes that having a secure base at work is crucial for high performance. Kohlrieser asserts that feeling secure allows a person to focus better on her work, achieve goals, and perceive impending obstacles as challenges, not threats. He explains:
When you offer a secure base, you begin to manifest trust and safety. When a person feels safe in her environment, she can transition from basic survival mode thinking to a more complex outlook, looking for opportunities and chances to thrive.”
In extreme situations, this lack of a secure base can even foster paralysis. Kohlrieser told me, “Far too often, people tell me they distrust their bosses. This is horrific! They’re occupied with thoughts like, Who's going to stab me in the back? Who's against me? If they don’t have the support to seek calculated risks, they won’t. Instead, they work to avoid risk. They're afraid of failure. They don't dare themselves to maximize their potential. As a leader, you’re expected to seek risks, challenges, and opportunities; and if you’re smart, you’ll create a safe space for your team to do the same.“
The Ingredients of a Secure Base
Sense of Belonging
It’s a leader’s job to ensure all team members feel welcome and see their efforts as valuable. With difficult team members, a leader must be exceedingly open. She’ll need to put the proverbial fish on the table, and ask, “Do you really want to belong to this team? If you are ambivalent, it’s going to be a source of conflict.”
Choices
We all want to feel we have a say. That's why leaders should offer their employees choice and power over what they can do, whenever possible. When you delegate wisely, you open up possibilities to let people shine. Additionally, creating a foundation of support often leads to explosions of creativity.
Forward Momentum
When a work conflict isn’t resolved, backlash is inevitable. It’s important that the entire team, leader included, has a procedure in place for getting over what happened. Be a leader who speaks the truth, but speaks it with empathy. And remember: the future is the future, and the past is the past.
Coaching
Leaders can create a secure base by helping employees identify their unique strengths and weaknesses, and then linking them to their personal and career aspirations. These leaders will encourage employees to establish long-term development goals and help them conceptualize a plan for attaining them. They’ll also make agreements with their employees about their role and responsibilities in enacting development plans, and they give plentiful instruction and feedback.
Positivity
Research on leadership styles finds perfectionists (sometimes called “pacesetters”) have a negative impact on their direct reports’ emotional state and performance. Perfectionist leaders only give failing grades – they never praise good performance. When you encounter a mistake, frame it as a lesson, rather than just another blunder.
Additional resources:
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.
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.
The HR and EI Collection: The combination of books and audio tools offers actionable findings on how leaders can foster group flow to maximize innovation, drive, and motivation to deliver bottom-line results.
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.
Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence: Focus uncovers the science of attention in all its varieties – presenting a groundbreaking look at this overlooked and underrated asset, and why it matters enormously for how we feel, and succeed, in life.
Additional reading:
4 Components Required to Sustain Innovation
The Benefits of a Productive Cocoon
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Photo: imging / shutterstock
