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support—someone she can count on to perform.
Such self-knowledge often shows itself in the hiring process. Ask a candidate to describe a time he got carried away by his feelings and did something he later regretted. Self-aware candidates will be frank in admitting to failure—and will often tell their tales with a smile. One of the hallmarks of self-awareness is a self-deprecating sense of humor.
Self-awareness can also be identified during performance reviews. Self-aware people know—and are comfortable talking about—their limitations and strengths,
Self-aware people can also be recognized by their selfconfidence. They have a firm grasp of their capabilities and are less likely to set themselves up to fail by, for example, overstretching on assignments. They know, too, when to ask for help. And the risks they take on the job are calculated. They won’t ask for a challenge that they know they can’t handle alone. They’ll play to their strengths.
Self-Regulation Biological impulses drive our emotions. We cannot do away with them—but we can do much to manage them. Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner conversation, is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings. People engaged in such a conversation feel bad moods and emotional impulses just as everyone else does, but they find ways to control them and even to channel them in useful ways.
But if he had a gift for self-regulation, he would choose a different approach.
He would then step back to consider the reasons for the failure. Are they personal—a lack of effort? Are there any mitigating factors? What was his role in the debacle? After considering these questions, he would call the team together, lay out the incident’s consequences, and offer his feelings about it. He would then present his analysis of the problem and a well-considered solution.
Second, self-regulation is important for competitive reasons. Everyone knows that business today is rife with ambiguity and change. Companies merge and break apart regularly. Technology transforms work at a dizzying pace. People who have mastered their emotions are able to roll with the changes. When a new program is announced, they don’t panic; instead, they are able to suspend judgment, seek out information, and listen to the executives as they explain the new program.
Sometimes they even lead the way. Consider
The signs of emotional self-regulation, therefore, are easy to see: a propensity for reflection and thoughtfulness; comfort with ambiguity and change; and integrity— an ability to say no to impulsive urges.
Like self-awareness, self-regulation often does not get its due. People who can master their emotions are sometimes seen as cold fish—their considered responses are taken as a lack of passion. People with fiery temperaments are frequently thought of as “classic” leaders—their outbursts are considered hallmarks of charisma and power. But when such people make it to the top, their impulsiveness often works against them. In my research, extreme displays of negative emotion have never emerged as a driver of good leadership.
Motivation If there is one trait that virtually all effective leaders have, it is motivation. They are driven to achieve beyond expectations—their own and ev...
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If you are looking for leaders, how can you identify people who are motivated by the drive to achieve rather than by external rewards? The first sign is a passion for the work itself—such people seek out creative challenges, love to learn, and take great pride in a job well done.
They also display an unflagging energy to do things better. People with such energy often seem restless with the status quo. They
An automated message then prompted them to punch in their numbers—how many calls and sales they had made that day. The system shortened the feedback time on sales results from weeks to hours.
That story illustrates two other common traits of people who are driven to achieve. They are forever raising the performance bar, and they like to keep score. Take the performance bar first.
The manager of another division gave his people a different kind of speech. He was up-front about his own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat everyone fairly.
Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at least three reasons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of globalization; and the growing need to retain talent.
As anyone who has ever been a part of one can attest, teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. They are often charged with reaching a consensus—which is hard enough with two people and much more difficult as the numbers increase. Even in groups with as few as four or five members, alliances form and clashing agendas get set.
In a series of one-on-one sessions, she took the time to listen to everyone in the group—what was frustrating them, how they rated their colleagues, whether they felt they had been ignored. And then she directed the team in a way that brought it together: She encouraged people to speak more openly about their frustrations, and she helped people raise constructive complaints during meetings. In short, her empathy allowed her to understand her team’s emotional makeup. The result was not just heightened collaboration among members but also added business, as the team was called on for help by a
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Globalization is another reason for the rising importance of empathy for business leaders. Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and misunderstandings. Empathy is an antidote.
Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in today’s information economy. Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and keep good people, but today the stakes are higher. When good people leave, they take the company’s knowledge with them. That’s where coaching and mentoring come in. It has repeatedly been shown that coaching and mentoring pay off not just in better performance but also in increased job satisfaction and decreased turnover. But what makes coaching and mentoring work best is the nature of the relationship.
Social Skill The first three components of emotional intelligence are self-management skills. The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a person’s ability to manage relationships with others.
It’s not just a matter of friendliness, although people with high levels of social skill are rarely mean-spirited. Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.
Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances, and they have a knack for finding common ground with people of all kinds—a knack for building rapport. That doesn’t mean they socialize continually; it means they work acc...
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People tend to be very effective at managing relationships when they can understand and control their own emotions and can empathize with the feelings of others. Even motivation contributes to social skill.
Socially skilled people, however, don’t think it makes sense to arbitrarily limit the scope of their relationships. They build bonds widely because they know that in these fluid times, they may need help someday from people they are just getting to know today.
By 1993, he was convinced that the company’s future lay with the Internet. Over the course of the next year, he found kindred spirits and
Management took notice: Within a year of the conference, the executive’s team formed the basis for the company’s first Internet division, and he was formally put in charge of it. To get there, the executive had ignored conventional boundaries, forging and maintaining connections with people in every corner of the organization.
Is social skill considered a key leadership capability in most companies? The answer is yes, especially when compared with the other components of emotional intelligence. People seem to know intuitively that leaders need to manage relationships effectively; no leader is an island. After all, the leader’s task is to get work done through other people, and social skill makes that possible.
Develop and maintain your network. Justin Mass, a senior learning technologist at Adobe, volunteers for cross-functional projects that increase his exposure to his HQ colleagues. He’s worked to become known as a guy who raises his hand before being asked, and that’s helped him create strong connections throughout the company.
It’s virtually impossible to navigate a company’s spoken and unspoken “rules” without a guide.
Analyze: Identify the benefits each of your existing network connections now provides. Does one person give you valuable information? Does another have expertise you need but lack?
De-layer: Weed out connections that aren’t helping you, such as people who burn too much of your time.
Diver...
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Construct a strong network, and you’ll have a wider, richer web of connections to draw on when the next crisis or opportunity lands on your desk.
This is Deb’s social network (the real-world kind, not the virtual kind), and it has helped her career a lot. But not because the group is large or full of high-powered contacts. Her network is effective because it both supports and challenges her. Deb’s relationships help her gain influence, broaden her expertise, learn new skills, and find purpose and balance. Deb values and nurtures them. “Make friends so that you have friends when you need friends” is her motto.
“My current role is really a product of a relationship I formed over a decade ago that came back to me at the right time,” she explains. “People may chalk it up to luck, but I think more often than not luck happens through networks where people give first
The old adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is true. But it’s more nuanced than that. In spite of what most self-help books say, network size doesn’t usually matter. In fact, we’ve found that individuals who simply know a lot of people are less likely to achieve standout performance, because they’re spread too thin.
Yes, it’s important to know powerful people, but if they account for too much of your network, your peers and subordinates often perceive you to be overly self-interested, and you may lose support as a result.
The executives who consistently rank in the top 20% of their companies in both performance and well-being have diverse but select networks like Deb’s—made up of high-quality relationships with people who come from several different spheres and from up and down the corporate hierarchy.
He was under constant pressure to find new technologies that would spur innovation and speed the drug commercialization process at his company, and he needed a network that would help him. Unfortunately, more than 70% of his trusted advisers were in the unit he had worked in before becoming CIO. Not only did they reinforce his bias toward certain solutions and vendors, but they lacked the outside knowledge he needed. “I had started to mistake friendship, trust, and accessibility for real expertise in new domains,” he told us.
When things went well at work, he was happy; when they didn’t, he wasn’t pleasant to be around. In fact, Tim’s wife finally broke down and told him she thought he had become a career-obsessed jerk and needed to get other interests.
With her encouragement, he joined Habitat for Humanity and started rowing with their daughter. As a result, his social network expanded to include people with different perspectives and values, who helped him focus on more healthful and fulfilling pursuits. “As
“Physically, I’m in much better shape and probably staved off a heart attack. But I think I’m a better leader, too, in that I think about proble...
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To understand more about what makes an effective network, let’s look again at Deb. She has a small set of core contacts—14 people she really relies on.
Core connections must bridge smaller, more-diverse kinds of groups and cross hierarchical, organizational, functional, and geographic lines.
Core relationships should result in more learning, less bias in decision making, and greater personal growth and balance.
formally powerful people, who provide mentoring, sense-making, political support, and resources;
people who give them developmental feedback,
