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October 6 - October 28, 2018
For example, if something has happened that everyone feels angry about (such as the closing of a division) or sad about (such as a serious illness in a much-loved co-worker), the EI leader not only empathizes with those emotions, but also expresses them for the group. That kind of resonance reinforces synchrony just as much as enthusiasm does, because it leaves people feeling understood and cared for.
Self-awareness—often overlooked in business settings—is the foundation for the rest: Without recognizing our own emotions, we will be poor at managing them, and less able to understand them in others. Self-aware leaders are attuned to their inner signals. They recognize, for instance, how their feelings affect themselves and their job performance. Instead of letting anger build into an outburst, they spot it as it crescendos and can see both what’s causing it and how to do something constructive about it. Leaders who lack this emotional self-awareness, on the other hand, might lose their
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McClelland proposed that if an organization wanted to hire or promote the best person for a specific job, such as a leadership position, it should discard what were then the standard criteria. Instead of testing people for their IQ, technical skills, or personality—or just looking at their résumés—McClelland proposed first studying employees who were already outstanding performers in that job and systematically comparing them with those who were just average at it. That analysis yields not just the threshold abilities for the position (the basic skills everyone must have to do the job) but,
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the stars were compared with managers whose performance was only average, and the two groups underwent intensive interviews designed to assess their competencies. Four competencies of emotional intelligence—but not a single technical or purely cognitive competency—emerged as the unique strengths of the stars: the drive to achieve results, the ability to take initiative, skills in collaboration and teamwork, and the ability to lead teams.
The researchers evaluated this talent pool through the lens of the leadership competencies assessed in the ECI (Emotional Competence Inventory), a 360-degree measure of emotional intelligence in leadership.
Emotional Intelligence Domains and Associated Competencies (see Appendix B for details) PERSONAL COMPETENCE: These capabilities determine how we manage ourselves. SELF-AWARENESS • Emotional self-awareness: Reading one’s own emotions and recognizing their impact; using “gut sense” to guide decisions • Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one’s strengths and limits • Self-confidence: A sound sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities SELF-MANAGEMENT • Emotional self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses under control • Transparency: Displaying honesty and integrity; trustworthiness •
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Vision requires what looks to others like a leap of faith: the ability to go beyond the data and to make a smart guess.
Surprisingly, even though no one could ascertain the specific connections between the clues and the weather, after fifty trials people were guessing right about 70 percent of the time. They had gradually gained a “feel” for what was going on; their brains had quietly picked up the accumulated lessons. Though their logical intellect was still stumped, those people had grasped the essence of the solution intuitively. It just felt right—their intuition told them what to do, based on the lessons learned.
Because this kind of learning goes on largely in a deep zone of the brain outside the reach of words (in the basal ganglia, a primitive part of the brain atop the spinal cord), leaders need to learn to trust their intuitive sense to access their life wisdom.
This is also why books can only teach you so much. We know a lot more than we can articulate. In common vernacular, this is called "experience". Also relates to my recent rants about quantitative metrics/measurements wrt decision making - if you base your decisions solely on metrics, then you're limited by what you can articulate.
Self-management also enables transparency, which is not only a leadership virtue but also an organizational strength. 22 Transparency—an authentic openness to others about one’s feelings, beliefs, and actions—allows integrity, or the sense that a leader can be trusted. At a primal level, integrity hinges on impulse control, keeping us from acting in ways that we might regret. Integrity also means that a leader lives his values. Such leaders strike others as genuine because they are not making a pretense of being other than they are. Integrity, therefore, boils down to one question: Is what
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Powerful as it is, however, the visionary style doesn’t work in every situation. It fails, for instance, when a leader is working with a team of experts or peers who are more experienced than he—and who might view a leader expounding a grand vision as pompous or simply out of step with the agenda at hand. This kind of misstep can cause cynicism, which is a breeding ground for poor performance.
Despite its benefits, the affiliative style should not be used alone. The style’s exclusive focus on praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected, and employees may perceive that mediocrity is tolerated. In addition, because affiliative leaders rarely offer constructive advice on how to improve, employees are left on their own to figure out how to do so.
In contrast, Sister Mary’s democratic style of getting buy-in from her constituents built feelings of trust and respect—and, in a word, commitment. By spending time one-on-one and in meetings listening to the concerns of employees (or, as with Sister Mary, of stakeholders such as parents), the democratic leader keeps morale high. The resulting impact on climate is positive across the board.
Of course, the democratic style can have its drawbacks. One result when a leader overrelies on this approach is exasperating, endless meetings in which ideas are mulled over, consensus remains elusive, and the only visible outcome is to schedule yet more meetings. A leader who puts off crucial decisions, hoping to thrash out a consensual strategy, risks dithering. The cost can be confusion and lack of direction, with resulting delays or escalating conflicts.
the classic signs of a pacesetter: exceptionally high standards of excellence, impatience with poor performance, an eagerness to roll up his sleeves to get the job done, and a readiness to take over for people when they get into difficulties. This is not to say that the pacesetting approach can’t work well. It can—but only in the right situations, namely, when employees are self-motivated, highly competent, and need little direction.
In sending these messages, the new president was forceful and strong. But his strong tactics worked because he attacked the old culture—not the people. In fact, he made it clear that he valued their talents and abilities; it was their way of doing things that he felt needed to change dramatically.
Given the crucial importance for effective leadership of a wide repertoire of leadership styles, one immediate lesson applies to hiring, promotions, and succession planning. Simply put, when it comes to filling a leadership position, it pays to find someone who has the flexible repertoire of four or more styles that marks the most outstanding leader. Failing that, ask whether the person you’re considering for a given leadership slot at least has mastered the specific style or styles that are most obviously salient to your business reality.
Whatever the motives, the result is a leader who has only partial information about what’s going on around him. This disease can be epidemic in an organization—not just among CEOs, but also for most high-level leaders. It is fed by the natural instinct to please the boss, resulting in a widespread tendency to give positive feedback and withhold the negative whenever information flows upward.
When it comes to building leadership skills that last, motivation and how a person feels about learning matters immensely. People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily (for instance, by studying for a test), it is soon forgotten. That may be why one study found that the half-life of knowledge learned in an MBA course was about six weeks.
Try doing some “free writing” around this vision of yourself fifteen years from now, or else speak your vision into a tape recorder or talk about it with a trusted friend. When doing this exercise, many people report that they experience a release of energy, feeling more optimistic than they had even moments earlier.
John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems, reflects an intellectual outlook when he describes a future of living better through technology. He talks, for example, of how integrated electronic systems will adjust the temperature of clothes when people walk from a heated home to a car in winter. Often sounding like a Bible-thumping preacher, he speaks openly of his belief that his company can create this model of the future, thereby allowing everyone to contribute to a better society.
Not sure if that's actually a better future to live in
As Napoleon observed, “A leader is a dealer in hope.”
leader is an anagram of dealer
That’s why we’ve found that the most emotionally intelligent leaders actively seek out negative feedback as well as positive. Those leaders understand that they need a full range of information to perform better—whether or not that information feels good to hear.
information from several thousand questionnaires, using a 360-degree format from bosses, peers, and subordinates, found that seeking out negative feedback—not just positive remarks—predicted the accuracy of people’s self-awareness and their overall effectiveness. If a leader knows what he needs to improve, he knows where to focus his attention. On the other hand, people who mainly sought positive feedback understandably had poor self-assessment—and lower effectiveness.
Despite the potential downfalls of this approach, many leadership training programs—or managers conducting annual performance reviews—regularly rationalize this error in approach with the adage “leave well enough alone,” which means neglecting to recognize people’s abilities in favor of giving attention only to the areas that need work. But that means the capabilities that people value, enjoy, and are most proud of get lost in the process. Focusing on only the gaps is not only depressing and demotivating, but also results in a lopsided balance sheet. Our strengths reveal the important things
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Trebino also looked for areas outside his job where he could sharpen his empathy and coaching skills—for example, by coaching his daughter’s soccer team and volunteering at a local crisis center for families in trouble. Both activities offered an arena to experiment with how well he understood others and to try out new coaching skills.
Small wonder that improvement plans crafted around learning—rather than performance outcomes—have been found most effective. For instance, in a program to improve communication skills, a learning agenda resulted in dramatically better presentations; a performance agenda tended to make people react defensively—not wanting to “look bad”—while neglecting to give them concrete steps to improve their actual performance.
For example, even in the goal-driven arena of sales, learning goals have been shown to lead to greater improvement than have performance goals. 5 Setting developmental goals that matter takes us from merely contemplating change to making concrete steps that prepare us to change. 6
Goals should build on one’s strengths, not on one’s weaknesses. • Goals must be a person’s own—not goals that someone else has imposed.
His second learning goal dealt with the leadership crisis: He aimed to be inspiring at every company meeting. For example, he made sure he began each small-group meeting with a reminder of why they were in business—their vision, values, and mission. Although at first he felt a bit self-conscious, even awkward, as he persisted in cultivating new habits of the visionary style, it soon felt less gushy and more natural.
People agree to development goals because a boss, mentor, coach—or spouse—encourages or pushes them to change. But it’s important to remember that the more personal the commitment to learning goals, the more likely you are to achieve them. 15 This is where passion and hope—the motivating brain activity inherent in tapping into your dreams—are again so vital to sustainable learning. And the more difficult a goal, the more essential is one’s commitment.
Great athletes spend a lot of time practicing and a little time performing, while executives spend no time practicing and all of their time performing, as Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz observed in the Harvard Business Review. 2 No wonder leaders so often recycle their problems: In the rush to achieve their goals and complete their tasks, they short themselves on learning to lead better.
The trick is to learn while doing other things, a strategy that might be thought of as “stealth learning” and that can be useful for improving emotional intelligence abilities, particularly leadership skills. In studying outstanding managers among scientists and engineers—those who, for example, regularly used competencies such as empathy—researcher Christine Dreyfus found that they had refined those talents in many settings. 31 Their abilities were particularly impressive given that they were engineers working in a technological culture that didn’t often model those competencies.
One engineer, for example, who’d become a strong leader, reported that he’d been able to transcend the command-and-control, pacesetting engineering culture through a somewhat surprising venue for leadership development: his church. “My church group easily lent itself to people expressing feelings and opinions,” the engineer recalled. “Where, as an engineer, I usually felt the need to always have a logical flow, in the group I became more accepting of less structure. Over time, that acceptance worked its way into how I acted as a leader—less concerned with flow and content and more attuned to
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Acro?
One day, driving to a breakfast meeting with an employee who seemed to be bungling a project, Jack ran through a positive scenario in his mind: He asked questions and listened to be sure he fully understood the situation before starting to solve the problem. He anticipated feeling impatient, and rehearsed how he would handle these feelings rather than resorting to his usual response of jumping in too soon.
In the early 1990s, a group of women who were partners in what was then Coopers & Lybrand met to form a study group. At first they gathered monthly to discuss their careers and how to provide leadership in the firm and in a traditionally male-dominated industry. But after a few meetings, the women began to realize that they were meeting to discuss their work and their lives in general. They developed a strong mutual trust, and found they could rely on each other for frank feedback as they worked on strengthening their leadership abilities.
They reported feeling that many of the people around them—people at work, even their families—had an investment in them staying the same, despite their wanting to change. But in the leadership program, they developed a new reference group—others like themselves—who encouraged that change. Moreover, we’ve seen that result in study after study: Positive groups help people make positive changes, particularly if the relationships are filled with candor, trust, and psychological safety.
Reflecting back on their careers as leaders, the executives we interviewed felt that the most pivotal experiences in their development had been jobs where they felt the challenges were over their heads—at least, at first. It took a sponsoring mentor who asked them to take the job and then protected them from meddling by “helpful hands” at corporate headquarters. The umbrella created by the mentor was so critical that the company began referring to this mentoring competence as giving others “room to act.”
We’ve seen repeatedly that when teams (and entire organizations) face their collective emotional reality, they begin a healthy reexamination of the shared habits that create and hold that reality in place. In fact, for leaders to extend emotional intelligence throughout their teams and organizations, that’s precisely where they need to start: by taking a hard look at reality, rather than focusing first on an ideal vision. Thus the sequence of reflection and self-discovery is reversed from what it was at the individual level,
As individuals, we feel most motivated to change when we tap into our dreams and ideal visions of our lives. That vision of our personal future gives us the energy and commitment to change our behavior. The ideal vision for a group, however, is often a much more distant concept, so it simply doesn’t provide enough motivation to instigate change. A good example is the lofty language found in company mission statements, which often feels light-years away from employees’ day-to-day experiences at work.
Janet is a good example of one of the biggest mistakes leaders can make: ignoring the realities of team ground rules and the collective emotions in the tribe and assuming that the force of their leadership alone is enough to drive people’s behavior.
An emotionally intelligent team, then, has the collective equivalent of empathy, the basis of all relationship skills. It identifies other key groups in the organization (and beyond) that contribute to the team’s success, and it takes consistent action to foster a good working relationship with those groups. Being empathic at the team level doesn’t just mean being nice, though. It means figuring out what the whole system really needs and going after it in a way that makes all those involved more successful and satisfied with the outcomes.
this is the true work of the leader: to monitor the emotional tone of the team and to help its members recognize any underlying dissonance. Only when a team can confront that emotional reality will it feel moved to change.
Another manager held “team closedowns.” Instead of simply shuffling people on to their next job as new positions were announced, on several occasions he brought the old team together to celebrate the past, mourn the end of an era, and discuss hopes for the future.
Same is probably helpful at a smaller scale at the end of projects
We also took a snapshot of the team’s emotional intelligence using the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI),
Should maybe take this
Part of understanding the emotional reality is uncovering the particular habits ingrained in a team or organization that can drive behavior. Often these habits make little sense to people—and yet they still act on them, seeing them as “just the way we do things around here.” Emotionally intelligent leaders look for signs that reveal whether such habits, and the systems that support them, work well.
Too often, unsure of their ability to handle the emotions that arise when people talk honestly about what is going on, leaders stick to the safe topics: alignment, coordination of team members’ functional areas, and strategy-implementation plans. While these safer conversations can set the stage for the next discussion—about the team itself, the organization, and the people—most teams stop the discussion at the level of strategy and functional alignment. They find it too difficult to be honest with one another, to examine the emotional reality and norms of the team.
Perhaps more important, discussions about cultural issues, the emotional reality of an organization, and how it feels to work there usually result in people feeling some ownership of the problems, the dream, and the process of getting from the real to the ideal.
creating human resource practices that foster emotional intelligence—recruiting and performance management, for instance—is key to supporting resonance and a healthy emotional climate.
Emotionally intelligent leaders know that their primal task is to look first to the organizational reality, identifying the issues with the full involvement of key individuals. They take the conversation to the organization as a whole, using engaging processes to get people viscerally involved in unearthing the current reality, while tapping into individual and collective hopes for the future.
Get their heads into the game
