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This whirlwind of change makes it more important than ever for leaders to be self-aware and composed, focused and high energy, empathic and motivating, collaborative and compelling—in short, resonant.
The fundamental task of leaders, we argue, is to prime good feeling in those they lead. That occurs when a leader
creates resonance—a reservoir of positivity that frees the best in people. At its root, then, the primal
job of leadership is emotional. We...
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performed one of the most crucial emotional tasks of leadership: He helped himself and his people find meaning and sense, even in the face of chaos and madness. To do so, he first attuned to and expressed the shared emotional reality so that the direction he eventually articulated resonated at the gut level, putting into words what everyone was feeling in their hearts.
One final note: There are many leaders, not just one. Leadership is distributed. It resides not solely in the individual at the top, but in every person at every level who, in one way or another, acts as a leader to a group of followers—wherever in the organization that person is, whether shop steward, team head, or CEO.
GREAT LEADERS move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions.
The difference between the leaders lay in the mood and tone with which they delivered their messages: One drove the group toward antagonism and hostility, the other toward optimism, even inspiration, in the face of difficulty. These two moments point to a hidden, but crucial, dimension in leadership—the emotional impact of what a leader says and does.
In the modern organization, this primordial emotional task—though by now largely invisible—remains foremost among the many jobs of leadership: driving the collective emotions in a positive direction and clearing the smog created by toxic emotions.
Followers also look to a leader for supportive emotional connection—for empathy.
dissonance, undermining the emotional foundations that let people shine.
emotional intelligence: how leaders handle themselves and their relationships. Leaders who maximize the benefits of primal leadership drive the emotions of those they lead in the right direction.
A closed-loop system such as the circulatory system is self-regulating; what’s happening in the circulatory system of others around us does not impact our own system. An open-loop system depends largely on external sources to manage itself.
In other words, we rely on connections with other people for our own emotional stability.
Leaders give praise or withhold it, criticize well or destructively, offer support or turn a blind eye to people’s needs. They can frame the group’s mission in ways that give more meaning to each person’s contribution—or not. They can guide in ways that give people a sense of clarity and direction in their
work and that encourage flexibility, setting people free to use their best sense of how to get the job done. All these acts help determine a leader’s primal emotional impact.
upbeat moods boost cooperation, fairness, and business performance.
Distress not only erodes mental abilities, but also makes people less emotionally intelligent. People who are upset have trouble reading emotions accurately in other people—decreasing the most basic skill needed for empathy and, as a result, impairing their social skills. 27
The “group IQ,” then—the sum total of every person’s best talents contributed at full force—depends on the group’s emotional intelligence, as shown in its harmony.
They naturally create a friendly but effective climate that lifts everyone’s spirits.
But there’s actually a logarithm that predicts that relationship: For every 1 percent improvement in the service climate, there’s a 2 percent increase in revenue. 35
grumpy workers serve customers poorly, with sometimes devastating results: Cardiac care units where the nurses’ general mood was “depressed” had a death rate among patients four times higher than on comparable units.
it was the store manager who created the emotional climate that drove salespeople’s moods—and ultimately, sales—in the right direction. When the managers themselves were peppy, confident, and optimistic, their moods rubbed off on the staff. 38
role. In general, the more emotionally demanding the work, the more empathic and supportive the leader needs to be.
But our analyses suggest that, overall, the climate—how people feel about working at a company—can account for 20 to 30 percent of business performance. Getting the best out of people pays off in hard results.
climate? Roughly 50 to 70 percent of how employees perceive their organization’s climate can be traced to the actions of one person: the leader. More than anyone else, the boss creates the conditions that directly determine people’s ability to work well. 41
“One team,” as a business mantra proclaims, means “more signal, less noise.” The glue that holds people together in a team, and that commits people to an organization, is the emotions they feel. 1 How well leaders manage and direct those feelings to help a group meet its goals depends on their level of emotional intelligence. Resonance comes naturally to emotionally intelligent (EI) leaders.
Such disturbing encounters wreak havoc emotionally, as demonstrated in studies in which physiological responses were monitored during arguments. 4 Such attacks—which send the
painful emotional messages of disgust or contempt—emotionally hijack the person targeted, particularly when the attacker is a spouse or boss, whose opinions carry much weight.
Some dissonant leaders, however, are more subtle, using a surface charm or social polish, even charisma, to mislead and manipulate.
The dark side of ambition is that it can focus a leader’s attention on himself, leading him to ignore the worries of the people who he needs to make him successful—and breeding dissonance. 8
No creature can fly with just one wing. Gifted leadership occurs where heart and head—feeling and thought—meet. These are the two wings that allow a leader to soar.
In moments of emergency, our emotional centers—the limbic brain—commandeer the rest of the brain.
tasks. Each of the four domains of emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—adds a crucial set of skills for resonant leadership.
In short, self-awareness facilitates both empathy and self-management, and these two, in combination, allow effective relationship management. EI leadership, then, builds up from a foundation of self-awareness.
That small joke served two purposes: It implicitly affirmed for everyone that the marketing chief had indeed erred, while softening that critical message—bypassing the need to spend time disagreeing or arguing about it. The group seamlessly moved on to the next decision, which was how to remedy the predicament.
As we have already noted, the artful use of humor typifies effective leadership.
The most effective leaders, then, use
humor more freely, even when things are tense, sending positive messages that shift the underlying emotional tone of the interaction. Although
the words that leaders speak may deal with dry details—clauses in a contract, the numbers in a business plan—the good feelings that a laugh brings...
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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.
leader. As the sociologist Max Weber argued a century ago, institutions that endure thrive not because of one leader’s charisma, but because they cultivate leadership throughout the system. That’s especially true when it comes to creating companies that are “built to last”: The ones that thrive for decades know how to incubate generations of effective leaders.
Where we formerly listed five main domains of EI, we now have simplified the model into four domains—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—with eighteen competencies instead of the original twenty-five (see the chart).
These EI competencies are not innate talents, but learned abilities, each of which has a unique contribution to making leaders more resonant, and therefore more effective.
Our basic argument, in a nutshell, is that primal leadership operates at its best through emotionally intelligent leaders who create resonance.
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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• Initiative: Readiness to act and seize opportunities • Optimism: Seeing the upside in events SOCIAL COMPETENCE: These capabilities determine how we manage relationships. SOCIAL AWARENESS • Empathy: Sensing others’ emotions, understanding their perspective, and taking active interest in their concerns • Organizational awareness: Reading the currents, decision networks, and politics at the organizational level • Service: Recognizing and meeting follower, client, or customer needs RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT • Inspirational leadership: Guiding and motivating with a compelling vision • Influence:
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team building
Intuition, that essential leadership ability to apply not just technical expertise but also life wisdom in making business decisions, comes naturally to the self-aware leader.
In short, intuition offers EI leaders a direct pipeline to their accumulated life wisdom on a topic. And it takes the inner attunement of self-awareness to sense that message.
