Emotional Intelligence

In 1990, in my role as a science reporter at The New York Times, I chanced upon an article in a small academic journal by two psychologists, John Mayer, now at the University of New Hampshire, and Yales Peter Salovey. Mayer and Salovey offered the first formulation of a concept they called emotional intelligence. Those were days when the preeminence of IQ as the standard of excellence in life was unquestioned; a debate raged over whether it was set in our genes or due to experience. But here, suddenly, was a new way of thinking about the ingredients of life success. I was electrified by the notion, which I made the title of this book in 1995. Like Mayer and Salovey, I used the phrase to synthesize a broad range of scientific findings, drawing together what had been separate strands of research reviewing not only their theory but a wide variety of other exciting scientific developments, such as the first fruits of the nascent field of affective neuroscience, which explores how emotions are regulated in the brain. I remember having the thought, just before this book was published ten years ago, that if one day I overheard a conversation in which two strangers used the phrase emotional intelligence and both understood what it meant, I would have succeeded in spreading the concept more widely into the culture. Little did I know. The phrase emotional intelligence, or its casual shorthand EQ, has become ubiquitous, showing up in settings as unlikely as the cartoon strips Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead and in Roz Chasts sequential art in The New Yorker. Ive seen boxes of toys that claim to boost a childs EQ; lovelorn personal ads sometimes trumpet it in those seeking prospective mates. I once found a quip about EQ printed on a shampoo bottle in my hotel room. And the concept has spread to the far corners of our planet. EQ has become a word recognized, Im told, in languages as diverse as German and Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Malay. (Even so, I prefer EI as the English abbreviation for emotional intelligence.) My e-mail inbox often contains queries, from, for example, a doctoral student in Bulgaria, a school teacher in Poland, a college student in Indonesia, a business consultant in South Africa, a management expert in the Sultanate of Oman, an executive in Shanghai. Business students in India read about EI and leadership; a CEO in Argentina recommends the book I later wrote on the topic. Ive also heard from religious scholars within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism that the concept of EI resonates with outlooks in their own faith. Most gratifying for me has been how ardently the concept has been embraced by educators, in the form of programs in social and emotional learning or SEL. Back in 1995 I was able to find only a handful of such programs teaching emotional intelligence skills to children. Now, a decade later, tens of thousands of schools worldwide offer children SEL. In the United States many districts and even entire states currently make SEL curriculum requirement, mandating that just as students must attain a certain level of competence in math and language, so too should they master these essential skills for living. In Illinois, for instance, specific learning standards in SEL abilities have been established for every grade from kindergarten through the last year of high school. To give just one example of a remarkably detailed and comprehensive curriculum, in the early elementary years

students should learn to recognize and accurately label their emotions and how they lead them to act. By the late elementary years lessons in empathy should make children able to identify the nonverbal clues to how someone else feels; in junior high they should be able to analyze what creates stress for them or what motivates their best performance. And in high school the SEL skills include listening and talking in ways that resolve conflicts instead of escalating them and negotiating for win-win solutions. Around the world Singapore has undertaken an active initiative in SEL, as have some schools in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. In Europe, the U.K. Has led the way, but more than a dozen other countries have schools that embrace EI, as do Australia and New Zealand, and here and there countries in Latin America and Africa. In 2002 UNESCO began a worldwide initiative to promote SEL, sending a statement of ten basic principles for implementing SEL to the ministries of education in 140 countries. In some states and nations, SEL has become the organizing umbrella under which are gathered programs in character education, violence prevention, antibullying, drug prevention and school discipline. The goal is not just to reduce these problems among schoolchildren but to enhance the school climate and, ultimately, students academic performance. In 1995, I outlined the preliminary evidence suggesting that SEL was the active ingredient in programs that enhance childrens learning while preventing problems such as violence. Now the case can be made scientifically: helping children improve their self-awareness and confidence, manage their disturbing emotions and impulses, and increase their empathy pays off not just in improved behavior but in measurable academic achievement. This is the big news contained in a recently completed meta-analysis of 668 evaluation studies of SEL programs for children from preschoolers through high school. The massive survey was conducted by Roger Weissberg, who directs the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning at the University of Illinois at Chicago the organization that has led the way in bringing SEL into schools worldwide. The data show that SEL programs yielded a strong benefit in academic accomplishment, as demonstrated in achievement test results and grade-point averages. In participating schools, up to 50 percent of children showed improved achievement scores and up to 38 percent improved their grade-point averages. SEL programs also made schools safer: incidents of misbehavior dropped by an average of 28 percent; suspensions by 44 percent; and other disciplinary actions by 27 percent. At the same time, attendance rates rose, while 63 percent of students demonstrated significantly more positive behavior. In the world of social science research, these remarkable results for any program promoting behavioral change, SEL had delivered on its promise. In 1995 I also proposed that a good part of the effectiveness of SEL came from its impact in shaping childrens developing neural circuitry, particularly the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex, which manage working memory what we hold in mind as we learn and inhibit disruptive emotional impulses. Now the first preliminary scientific evidence for that notion has arrived. Mark Greenberg of Pennsylvania State University. A codeveloper of the PATHS curriculum in SEL, reports not only that the program for elementary school students boasts academic achievement but, even more significantly, that much of the increased learning can be attributed to improvements in attention and working memory, key functions

of the prefrontal cortex. This strongly suggests that neuroplasticity, the shaping of the brain through repeated experience, plays a key role in the benefits from SEL. Perhaps the biggest surprise for me has been the impact of EI in the world of business, particularly in the areas of leadership and employee development (a form of adult education). The Harvard Business Review has hailed emotional intelligence as a ground-breaking, paradigm-shattering idea, one of the most influential business ideas of the decade. Such claims in the business world too often prove to be fads, with no real underlying substance. But here a far-flung network of researchers has been at work, ensuring that the application of EI will be grounded in solid data. The Rutgers University-based Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (CREIO) has led the way in catalyzing this scientific work, collaborating with organizations that range from the Office of Personnel Management in the federal government to American Express. Today companies worldwide routinely look through the lens of EI in hiring, promoting, and developing their employees. For instance, Johnson and Johnson (another CREIO member) found that in divisions around the world, those identified at mid career as having high leadership potential were far stronger in EI competencies than were their less-promising peers. CREIO continues to foster such research, which can offer evidence-based guidelines for organizations seeking to enhance their ability to achieve their business goals or fulfill a mission.

Putting Brain Science to Work in Your Company

Written on June 29, 2011 4:26pm | by Daniel Goleman |

By Steve Minter for IndustryWeek, June 22, 2011. Read the full article. Every manager faces the same challengehow do you get the most from the people on your team? In his latest book, The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, author and psychologist Daniel Goleman says the key is to keep your employees in the flow. People operate in three neurological states, says Goleman. The first, disengagement, occurs when employees are in a low-motivation state where they are distracted and inattentive to the task at hand. Disengagement is rife in the manufacturing sector because so many people are not inspired, motivated or engaged in the work they do. They just do good enough to keep the job, he says. Frazzle, the second state, prevents people from being productive because they are upset with something. It may be a problem with their boss, a coworker or they just have too much to do and too little time. As a result, the body unleashes a cascade of stress hormones, and the person focuses on the problem bothering them rather than their job. Flow represents, in Golemans words, a state of neural harmony, where only what is relevant to the task at hand is what is activated. It maximizes cognitive abilities and is where people are at their best and most productive, Goleman says. How do you help keep employees in the flow? Managers should strive not to overwhelm employees but to challenge them by understanding what they are good at and what they want

to get better at. Goleman recommends they conduct a coaching conversation, a one-on-one talk where the focus is on what the employee wants from life, their career and their job. That enables the manager to determine what stretch assignments to give the employee. Goleman says that is a fantastic way to motivate people and help them improve. Goleman says managers can also improve employee performance by making work meaningful to them. He notes that in a crisis or when facing a big deadline, employees will rise to the occasion if it matters to them. Mission statements try to establish this shared purpose, but Goleman says they often fail because they are too abstract and distant. It is better and more powerful if this comes up in a natural conversation with people, he recommends. That is a smart mission for any company, Goleman says, to get as many people as possible in that state where they love what they are doing, it is meaningful, it is serving a larger objective and is engaging. Keep reading on IndustryWeek.com

Performance Reviews: Its Not Only What You Say, But How You Say It
Written on October 15, 2010 5:56pm | by Daniel Goleman |

Performance reviews are the HR ritual that everyone dreads. And now brain science shows that positive or negative, the way in which that review gets delivered can be a boon or a curse. If a boss gives even a good review in the wrong way, that message can be a low-grade curse, creating a neural downer. So I learned while reviewing recent scientific findings for an upcoming webinar that has got me rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence. The neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has found that when were in an upbeat, optimistic, I-can-handle-anything frame of mind, energized and enthusiastic about our goals, our brains turn up the activity in an area on the left side, just behind the forehead. Thats the brain state where we are at our best. But when were feeling down, with low energy and zero motivation, even anxious, our brain has turned up the volume on the right side. Thats the zone where we punt. And performance feedback that focuses on whats wrong with us also puts this downer brain area on overdrive. Were so preoccupied with the bad news (and our fantasies of this meaning well lose our job) that we just dont have the energy or cant focus on working at our best.

Even the bosss tone of voice can trigger one or another brain area. In one study, when people got positive performance feedback that was delivered in a negative, cold tone of voice, they came out of the session feeling downdespite the good news. Amazingly, when negative feedback came in a warm, positive tone of voice, they felt upbeat and energized. Of course a boss needs to give employees performance feedback. But too many are poor at giving feedback. The problem here takes two forms: being hyper-critical and focusing only on whats wrong without balancing it with whats right, or undermining even positive feedback with a negative tone. Either way, the messages the boss sends activate the wrong brain zone. Inept manager feedback makes us inept. The bad news: this is rampant. The really bad news: it hurts business. Thats the verdict of Samuel A. Culbert, a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He says annual reviews do more than create more stress for workers. They end up making everybody those who get them and those who give themless productive. In theory, artful performance feedback improves our performance, setting us on the right track. Such feedback is best given on the spot (not months later in a formal review), and with a sense of trust and openness between the giver and receiver. It might take the general form of When you do X, it does not help get to Y, because of Z. The X and Z here should be a clear and specificthat is, actionable information. But what happens when such on-the-spot feedback comes in the heat of the moment, when the manager is steamed and not caring the least about imparting X, Y, or Z? Managers have their emotional hijacks, too. Then theres the nightmare of the formal performance review. UCLAs Culbert argues they are largely a shama charade carried out to justify decisions on promotion or pay. And even when they do reflect actual performance, the feedback tends to be hollow rather than giving you a healthy balance of what you do well with what need to improve onand how. So Culbert suggests instead a performance preview, where a boss outlines how an employee can do even better. But the neuroscience adds a crucial nuance: even positive news should come with a positive tone. So add to that feedback a dollop of emotional intelligence.

Want Creative Workers? Loosen the Reins, Boss

Written on June 2, 2011 4:31pm | by Daniel Goleman |

Philip Glass, the contemporary composer, works on his new compositions only between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Thats the time, he says, when his creative ideas come to him. When filmmaker George Lucas needs to write or edit a script, he sequesters himself in a small cottage behind his house where he gets no calls or visitors.

A lesson in managing creativity can be found in the work discipline of such inventive geniuses: A protected bubble in time and space fosters the imaginative spirit. That notion challenges some prevailing wisdomparticularly the assumption that upping the pressure on workers will squeeze more innovative thinking out of them. Many managers assume that just calling people into a high-demand brainstorming session will get everyones best ideas out on the table. That is dead wrong, according to new research on the creative process. In a knowledge economy, where competitive advantage comes from leveraging the most innovative ideas and executing them well, leaders at every level would do well to reflect on these findings. In a study led by Teresa Amabile, a director of research at the Harvard Business School, researchers asked more than 1,000 knowledge workersmembers of research-anddevelopment, marketing and information-technology teamsto keep daily diaries. This data trove revealed a disconnect between how managers think they can best support creative efforts, and how those who are actually making the efforts assess what helps them most.

Small Wins Count

When the researchers asked managers to name the most effective ways they could encourage creativity, the most frequent response was praising people for good work. When they asked the workers themselves, the No. 1 carrot turned out to be providing ongoing managerial support of their daily progress. Only 5 percent of managers got this right. Daily progress toward a large goal, even small wins, primes positive moods and catalyzes creativity, the Harvard study found. Members of creative project teams also described the most common ways managers unwittingly undermine creative work. These ranged from dismissing an idea out of hand to ignoring suggestions to torpedoing an employees creative project, for instance through an abrupt reassignment or a cavalier change of mind. The researchers advised managers to set clear goals and then let people accomplish them in their own ways.

Aha Moment
The Harvard researchers also recommended that supervisors protect workers time and resources so they can have periods of sustained focus on their projects. This adviceto manage staff time wellis supported by new brain research that reveals what happens at the moment of Aha! Joy Bhattacharya at the University of London has found that in the moments just before a creative insight, the mind is typically relaxed and open to new ideas, as indicated by an alpha brain wave. As the Aha! approaches, theres an abrupt shift marked by high gamma-wave activity. This indicates that far-flung neural circuits are connecting in a new network. A third of a second after the peak of this activity, a novel idea floats into the mind. This finding indicates that creative insights cant be concocted on demand; they need to ripen. The first step in the creative process typically involves immersion in the problem and current thinking, and then gathering any information that might be relevant. But in the next

stage, intense effort should give way to letting what is known as the cognitive unconscious work on the problem by making novel connections. Constant distractions interrupt the mental space where creative insights simmer. Thats why so many Aha! moments come in the relaxed space of downtime when were doing something other than tensing to be creative.

Lessons From Google

Anyone whose work involves strategic thinking can learn something from the findings. The usual method for devising a competitive strategy is to come up with an idea and then analyze its value. The trouble is, no one tells you how to come up with that idea in the first place. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who created the innovative search formula that became the basis of Google Inc. (GOOG), know something about that process. They have instituted Googles famous once-a-week day for employees to work exclusively on their pet creative projects. Long before Google existed, 3M set aside 15 percent of employee time for the same thing. Another trendsetter was Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research center known for insulating its creative staff from competitive pressures and giving them time to reflect, explore and collaborate. Xerox PARC is the birthplace of a plethora of computer-age basics including laser printing and the graphical user interface that gave us windows and icons. In a day when the use of innovative ideas provides a competitive edge, its good to understand how squeezing time and people can unwittingly squelch creativity, hurting an organizations future. The best advice for someone who manages innovative thinkers is to nurture the conditions where creative ideas can flow most freely.

The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: An Interview with Daniel Goleman

Written on May 19, 2011 9:16pm | by Daniel Goleman |

By Monty McKeever for Tricycle, May 18, 2011. Read the full interview. Tricycle: How does understanding the brain help us manage stress? Daniel Goleman: There are several ways that understanding some brain mechanics and having basic neural tools at hand can help us manage stress. First of all, we have to realize that theres no escaping stress completely; this is the nature of life. Some of whats called samsara is what other people call stress. When were stressed the part of the brain that takes over, the part that reacts the most, is the circuitry that was originally designed to manage threatsespecially circuits that center on the amygdala, which is in the emotional centers of the brain. The amygdala is the trigger point for the fight, flight, or freeze response. When these circuits perceive a threat, they flood the body with stress hormones that do several things to prepare

us for an emergency. Blood shunts away from the organs to the limbs; thats the fight or flee. But the response is also cognitiveand, in modern life this is what matters most, it makes some shifts in how the mind functions. Attention tends to fixate on the thing that is bothering us, thats stressing us, that were worried about, thats upsetting, frustrating, or angering us. That means that we dont have as much attentional capacity left for whatever it is were supposed to be doing or want to be doing. In addition, our memory reshuffles its hierarchy so that whats most relevant to the perceived threat is what comes to mind most easilyand whats deemed irrelevant is harder to bring to mind. That, again, makes it more difficult to get things done than we might want. Plus, we tend to fall back on over-learned responses, which are responses learned early in lifewhich can lead us to do or say things that we regret later. It is important to understand that the impulses that come to us when were under stressparticularly if we get hijacked by itare likely to lead us astray. Its extremely important to widen the gap between impulse and action; and thats exactly what mindfulness does. This is one of the big advantages of mindfulness practice: it gives us a moment or two, hopefully, where we can change our relationship to our experience, not be caught in it and swept away by impulse, but rather to see that theres an opportunity here to make a different, better choice. I think that understanding the basic neural mechanisms involved is an aid to mindfulness because it tells us we dont have to get swept away.

Picking the Right Brain State for the Job

Written on May 8, 2011 4:15pm | by Daniel Goleman |

The brain is like an instrument we can tune for the job at handsomething like tuning a guitar to the right key for a song. Reading the fine print in a contract, cognitive scientists tell us, takes a very different state than, say, coming up with a clever name for your business. Our emotions are the keyboard we play in tuning our brains. Here are some of the ways moods match to tasks at hand: By allowing the brain to generate a greater fluidity of thoughts, our positive moods make us better at coming up with novel ideas, solving problems, and making decisions. On the downside, though, upbeat moods make us a bit more gullible, by weakening our ability to detect the weaknesses in an argument someone is making. We are more prone to making snap decisions we might regret later. And we are less careful in paying attention to the details of tasks. The upside of being down, or at least more somber: we can more easily focus on those details we missed or ignored while we were upbeatwe pay more attention even to boring jobs. The take home: get serious before you read that contract. Some other benefits to sour moods: were more skeptical, and so less likely to take someones word for iteven an experts. We ask more questions and come to our own independent conclusion.

Then theres anger. Aristotle wrote, anyone can get angrythats easy. But to get angry in the right way, for the right reason, at the right time, and with the right personthats not so easy. So have an unfair charge on your credit card bill? Get angrybut in the right way. Anger which can so readily get us to do or say something we regret laterhas its virtues. If we can channel the anger, it raises our energy and focuses us on changing things for the better persisting in complaining until we get that charge removed. Some downsides of anger are obvious, like the toxicity it puts in the air for those around us. But some costs are more subtle: anger makes us pessimistic, and so more likely to give up rather than keep trying after some setback. We have a built-in negative bias toward everything we see, and so a negative spin in our judgments. And then theres the problem that our emotions are contagiousso if were cranky at the office, we can not just ruin everyone elses day, but also their effectiveness. Yes, and Yes and No. Emotional intelligence has four parts: self-awareness, managing our emotions, empathy, and social skill. There are many tests of emotional intelligence, and most seem to show that women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to these basic skills for a happy and successful life. That edge may matter more than ever in the workplace, as more companies are starting to recognize the advantages of high EI when it comes to positions like sales, teams, and leadership. On the other hand, its not that simple. For instance, some measures suggest women are on average better than men at some forms of empathy, and men do better than women when it comes to managing distressing emotions. Whenever you talk about such gender differences in behavior, your are referring to two different Bell Curves, one for men and one for women, that largely overlap. What this means is that any given man might be as good or better as any woman at empathy, and a woman as good as or better than a specific man at handling upsets. Lets look at empathy. There are three kinds: cognitive empathy, being able to know how the other person sees things; emotional empathy, feeling what the other person feels; and empathic concern, or sympathybeing ready to help someone in need. Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, in general. This kind of empathy fosters rapport and chemistry. People who excel in emotional empathy make good counselors, teachers, and group leaders because of this ability to sense in the moment how others are reacting. Neuroscientists tell us one key to empathy is a brain region called the insula, which senses signals from our whole body. When were empathizing with someone, our brain mimics what that person feels, and the insula reads that pattern and tells us what that feeling is. Heres where women differ from men. If the other person is upset, or the emotions are disturbing, womens brains tend to stay with those feelings. But mens brains do something else: they sense the feelings for a moment, then tune out of the emotions and switch to other brain areas that try to solve the problem thats creating the disturbance.

Thus womens complaint that men are tuned out emotionally, and mens that women are too emotionalits a brain difference. Neither is betterboth have advantages. The male tune-out works well when theres a need to insulate yourself against distress so you can stay calm while others around you are falling apartand focus on finding a solution to an urgent problem. And the female tendency to stay tuned in helps enormously to nurture and support others in emotionally trying circumstances. Its part of the tend-and-befriend response to stress. Theres another way of looking at male-female differences in EI: Simon Bar-On Cohen at Cambridge University says that theres an extreme female brain which is high in emotional empathybut not so good at systems analysis. By contrast, the extreme male brain excels in systems thinking and is poor at emotional empathy (he does not mean that all men have the male brain, nor all women the female brain of course; many women are skilled at systems thinking, and many men at emotional empathy). Psychologist Ruth Malloy at the HayGroup Boston studies excellence in leaders. She finds when you only look at the starsleaders in the top ten percent of business performance gender differences in emotional intelligence abilities wash out: the men are as good as the women, the women as good as the men, across the board. That echoes a discovery by scientists who study primates. When a chimp sees another chimp who is upset, say from an injury, she mimics the distress, a way of showing empathy. Some chimps will then go over and give some solace to the upset chimp, for example, stroking the other to help it calm down. Female chimps do this more often than male chimps dowith one intriguing exception: the alpha males, the troupe leaders, give solace even more often than do female chimps. In natures design, leaders, it seems, need a large dose of empathic concern.

Resilience for the Rest of Us

Written on May 4, 2011 10:42am | by Daniel Goleman |

There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain. If youve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article Building Resilience. Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook. But, fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life. What about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leaders life? Resilience is, again, the answer but with a different flavor. You need to retrain your brain.

The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from lifes downers. Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesnt now and then?), thats a sure sign that our amygdala the brains radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response has hijacked the brains executive centers in the prefrontal cortex. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state. The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, finds Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. Hes also found that when were distressed, theres heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area. Each of us has a characteristic level of left/right activity that predicts our daily mood range if were tilted to the right, more upsets; if to the left, quicker recovery from distress of all kinds. To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24/7, biotech startup and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn offered the employees at the biotech outfit instruction in mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus but without reacting. The instructions are simple: 1. Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes for instance, close your office door and mute your phone. 2. Sit comfortably, with your back straight but relaxed. 3. Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation, and start again on the next breath. 4. Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in any way. 5. See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction thoughts, sounds, whatever let them go and return your attention to your breath. After eight weeks, and an average 30 minutes a day of practicing mindfulness, the employees had shifted their ratio from tilted toward the stressed-out right side to the resilient left side. Whats more, they said they remembered what they loved about their work they got in touch with what had brought them energy in the first place. To get the full benefit, a daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes works best; think of it like a mental exercise routine. It can be very helpful to have guided instructions, but the key is to find a slot for it in your daily routine. (There are even instructions for using a long drive as your practice session.) Mindfulness has been steadily gaining credence among hard-nosed executives. There are several centers where mindfulness instruction has been tailored for businesspeople, from tony resorts like Miraval to programs in mindful leadership at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Google University has been offering a course on mindfulness to employees for years. Might you benefit from tuning up your brains resilience circuitry by learning mindfulness? Among high-performing executives, the impacts of stress can be subtle. My colleagues

Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee suggest as a rough diagnostic of leadership stress asking yourself, Do I have a vague sense of unease, restlessness, or the feeling that life is not great (a higher standard than good enough)? A bit of mindfulness might put your mind at ease. Daniel Goleman is Co-Director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University, co-author of Primal Leadership: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, and, most recently, author of The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights.

Daniel Goleman responds to Po Bronson at Newsweek

Written on November 3, 2009 7:35am | by Daniel Goleman |

Po Bronson is a first-rate journalist, and Im sure NurtureShock is a wonderful book (I havent had a chance to see it yet). But in his Newsweek blog Po has mis-stated several of my positions. So for the record, let me begin to set the record straight by quoting from my Forward to the 10th anniversary paperback edition of Emotional Intelligence, where I write about one myth widely repeated: the fallacy that EQ accounts for 80 percent of success. This claim is preposterous. In the Forward I go on to explain that the misinterpretation stems from estimates that IQ accounts for around 20 percent of success in careers. This leaves 80 percent unaccounted for. But this does not mean emotional intelligence explains the rest of career success. As I wrote in Emotional Intelligence, a wide range of elements, from family wealth and education, to simple luck including emotional intelligence to some degree and many more factors are at play. Malcolm Gladwells recent book Outliers argues for chance opportunity as one such. Another common misconception, I wrote in the Forward, takes the form of recklessly applying the importance of emotional intelligence to domains where it matters far less than IQ academic achievement being the most obvious. When it comes to career success, the picture is more nuanced. IQ scores are the best predictor of what career rung we can manage. Thats what they were designed to do; IQ tests were first widely applied in sorting into the right specialty and rank millions of American soldiers during World War I. But when it comes to predicting who among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will emerge as an effective leader, IQ loses is predictive power. This is partly due to the floor effect, where in order to enter the top echelons of a given profession or large organization everyone has already been sifted for IQ. At those levels a relatively high IQ becomes a threshold ability what you need to enter and stay in the game. In my 1998 book Working with Emotional Intelligence I proposed that EI-based abilities more often than IQ-type abilities or technical skills are the discriminating competencies that predict who among a group of very smart people will lead most ably. This is a key point for anyone running an organization who must decide what abilities to look for in potential leaders. One methodology used in industrial/organizational psychology to make this

judgment is called competence modeling, which contrasts highly effective leaders with mediocre ones, and determines what specific abilities the stars display that the others lack. Organizations around the world use the competence modeling method to make personnel decisions, performing independent analyses of their own employees. As I wrote in the Forward, if you scan these competency models, you discover that IQ and technical skills drop toward the bottom of the list the higher the position (though they remain stronger predictors of excellence in lower-rung jobs). Competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from 80 to 100 percent EI-based abilities. I inadvertently may have added to the confusion about EI as a factor in success when I summarized this competence data in ways that were misconstrued as claiming that EI (I generally dont use the term EQ) is more powerful in predicting career success than IQ. Once I realized that people did not understand the limited context and correct basis of this statement, I gave more qualifying information. Still, some press accounts and other secondary sources continue to misrepresent my views, as Po Bronson has done here. Another point relates to the contrast between executive function and emotional intelligence. Po Bronson seems to say that executive function and emotional intelligence are in some kind of competition as concepts. Actually I would argue they are partly overlapping constructs. My model of emotional intelligence elaborates four domains of ability: self-awareness, selfregulation, empathy, and interpersonal skill. The first two self-awareness and selfregulation are themselves elements of executive function, all of which are based in the operations of zones of the prefrontal cortex. Indeed, in writing about self-regulation in my 1995 book Emotional Intelligence I cite the work of Walter Mischel and his now-famous marshmallow test with four-year-olds, which assessed their ability to manage impulsivity and delay gratification two key indicators of executive function. I would expect executive function and emotional intelligence (at least as described in my model perhaps not with Salovey and Mayers) to correlate strongly with EF. Thats a question for further research. Po also misrepresents curricula in social/emotional learning as a waste of time. An article by University of Illinois psychologist Roger Weissberg and colleagues at the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning, now in press in the journal Child Development, reports on a meta-analysis of more than 200 studies comparing students who had the program with those who do not. The results, as presented in an earlier version of this paper: The programs reduce violence and other antisocial behavior by around 10% and enhance positive behaviors like paying attention in class by the same margin and benefits are greatest in schools that need it the most. Most intriguing, academic achievement test scores go up around 11 percent. That sounds like a program anyone would want their children to benefit from. Another odd notion put forward by Po is that Peter Salovey represents the academic side of emotional intelligence and I represent the commercial side. I do not sell any product or service related to EI. The sole exception: like Peter Salovey I have co-authored an assessment tool for EI (this is standard practice among psychologists; the various IQ tests embody differing theories of intelligence and how to measure it and are designed by the theorist). Our assessment tools are available only to professionals. Saloveys is recognized as the flagship general measure of EI; mine is the ESCI, designed specifically for leadership development. Both Peter (I consider him a friend) and I are members of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based at Rutgers. Our hope for the field is that rigorous research will more sharply define the EI construct, its correlates and its practical

applications, all based on empirical data. Thats the way science grows and evolves. But good science takes time. Give it a decade, Po, and lets revisit these issues.