Leaders In London

Q: What’s the shortest distance between two people?
A: Laughter

What’s that got to do with leadership?

Empathy – understanding how others tick and being able to connect with them - is at the core of Emotional Intelligence, or ‘EQ’, as the psychologist Daniel Goleman calls it.

Goleman uses laughter as an example of a powerful connection (flowing directly from your limbic system to the other person) that by-passes the brain and creates an instant sense of shared experience.

We now know, from Goleman’s books such as Primal Leadership, that being highly competent won’t make you an effective leader unless you have Emotional Intelligence; the ability to connect with people emotionally and create that sense of shared experience. EQ triumphs over IQ, his research shows.

Goleman’s latest work, published in the Harvard Business Review, goes further and explains how and why followers actually ‘mirror’ how their leaders behave.

Now, in tough trading conditions, when you need to keep people engaged and their performance high in the face of uncertainty, you need Social Intelligence more than ever as a core part of your leadership. ‘Social Intelligence’, says Goleman in a new article in the Harvard Business Review this month, is the outward-facing aspects of EQ; a sub-set of Emotional Intelligence if you will. It’s how you relate to others. Social Intelligence includes these seven leadership skills, says Goldman:

1. Empathy
2. Attunement
3. Organizational awareness
4. Influence
5. Developing others
6. Inspiration
7. Teamwork

Action: Goleman’s new papre in the HBR ‘Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership; says you can ‘train your brain’ to develop Social Intelligence – the ability to connect with others positively to develop a high performance, highly co-operative team. Even if you feel you are not a natural at making emotional connections, his research suggests you can rewire your own brain by consciously working at it. His workshop at Leaders in London later this year will explain how to do it (book before September 26th to save up to £500).

Click here to:
watch a short video interview with Goldman
link to a summary of the article
read the article itself if you have time (about 20 minutes), and
view a table that shows the seven leadership skills and explains them, so you can pick out which ones you are strong at and which ones need work.

As mentioned in the post below, it occurs to me a lot of us are leading through a downturn - tough trading conditions, whatever you want to call it - for the first time. So, Douglas Adams’ advice from The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, is the best of all. It’s on the button.

Part of your leadership job now is helping others not to panic, too. People panic when they feel things are out of their control. Rising energy and food prices, an uncertain economy, talk of recession, worries about their own future as some organizations shed jobs…All of these can contribute to low morale and a drop in performance just when you need a high performing organization most.

You help fix that by:

Clearly setting out what’s happening in your market. Also, listening to what your front line is telling you is happening in the market, as they are your eyes and ears and often know best what needs to be done.

Involving people on how the organization should respond to emerging trading conditions.

And doing what you say you’ll do.

‘Consulting’ doesn’t mean a long drawn-out consultation process. It means using the rapport and open communications channels you have established with individuals and people en masse to involve them in adjusting the organization or team’s path to account for changes in the market: you need their agreement and buy-in, as always, and then they’ll help you get there.

Daniel Goleman calls this ability to take the emotional temperature of the people who report to you ’social intelligence’ - part of the broader ‘Emotional Intelligence’ that he has popularized. Where EI includes knowing yourself and your emotions, SI focuses on knowing the emotions of people you work with, who report to you, and customers. This used to be called ’soft stuff’. But, as it’s critical to how you and your people adapt to the current environment - whether you thrive or not - and to maintaining high performance, the soft stuff is now clearly the hard stuff.

Goleman is coming to Leaders in London to help us lead in a way that harnesses Social Intelligence.

Leadership is a hard-nosed thing, right? Especially in a downturn. If you’re too soft, people will take advantage, won’t strive to hit their targets (aka to please you, in these days of evaporating bonuses) and you won’t be a strong leader, right? Well, it’s not really as simple as that, is it.

Being a ‘hard but fair’ leader, a disciplinarian who keeps on top of people to ensure they do what they are supposed to do, and that they constantly report back to you for a pat on the head and try hard to avoid your temper if they did wrong…It’s all a bit old-fashioned and uninspiring, isn’t it; both for you and the people you lead. Yes, you need some of the elements of a ‘hard but fair leader’ - setting expectations for yourselves and others and ensuring you and others strive for high performance - but all the baggage that goes with it is increasingly outmoded.

If you’re anything like me, you want people to perform to a high level and do the right thing regardless of whether you are there or not, whether you will know about it or not, whether you will shout about it or not. You want them to do it because they are inspired to do it, not because they are afraid of the boss if they don’t do it.

Over on his Leadership Now blog, Michael McKinney re-visits this whole ‘tough leader or kind leader’ thing and says it’s not a case of opposites, not a case of hard or soft leadership. Michael looks at the book LEading With Kindness, to ask if it’s possible and to break the idea that tough/hard/demanding leadership is the opposite of kind/soft/undemanding leadership. Michael says:

Bill Baker and Michael O’Malley have done a service with their book, Leading With Kindness. As awkward as that title might seem at first blush, the authors aren’t suggesting that kind leaders have a soft personality, or are sissies, or are well liked at all times. (“You can be hard-nosed and kind.”) Leading with kindness is not a hot-tub leadership where the participants pass the torch singing Kumbaya. In fact they write, “They muddle through life much like the rest of us, mostly unnoticed except by those around them who are keenly aware that they are in the presence of someone special.”

(That last sentence reminds me that great leaders are not great because they are super-human. Instead, they are ordinary but growth-oriented people with character that have chosen to make a commitment to a bold course of action that is in the best interest of those they serve despite the odds.)

Gets my vote. Click on the blog link, above, to read more. Just because trading conditions get hard, doesn’t mean your leadership style has to.

Daniel Goleman on how social intelligence - emotional intelligence applied externally to manage your relationships - leads to higher performing organizations

“When Claudio Fernando-Araoz, head of research for the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International, looked at CEOs who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany and Japan: those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise – but fired for lack of emotional intelligence. They simply could not win over, or sometimes even just get along with, their board of directors, or their direct reports, or others on whom their own success depended.

All this has made intuitive and theoretical sense to me. But I like data. So I’m pleased to see several new studies that confirm how essential social intelligence – as opposed to simple self-mastery – can be for leadership effectiveness. The findings:

* At a transportation company, those leaders strongest in the social intelligence competencies led greater revenue growth, compared to executives with strengths only in the self-mastery competencies.
* The same goes for banking: at a major nationwide bank, high social intelligence (but not self-mastery alone) predicted executive’s yearly performance appraisal, which in turn reflects business success.
* The value of social intelligence even applies to clergy: among Catholic priests,, greater social intelligence predicted more satisfied parishioners.”

That’s Daniel Goleman, of Emotional Intelligence fame, explaining how the social intelligence side of EI is essential for keeping companies performing at a high level. If you think tough trading conditions mean EI is not essential, then you are exactly wrong. The soft stuff is now the hard stuff. Dr. Goleman will be explaining at Leaders in London. Here’s his blog if you want to browse his thinking: Daniel Goleman Blog