What Makes a Leader? Daniel Goleman

What Makes a Leader? Daniel Goleman

1. It's emotional intelligence: a group of five skills that en- able the best leaders to maximize their own and their followers' performance.

   • The EI skills are: • Self-awareness—knowing one's strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, and impact on others.
     • • Self-regulation—controlling or redirect- ing disruptive impulses and moods
       • • Motivation—relishing achievement for its own sake
         • • Empathy—understanding other people's emotional makeup
           • • Social skill—building rapport with others to move them in desired directions
     • STRENGTHENING YOUR EI Use practice and feedback from others to strengthen specific EI skills.

2. Truly ef- fective leaders are also distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence, which includes self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, em- pathy, and social skill.

   • Goleman found direct ties between emotional intelligence and measurable busi- ness results.

3. Evaluating Emotional Intelligence

   • When I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.
     • My analysis showed that emo- tional intelligence played an increasingly impor- tant role at the highest levels of the company, where differences in technical skills are of neg- ligible importance.
     • Other researchers have confirmed that emo- tional intelligence can also be linked to strong performance.
     • Self-aware people can also be recognized by their self-confidence.

4. Self-Awareness

   • Self-awareness is the first component of emo- tional intelligence.
     • Self-awareness means having a deep un- derstanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weak- nesses, needs, and drives.
     • People who have a high degree of self- awareness recognize how their feelings affect them, other people, and their job performance.
     • Self-awareness extends to a person’s under- standing of his or her values and goals.

5. Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?

   • Scientific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a genetic com- ponent to emotional intelligence and psychological and developmental research indicates that nurture plays a role as well.
     • It’s important to emphasize that building one’s emotional intelligence cannot—will not—happen without sincere desire and con- certed effort.
   • Emotional intelligence increases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity.
     • Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neurotransmitters of the brain’s limbic system, which governs feelings, impulses, and drives.
       • To enhance emotional intelligence, organi- zations must refocus their training to include the limbic system.

6. Self-Regulation

   • Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner conversation, is thecomponent of emotional intelligence that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings.
     • Many of the bad things that happen in companies are a function of im- pulsive behavior.
   • People who are in control of their feelings and impulses—that is, people who are reasonable—are able to create an en- vironment of trust and fairness.
     • Self-regulation is important for com- petitive reasons.
       • Self-regulation often does not get its due.

7. Motivation

   • If there is one trait that virtually all effective leaders have, it is motivation.
     • Those with leadership potential are moti- vated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of achievement.
       • They are persistent with their questions about why things are done one way rather than another; they are eager to explore new approaches to their work.
     • People with high motivation remain optimistic even when the score is against them.
   • If you set the performance bar high for yourself, you will do the same for the organization when you are in a position to do so.

8. Empathy

   • Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at least three rea- sons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of globalization; and the growing need to retain talent.
     • Empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in today’s infor- mation economy.

9. Social Skill

   • The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a per- son’s ability to manage relationships with others.
   • Moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.
     • That doesn’t mean they socialize continually; it means they work according to the assumption that nothing important gets done alone.
       • And a leader’s motivation will be useless if he cannot communicate his passion to the organization.
         • Social skill allows leaders to put their emotional intelligence to work.