As Daniel Goleman points out in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. In fact, Goleman goes on to site Howard Gardner’s 1983 book (or manifesto) Frames of the Mind, which refuted the IQ view that one form of intelligence, existed. It claimed, rather, that a wide spectrum of intelligences exist. According to Gardner, IQ contributes about 20 percent to the factors that determine life success, which leaves 80 percent to other factors. (Gardner, 1995). While Gardner identified seven key varieties of intelligence, the “Interpersonal” and “Intrapersonal” intelligences correlate with what we learned earlier that are key factors to success in business.
The principles and theories of business are pretty straight forward. Intelligent people can master business acumen over years of practice. What makes the practice of business challenging and rewarding is that no matter what business one finds herself in, people are involved. Successful business people are individuals with high degrees of interpersonal intelligence or the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work and how to work cooperatively with them. While interpersonal intelligence is very important, as we learned from Figure 1, visible knowledge and skills are only the tip of the iceberg. Intrapersonal intelligence is the “correlative ability turned inward; it is the capacity to form an accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be able to use that model to operate effectively in life” (Gardner, 1993, p. 9).
At a very young age, I began reading leadership and psychology books. When you have read as many books as I have, you begin to see themes and patterns among authors. I began to realize that we really do not have very many original thoughts, only new ways of organizing and looking at information. Even as I write this paper, I realize how much each of us is a sum of our experiences and the people who have made impressions upon us. I scan books now, looking for gold nuggets of information to add to my knowledge base. I rarely purchase a book unless it strikes me as a new way of looking at a concept or theme. As we continue to be bombarded with more and more information, the need for relevant and useful information seems to be even more critical.
During our MBA leadership instruction, we had the opportunity to select and read various books related to leadership and psychology themes. Two books in particular, when read together, get to the core of how leaders can be effective and why they must take their responsibility as leaders seriously. As you can see from the above discussion, success in business has very little has to do with IQ intelligence alone; yet, it has everything to do with one’s emotional intelligence development.
Research supports the fact that we are born with our IQ; we can get better at taking the tests and improve our score by a point or two, but this number remains fairly constant. The beauty of emotional intelligence and value added to individuals is that with work and commitment, we can each develop areas of our emotional intelligence beyond our genetic make-up. When tapped, our EQ (emotional intelligence) will yield more lasting results to the individual than development of our IQ. Such emotional attention translates to more prepared and qualified MBA graduates.
How Leaders Can Be Effective
The first book I will examine in this section, Dr. Steven Covey’s Principle-centered Leadership (or what I call the “How” book) is a great example of the current perspective on leadership and practical things one can do right now to improve one’s life and leadership skills. Principle-centered Leadership expands Covey’s conceptual ideas (presented in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) to leadership and organizations. As with most of Covey’s work, corporate management and leadership training is readily available for purchase. I was first introduced to Covey’s 7 Habits my freshman year in college and have been directed to it a number of times by mentors throughout my career.
Covey’s Principle-centered Leadership suggests that the highest level of human motivation is a sense of personal contribution. Whether one agrees with this idea or not, this is a common belief among leadership authors. As with the Figure 1 from the Introduction (in which central and surface competencies were represented by an iceberg diagram) Principle-centered Leadership assumes a circle with four dimensions: Security, Wisdom, Power and Guidance. When an individual is out of balance or drawn to one or more dimensions without skills or insight to return to center, the individual has a difficult time achieving a balanced life or leadership style. The center of the circle represents four principles, which work at four levels. The dimensions, or factors, are interdependent. When these four factors are harmonized, according to Covey, it will create the great force of a noble personality, a balanced character and a beautifully integrated individual (Covey, 1992).
Characteristics of Principle-centered Leaders
While every principle-centered leader has unique personalities and skills, there are common visible characteristics which can be seen universally. According to Covey, principle-centered leaders are continually learning by using past experiences and mistakes to improve the performance in present leadership responsibilities. They are service-orientated with a strong personal commitment to improving circumstances for others as well as for themselves. Principle-centered leaders radiate positive energy and believe in other’s unique talents and abilities. They also lead balanced lives, seeing life as an adventure to be explored and enjoyed. This life adventure provides many opportunities to engage with others in win-win synergistic experiences. When they get tired, they take care of themselves and renew their spirits to engage in another day of life. These individuals have a strong work ethic and personal commitment to the need for continuous improvement in four areas:
- personal and professional development;
- interpersonal relations;
- managerial effectiveness; and
- organizational productivity (pp. 33-39).
Principle-centered leadership is practiced from the inside-out on four levels which ties to four principles. Each level is “necessary but insufficient”—meaning we have to work on all principles at each level to create a balanced and effective leadership style. Figure 6 below aligns the principle to the level.
Figure 6. Four Levels, Four Principles
(Adapted from Covey, 1992, p. 31)
(Adapted from Covey, 1992, p. 31)
Why Leaders Need to Be Effective
The second, or the “Why” book, is, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. This text provides insight into the responsibility we all have as leaders—to add the best we have to the emotional soup among the groups we lead (both large and small)—as well as tangible examples of why and when to use different leadership strategies. Leaders have the greatest impact on organizational results and developing healthy corporate cultures.
Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee write:
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.
[…] Even if they get everything else just right, if leaders fail in this primal task of driving emotions in the right direction, nothing they do will work as well as it could or should. (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002, p. 3, emphasis added)
The Primal Dimension
According to the authors:
The emotional task of the leader is primal—in two senses—it is both the original and the most important act of leadership. […] Throughout history and in cultures everywhere, the leader in any human group has been the one to whom others look for assurance and clarity when facing uncertainty or threat, or when there’s a job to be done. The leader acts as the group’s emotional guide. Quite simply, in any human group the leader has maximal power to sway everyone’s emotions. All leadership includes the primal dimension—for better or for worse. (pp. 5-6, emphasis added)
It isn’t hard to find examples in one’s life or career in which a leader has inspired (good) or stirred up (bad) emotion within you.
The Open Loop
Goleman et al. explains why this is the case:
The reason a leader’s manner—not just what he does, but how he does it—matters so much lies in the design of the human brain: what scientists […] call the open-loop nature of the limbic system, our emotional centers. […] An open-loop system depends largely on external sources to manage itself. (p. 6, emphasis added)
In other words, we rely on connections with other people for our own emotional stability. Despite advances in civilization, the open-loop limbic system is part of who we are and what makes us human. Even though the open-loop is so much a part of our lives, we usually don’t notice the process itself. According to the authors, scientists have captured this “attunement of emotions” in the laboratory by measuring the physiology—such as heart rate—of two people as they have a good conversation. As the conversation begins, their bodies each operate at different rhythms. By the end of a simple fifteen-minute conversation, their physiological profiles look remarkably similar—a phenomenon which scientists called mirroring.
Remarkably, emotions spread without resistance in this way whenever people are near one another, even when the contact is completely nonverbal. The same effect holds in the office, boardroom, or shop floor; people in groups at work inevitably “catch” feelings from one another, sharing everything from jealousy and envy to angst or euphoria. Scientists have found the more cohesive the group, the stronger the sharing of moods, emotional history, and even “hot buttons” occurs.
Contagion and Leadership
Goleman et al. explain that leaders have much more responsibility over emotional mirroring than others:
The continual interplay […] among members of a group creates a kind of emotional soup […] everyone adds his/her own flavor to the mix. […] it is the leader who adds the strongest seasoning. Why? […] that enduring reality of business: Everyone watches the boss. People take their emotional cues from the top, even when the boss isn’t highly visible. (Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002, p. 8)
It was intriguing to learn that even the CEO who works behind closed doors on an upper floor is watched—his attitude affects the moods of his direct reports, and a domino effect ripples throughout the company’s emotional climate. In these studies, even when leaders are not talking, they were watched more carefully than anyone else in the group. When people raise a question for the group as a whole, they would keep their eyes on the leader to see his/her response.
Remarkably, group members generally see the leader’s emotional reaction as the most valid response, and so model their own on it—particularly in an ambiguous situation, in which various members react differently. In a sense, the leader sets the emotional standard. (See research by Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002; Bachman, 1988)
I can’t help but think how valuable this information is/could be to professional educators (classroom CEOs) in the MBA adult classroom.
Definitely worth the time to read, Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee go on to discuss leadership competencies and how they are developed through emotional intelligence. These competencies include:
Self–awareness: which include emotional awareness, accurate information about oneself and level of self-confidence, etc;
Self–management: which include self-control, transparency, adaptability, achievement, initiative and optimism;
Social Awareness: which include empathy, organizational awareness and service, and finally;
Relationship Management: which include inspiration, influence, and the development of others, becoming a catalyst for change, conflict management, teamwork and collaboration.
At this point in our discussion, we are beginning to see the importance of leadership and how critical it is in developing lifelong learners. If emotional intelligence is truly as vital to leadership and business management as these experts claim, there should be more to graduate education than lectures and information regurgitation. The important thing isn’t that we know that MBA students are intelligent, and that lifelong learning and leadership skills are key factors to success. It is that we know how this knowledge applies to transforming graduate business education and act now to apply this knowledge to create informed and strategic change within the walls of graduate business education.
