The Power of Emotional Intelligence

The Leader’s Primal Challenge: Self-Management

From self-awareness – understanding one’s emotions and being clear about one’s purpose – flows self-management, the focused drive that all leaders need to achieve their goals.  Without knowing what we’re feeling, we’re at a loss to manage those feelings.  Instead, our emotions control us.  That’s usually fine, when it comes to positive emotions like enthusiasm and the pleasure of meeting a challenge.  But no leader can afford to be controlled by negative emotions, such as frustration and rage or anxiety and panic.

The problem is that such negative emotional surges can be overwhelming; they’re the brain’s way of making us pay attention to a perceived threat.  The result is that those emotions swamp the thinking brain’s capacity to focus on the task at hand, whether it’s strategic planning or dealing with news of a drop in market share.

A brain scan of someone who is upset or anxious shows high activity in the amygdala and the right side of the prefrontal area in particular, among other areas.  This picture depicts an amygdala hijack: The emotional centers are driving or reverberating with the high activity in the prefrontal zone, which makes us fix our attention on, and obsess about, the cause of our distress.  But when the scan shows someone in an upbeat mood, the key circuitry runs from the left prefrontal cortex down to the amygdala.  The brain circuitry that generates good moods concentrates in the left prefrontal area and inhibits the action of the amygdala and connected area that drive distress.

The left side of the prefrontal area, researchers believe, is part of a key circuit that inhibits neurons in the amygdala, and so keeps a person from being captured by distress.  This circuitry helps a leader to calm rocky emotions and maintain a confident, enthusiastic tone.

Self-management, then – which resembles an ongoing inner conversation – is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being a prisoner of our feelings.  It’s what allows the mental clarity and concentrated energy that leadership demands, and what keeps disruptive emotions from throwing us off track.  Leaders with such self-mastery embody an upbeat, optimistic enthusiasm that tunes resonance to the positive range.

All of this is critically important to emotional intelligence.  Because emotions are so contagious – especially from leaders to others in the group – leaders’ first tasks are the emotional equivalent of good hygiene – leaders’ first tasks are the emotional equivalent of good hygiene: getting their own emotions in hand.  Quite simply, leaders cannot effectively manage emotions in anyone else without first handling their own.  How a leader feels thus becomes more than just a private matter; given the reality of emotional leakage, a leader’s emotions have public consequences.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that a leader will never reel from life’s slings and arrows.  A divorce, a struggling child, or the illness of a loved one will inevitably trouble anyone.  But the key is whether the urgencies of a leader’s private life spill over into relationships on the job.

Leaders who freely vent their anger, catastrophize, or otherwise let their distressing emotions run amok can’t also lead the group into a positive register, where the best work gets done.  Again the brain plays a critical rule: In a sense, whenever two people have an encounter, there is a dance of amygdalas that creates either resonance or dissonance.  In this neural tug-of-war, the person with stronger emotional self-management abilities tends to win.  When a person with a pronounced left prefrontal tilt – that is, a person who is perennially upbeat – talks with someone known to be confrontational about issues they disagree on, the unflappable person typically ends up calming the irritable one.

The secret?  Typically, disagreeable people provoke irritation in those they encounter, who then start to feel angry in return.  In other words, in the open loop, the irritated amygdala draws the other into perturbation.  But when the other person does not return aggression in kind – in fact, remains firmly in a positive register – then the person with the aroused amygdala has a chance to calm down, or a least not become more provoked.  Indeed, in one study the irritable person reported afterward that he just couldn’t be confrontational because the other person kept responding with positivity.

Similarly, leaders who can stay optimistic and upbeat, even under intense pressure, radiate the positive feelings that create resonance.  By staying in control of their feelings and impulses, they craft an environment of trust, comfort, and fairness.  And that self-management has a trickle-down effect from the leader.  No one wants to be known as hothead when the boss consistently exudes a calm demeanor.

Not surprisingly, self-management is also important for competitive reasons.  In the current ambiguous environment, where companies continually merge and break apart and technology transforms work at a dizzying pace, leaders who have mastered their emotions are better able to roll with the changes and help the organization to adjust.

Self-management also enables transparency, which is not only a leadership virtue but also an organizational strength.  Transparency – an authentic openness to others about one’s feelings, beliefs, and actions – allows integrity, or the sense that a leader can be trusted.  At a primal level, integrity hinges on impulse control, keeping us from acting in ways that we might regret.   Integrity also means that a leader lives his values.  Such leaders strike others as genuine because they are not making a pretense of being other than they are.  Integrity, therefore, boils down to one question: Is what you’re doing is keeping with your own values?  EI leaders, we find, hold to an integrity that makes them comfortable with the questions transparency poses.

Ultimately, the most meaningful act of responsibility that leaders can do is to control their own state of mind.  The original sense of the hipster term cool referred to the capacity of African American jazz musicians who could control their rage at the racism of the times, even as they channeled that anger into an extraordinary expression of deep feeling.  Effective leadership demands the same sort of capacity for managing one’s own turbulent feelings while allowing the full expression of positive emotions.

Social Awareness and the Limbic Tango

After self-awareness and emotional self-management, resonant leadership requires social awareness or, put another way, empathy.  The ability to empathize, in its most basic form, stems from neurons in extended circuitry connected to, and in, the amygdala that read another person’s face and voice for emotion and continually attune us to how someone else feels as we speak with them.  This circuitry sends out a steady stream of bulletins – he’s getting a bit upset by that last remark… looks a little bored now… he liked hearing that – which the prefrontal zone and related areas use to fine-tune what we say or do next.

By keeping us posted on how the other person has just responded, the amygdala and connected circuits keep us in synch as a key relay station in the interpersonal open loop for emotions.  This circuitry also attunes our own biology to the dominant range of feelings of the person we are with, so that our emotional states tend to converge.  One term scientists use for this neural attunement is limbic resonance, “a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation” whereby two people harmonize their emotional state.  Any time we have a genuine connection with someone where we’ve felt “on the same wavelength” – whether a pleasant time or even a good cry together – it signals that we’ve just experienced such an interlocking of brains.  This tacit harmony occurs in any good human connection – between a mother and child, with friends over a cup of coffee, among team members laughing together as they work.  It’s the resonance that can trigger a sweep of emotion through a group or crowd, whether the feeling is grief, such as at a funeral, or excitement after a successful IPO.

While empathy represents a necessary ingredient of EI leadership, another lies in leaders’ ability to express their message in a way that moves others.  Resonance flows from a leader who expresses feelings with conviction because those emotions are clearly authentic, rooted in deeply held values.

EI leaders spread emotions in the positive register: They move people by articulating a dream they hold that elicits optimism, or compassion, or a sense of connection – aspirations that point toward a hopeful future.  At the brain level, such messages emanate upbeat emotions, a range of feeling centered in the circuitry to and from the left prefrontal area.  This zone of the brain also holds the key to motivation; as these positive visions spread, a group catches fire around that common goal.  Think, for example, of Martin Luther King Jr. mobilizing the American civil rights movement with his powerful refrain “I have a dream,” which envisioned a world where all people would have equal opportunities.

Social awareness – particularly empathy – is crucial for the leader’s primal task of driving resonance.  By being attuned to how others feel in the moment, a leader can say and do what’s appropriate – whether it be to calm fears, assuage anger, or join in good spirits.  This attunement also lets a leader sense the shared values and priorities that can guide the group.  By the same token a leader who lacks empathy will unwittingly be off-key, and so speak and act in ways that set off negative reactions.  Empathy – which includes listening and taking other people’s perspectives – allows leaders to tune into the emotional channels between people that create resonance.  And staying attuned lets them fine-tune their message to keep it in synch.

Empathy: The Business Case

Of all the dimensions of emotional intelligence, social awareness may be the most easily recognized.  We have all felt the empathy of a sensitive teacher or friend; we have al been struck by its absence in an unfeeling coach or boss.  But when it comes to business, we rarely hear people praised, let alone rewarded, for their empathy.  The very word seems unbusinesslike, out of place amid the rough realities of the marketplace.

But empathy – the fundamental competence of social awareness – doesn’t mean a kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay” mushiness.  It doesn’t mean that leaders should adopt other people’s emotions as their own and try to please everybody.  That would be a nightmare – it would make action impossible.  Rather, empathy means taking employees’ feelings into thoughtful consideration and then making intelligent decisions that work those feelings into the response.  And, most crucially, empathy makes resonance possible; lacking empathy, leaders act in ways that create dissonance.

Empathy builds on self-management, but that means expressing emotions as appropriate, not stifling them.  EI leaders’ ability to empathize sometimes leads them to tear up or cry when their employees have cried, whether because of a personal tragedy or even during a reprimand or firing.  Alternatively, while a considered response doesn’t necessarily signal a lack of passion, leaders who swallow their emotions can appear emotionally aloof.

When leaders are able to grasp other people’s feelings and perspectives, they access a potent emotional guidance system that keeps what they say and do on track.  As such, empathy is the sine qua non of all social effectiveness in working life.  Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say.  They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and they respond on the mark.  Accordingly, empathy is key to retaining talent.  Leaders have always needed empathy to develop and keep good people, but whenever there is a war for talent, the stakes are higher.  Of all the factors in a company’s control, tuned-out, dissonant leaders are one of the main reasons that talented people leave – and take the company’s knowledge with them.

Finally, in the growing global economy, empathy is a critical skill for both getting along with diverse workmates and doing business with people from other cultures.  Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and misunderstandings.  Empathy is an antidote that attunes people to subtleties in body language, or allows them to hear emotional message beneath the words.

Relationship Management

The triad of self-awareness, self-management, and empathy all come together in the final EI ability: relationship management.  Here we find the most visible tools of leadership – persuasion, conflict management, and collaboration among them.  Managing relationships skillfully boils down to handling other people’s emotions.  This, in turn, demands that leaders be aware of their own emotions and attuned with empathy to the people they lead.  If a leader acts disingenuously or manipulatively, for instance, the emotional radar of followers will sense a note of falseness and they will instinctively distrust that leader.  The art of handling relationships well, then, begins with authenticity: acting from one’s genuine feelings.  Once leaders have attuned to their own vision and values, steadied in the positive emotional range, and tuned into the emotions of the group then relationship management skills let them interact in ways that catalyze resonance.

Handling relationships, however, is not as simple as it sounds.  It’s not just a matter of friendliness, although people with strong social skills are rarely mean-spirited.  Rather, relationship management is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the right direction, whether that’s agreement on a marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new project.

That is why socially skilled leaders tend to have resonance with a wide circle of people – and have a knack for finding common ground and building rapport.  That doesn’t mean they socialize continually; it means they work under the assumption that nothing important gets done alone.  Such leaders have a network in place when the time for action comes.  And in an era when more and more work is done long distance – by e-mail or by phone – relationship building, paradoxically, becomes more crucial than ever.

Given the primal task of leadership, the ability to inspire and move people with a compelling vision looms large.  Inspirational leaders get people excited about a common mission.  They offer a sense of purpose beyond the day-to-day tasks or quarterly goals that so often take the place of a meaningful vision.  Such leaders know that what people value most deeply will move them most powerfully in their work.  Because they are aware of their own guiding values, they can articulate a vision that has the ring of truth for those they lead.  That strong sense of the collective mission also leaves inspirational leaders free to direct and guide with firmness.  As one product director put it, “I’m a company of one – I have no team, no power; I share people with other projects.  I can’t tell people what to do – but I can convince them by appealing to their agenda.”

Finally, as the tasks of leadership become more complex and collaborative, relationship skills become increasingly pivotal.  For instance, every large organization must distribute its leadership among its division heads, and that creates a de facto team.  Beyond that, as organizations realize that the old functional silos – marketing over here, strategy there, compensation here – must be broken down, more leaders routinely work with their peers as part of cross-functional teams.  If any group needs to maximize its effectiveness, it’s the team at the top.  And that means establishing close and smooth relations so that everyone can share information easily and coordinate effectively.

Relationship skills allow leaders to put their emotional intelligence to work.  But there’s more to it than that.  When it comes to getting results, the competencies that distinguish the best leaders operate in well-orchestrated unison, becoming distinctive leadership styles – as we shall see in the next chapter.

(An extract from The Neuroanatomy of Leadership)