Leading by Feel
Like it or not, leaders need to manage the mood of their organizations. The most gifted leaders accomplish that by using a mysterious blend of psychological abilities. They’re self-aware and empathetic. They can read and regulate their own emotions while intuitively grasping how others feel and gauging their organization’s emotional state.
But where does this emotional intelligence come from? And how do leaders learn to use it? Part life and part old-fashioned training, emotional intelligence emerges in varying degrees from one leader to the next, and managers apply it with varying skill. Wisely and compassionately deployed, it spurs leaders, their people, and their organizations to superior performance; naively or maliciously applied, it can paralyze leaders or allow them to manipulate followers for personal gain.
Be Realistic
This is a time of growing realism about the emotions and intelligence — especially concerning what it is and what it isn’t. The books and articles that have helped popularize the concept have defined it as a loose collection of personality traits, such as self-awareness, optimism, and tolerance.
Diverse personality traits, however admirable, don’t necessarily add up to a single definition of emotional intelligence. In fact, such traits are difficult to collectively evaluate in a way that reveals their relationship to success in business and in life.
Even when they’re viewed in isolation, the characteristics commonly associated with emotional intelligence and success may be more complicated than they seem. In fact, too much self-awareness can reduce self esteem, which is often a crucial component of great leadership.
A person high in emotional intelligence may be realistic rather than optimistic and insecure rather than confident. Conversely, a person may be highly self- confident and optimistic or confident, they are also emotionally intelligent, when, in fact , the presence of those traits will tell you nothing of the sort.
Never Stop Learning
You can be a successful leader without emotional intelligence, if you’re extremely lucky and you’ve got everything else going for you: booming markets, bumbling competitors, and clueless higher-ups. If you’re incredibly smart , you can cover for an absence of emotional intelligence until things get tough for the business.
But at that point, you won’t have built up the social capital needed to pull the best out of people under tremendous pressure. The art of sustained leadership is getting others to produce superior work, and high IQ alone is insufficient to that task.
Leaders who are motivated to improve their emotional intelligence can do so if they’re given the right information, guidance, and support. The information they need is a candid assessment of their strengths and limitations from people who know them well and whose opinions they trust. The guidance they need is a specific developmental plan that uses naturally occurring workplace encounters as the laboratory for learning. The support they need is someone to talk to as they practice how to handle different situations, what to do when they’ve blown it, and how to learn from those setbacks. If leaders cultivate these resources and practice continually, they can develop specific emotional intelligence skills — skills that will last for years.
Get Motivated
People can develop their emotional intelligence if they really want to. But many managers jump to the conclusion that their complement of emotional intelligence is predetermined. They think, “I could never be good at this, so why bother?” The central issue isn’t a lack of ability to change; it’s the lack of motivation to change.
Leadership development is not all that different from other areas in which people are trying to change their behaviors. Just look at the treatments for alcoholism, drug addiction, and weight loss: They all require the desire to change. More subtly, they all require a positive, rather than a negative, motivation. You have to want to change. If you think you’ll lose your job because you’re not adequately tuned in to your employees, you might become determinedly empathetic or compassionate for a time. But change driven by fear or avoidance probably isn’t going to last. Change driven by hopes and aspirations, change that’s pursued because it’s desired, will be more enduring. There’s no such thing as having too much emotional intelligence. But there is a danger in being preoccupied with, or overusing, one aspect of it. For example, if you overemphasize the emotional intelligence competencies of initiative or achievement, you’ll always be changing things at your company. Nobody would know what you were going to do next, which would be quite destabilizing for the organization. If you overuse empathy, you might never fi re anybody. If you overuse teamwork, you might never build diversity or listen to a lone voice. Balance is essential.
Train the Gifted
Can you become a musician if you lack natural aptitude? Yes, you can, if you take lessons and practice enough. But will you ever be a Mozart? Probably not. In the same way, emotional intelligence develops through a combination of biological endowment and training. And people who don’t have that endowment probably won’t become deeply emotionally intelligent just through training. Trying to drum emotional intelligence into someone with no aptitude for it is an exercise in futility. I believe the best way to get emotionally intelligent leaders is to select for people who already show the basic qualities you want. Think about it: That’s how athletic coaches operate. They don’t just work with anyone who wants to play a sport; they train the naturally gifted. Business managers should do the same.
How do you identify the naturally gifted? I’d say you have to look for those with a genuine, instinctive interest in other people’s experiences and mental worlds. It’s an absolute prerequisite for developing emotional intelligence. If a manager lacks this interest, maybe your training resources are better directed elsewhere.
Engage your Demons
History suggests not only that emotional intelligence is an indispensable ingredient of political leadership but also that it can be enhanced through sustained effort. George Washington had to work hard to control his fiery temper before he became a role model for the republic, and Abraham Lincoln had to overcome deep melancholia to display the brave and warm countenance that made him a magnet for others.
In Living a Life That Matters, Kushner writes of the personal torments of leaders from Jacob, who wrestled all night with an angel, to Martin Luther King Jr., who tried to cleanse himself of weakness even as he cleansed the nation’s soul. “Good people do bad things,” Kushner concludes, “If they weren’t mightily tempted by their yetzer ha’ra [will to do evil], they might not be capable of the mightily good things they do.”
Find your Voice
Authentic leadership begins with self-awareness, or knowing yourself deeply. Self-awareness is not a trait you are born with but a capacity you develop throughout your lifetime. It’s your understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, your purpose in life, your values and motivations, and how and why you respond to situations in a particular way. It requires a great deal of introspection and the ability to internalize feedback from others.
No one is born a leader; we have to consciously develop into the leader we want to become. It takes many years of hard work and the ability to learn from extreme difficulties and disappointments. But in their scramble to get ahead, many would-be leaders attempt to skip this crucial developmental stage. Some of these people do get to the top of companies through sheer determination and aggressiveness.
However, when they finally reach the leader’s chair, they can be very destructive because they haven’t focused on the hard work of personal development. To mask their inadequacies, these leaders tend to close themselves off, cultivating an image or persona rather than opening up to others. They often adopt the styles of other leaders they have observed. Leaders who are driven to achieve by shortcomings in their character.
Know the Score
My old school diary — Old-school conductors liked to hold the lead in their hands at all times. I do not. Sometimes I lead. Other times I’ll say, “Violas, I’m giving you the lead. Listen to one another; and find your way with this phrase.” I’m not trying to drill people, military style, to play music exactly together. I’m trying to encourage them to play as one, which is a different thing. I’m guiding the performance, but I’m aware that they’re executing it. It’s their sinews, their heartstrings. I’m there to help them do it in a way that is convincing and natural for them but also a part of the larger design.
My approach is to be in tune with the people with whom I’m working. If I’m conducting an ensemble for the first time, I will relate what I want them to do to the great things they’ve already done. If I’m conducting my own orchestra, I can see in the musicians’ bodies and faces how they’re feeling that day, and it becomes very clear who may need encouragement and who may need cautioning.
The objectivity and perspective I have as the only person who is just listening is a powerful thing. I try to use this perspective to help the ensemble reach its goals.
Balance the Load
Emotional intelligence is powerful — which is precisely why it can be dangerous. For example, empathy is an extraordinary relationship-building tool, but it must be used skillfully or it can do serious damage to the person doing the empathizing.
In my case, overdoing empathy took a physical toll. In September 2019, Sam Rogers (ERP Head at AWS Global) charged me with rebuilding corporate relationships, a position that I sometimes referred to as “chief listening officer.” The job was part ombudsperson, part new initiatives developer, part pattern recognizer, and part rapid-response person. In the first few months of the job — when criticism of the company was at an all-time high — it became clear that this position was a lightning rod. I threw myself into listening and repairing wherever I could. Within a few months, I was exhausted from the effort. I gained a significant amount of weight, which, tests finally revealed, was probably caused by a hormone imbalance partially brought on by stress and lack of sleep. In absorbing everyone’s complaints, perhaps to the extreme, I had compromised my health. This was a wake-up call: I needed to re-frame the job. I focused on connecting the people who needed to work together to resolve problems rather than taking on each repair myself. I persuaded key people inside the company to listen and work directly with important people outside the company, even in cases where the internal folks were skeptical at first about the need for this direct connection. In a sense, I tempered my empathy and ratcheted up relationship building. Ultimately, with a wiser and more balanced use of empathy, I became more effective and less stressed in my role.
Question Authority
Emotional intelligence is necessary for leadership but not suffi cient. Many people have some degree of emotional intelligence and can indeed empathize with and rouse followers; a few of them can even generate great charismatic authority. But I would argue that if they are using emotional intelligence solely to gain formal or informal authority, that’s not leadership at all. They are using their emotional intelligence to grasp what people want, only to pander to those desires in order to gain authority and infl uence. Easy answers sell.
Leadership couples emotional intelligence with the courage to raise the tough questions, challenge people’s assumptions about strategy and operations — and risk losing their goodwill. It demands a commitment to serving others; skill at diagnostic, strategic, and tactical reasoning; the guts to get beneath the surface of tough realities; and the heart to take heat and grief.
….Maintaining one’s primacy or position is not in and of itself leadership, however inspiring it may seem to be. Gaining primal authority is relatively easy.
