When Daniel Goleman released his best-selling book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” the concept resonated with millions of readers, many experiencing an “aha” moment, recognizing this trait in people that they admired.
Through his research, Goleman found that people who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence. A combination of self-awareness, mastery over emotions, social awareness, empathy, tuning into others, allow harmonious or effective relationships.
This finding proved to be good news: Unlike IQ, which barely budges over the course of our life, emotional intelligence can change. It’s learned and learnable at any point in life. In this Big Think+ lesson, Goleman outlines 4 domains of emotional intelligence and 12 particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence.
DANIEL GOLEMAN: When I wrote the book "Emotional Intelligence," a lot of people had an "aha" experience like, "Oh, so that's what's going on." It was the first time that for a popular audience, emotional intelligence had become well known. I was a science journalist at the New York Times back then, and I'd been covering a decade of research on the brain and emotion. And I wanted to have a frame for that. I integrated it with the findings from research on outstanding performers, and I saw that people who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence.
So from the get-go, I've seen emotional intelligence as having to do with leadership, and this was taken up by the Harvard Business Review. They've done a series of articles starting with one which said, "Look. Emotional intelligence is the core of effective leadership." And now I talk about four domains of emotional intelligence and then twelve particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence.
A combination of self-awareness, managing your emotions well, social awareness, empathy, tuning into other people, and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships. Unlike IQ, which barely budges over the course of our life, emotional intelligence can change. It's learned and learnable. And it's learned and learnable at any point in life.
Self-awareness means you know what you're feeling. You know how it shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act. Emotional self-awareness is what I'm talking about. Emotion directs attention. So knowing what you're feeling and how strongly you're feeling it and where it's driving you to attend is extremely important because your attention creates your reality moment to moment. So self-awareness gives you a kind of diagnosis of where am I right now. Maturity is sometimes defined as widening the gap between impulse and action.
Self-awareness, it's the least visible part of emotional intelligence, but we find in our research that people low in self-awareness are unable to develop strengths very well in other parts of emotional intelligence. People that are high in self-awareness, however, are able to develop excellence across the board very often.
Self-management in my model has four different components. One of them is handling upsetting emotions so they don't get in the way of what you have to do right now. Another aspect of emotional self management is marshaling positive emotions, seeing the bright side of things, not just the glass is half empty, but feeling pretty good about what's happening no matter what happens. That lets you also be agile, another aspect. Adjust to changing situations. You want to have a growth mindset, see yourself as able to improve and other people as able to improve. And finally, you want to keep your eye on the goal that matters despite the distractions of the day. So goal focus is an emotional self management tool too.
In my model of emotional intelligence, the third part is social awareness, which in one sense means sensing how your organization works. It's a kind of systems point of view. But I think as a leader, what matters more is empathy,how you tune in to your people, the people around you, the people above you, to the side, below you. And tuning in has three parts. One is cognitive empathy, understanding how that person sees the situation, what their perspective is. It's walking a mile in their shoes, as the the proverb says. You're able to sense the language or mental models a person uses as a frame on reality. What language do they use to explain what's going on to themselves? If you have high cognitive empathy, you can message quite well. You can hit the target with what you say to the person because you know the language that they understand.
The second part is emotional empathy, and this has to do with the design of the social circuitry in the human brain. The brain is designed to lock into the brain of the person in front of us and to create a pathway that's instantaneous, automatic, and unconscious for what that person is doing, intending, and feeling. This lets us know what the person feels because we feel it too. We get an inner signal that tells us what's going on with the other person. And this helps us keep our interaction on the same page, on target, emotionally.
The third part of empathy, which I think is really important for leadership and all too often just ignored, is caring. It's called technically empathic concern, and it means, I know what you think, I know what you feel, but I also care about you. And so leaders have to have this ability to communicate that they care about the person, they're concerned about them. This, by the way, builds huge trust, huge rapport between a leader and the people they lead.
The fourth part of emotional intelligence is relationship management. It's what we see every day. It's what leaders display. Can you guide? Can you influence? Can you get work done well through other people? Can you inspire? Can you get the best out of people because you can articulate meaning here in what we're doing? Are you a good team member? Not just on your team at the same level. If you're in the C-suite, that's a team. How are you as a team player? And then how are you as a team leader? Can you handle conflicts well? Can you keep yourself calm and listen to both sides and come up with a good enough solution that both sides can accept? Do you realize that you are in a position to help the people you lead become leaders of the future? Can you help them develop strengths? Can you coach them? Can you mentor them? Can you help them strengthen the leadership cadre of your organization going into the future?
