Social Intelligence and Leadership

Hello, I'm Diane Coutu, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, and I'm delighted to have Dan Goldman as my guest today. Dan is a psychologist known around the world for his expertise in

social

and emotional

intelligence

. He is also co-author of the Harvard Business Review Article: Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership Dan, welcome to the show, thank you, it's a real pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you, Dan, we invited you because we want to talk about

social

and emotional

intelligence

and how they affect organizations and leaders, so let's start with the beginning emotional intelligence, why it is, what it is, and why emotional intelligence is important to us.

It refers to how we handle ourselves. Are we aware of our feelings, our passions, you know, the things that excite us? things that discourage us what makes us effective what gets in the way and also how we manage our emotions we let things interrupt our ability to concentrate to get the job done effectively or not and empathy recognize other people's emotions know how people act Another person sees things, how they feel, and uses all of that to interact with people effectively. You know that your work has changed the way leaders and companies do their jobs around the world.

Can you think of a leader who has changed the way he does her job or how she does it? work based on his knowledge of emotional intelligence, well, you know, I heard about hundreds, but I can't name any. I can think of a very high-ranking executive who was hearing from his direct reports that things were not going so well that the messages came. for example, in the form of people leaving and a lot of complaining and it turned out that when you actually faced what was going on, people said: you just don't listen, just tell us what you think you say you want.

Listen to what we know and we know a lot, but you don't really seem to care. What you had to do was improve the social intelligence ability to listen and tune in to other people and it's a real problem for many executives because of course you know a lot, but you don't know everything, but because you're the boss, people respect you. and they start to listen, but the really great, outstanding leaders that we find are people who listen first and get other people to say what they want. think and what they know and then put all that together for a higher order integration, that's real

leadership

, that's what you had to learn and through training you were able to change and the performance of your business, the performance of your unit was much better after than Before, a leader's level of emotional intelligence affects organizational performance.

We now have so much data from about 10 years of accumulated data from organizations of all types that shows that there is a direct correlation between the emotional intelligence of

leadership

at all levels and how that organization performs. By any performance metric you want to use well, but I find that leaders often think they have more emotional intelligence than they do, how do you begin to assess their level of emotional intelligence? Actually, I think we all think we have more emotional intelligence than we do. One of the most brutal ways is to ask your teenager, but at work what you can do is ask other people because it turns out that we ourselves are not the best indicator of how we are impacting other people, but other people I can. having them be honest I can tell you what your strengths are and we all have them and what you can improve on and that is the most interesting valuable information because that is where any leader can get a boost in improvement by having a better voice and listening. that executive did it, you can become a more effective leader and therefore, because you depend on other people for your success, by getting better at listening to them, helping them develop, helping them do their jobs well, the entire organization benefits. , interesting, Dan, you talk about emotional intelligence and me.

I'm really curious how you went from that to social intelligence, well, emotional intelligence when I first wrote it. I was prompted by a new advance in brain science in our understanding of the emotional centers of the brain and how that affects our ability to think well, it turns out that when we are upset it hinders our ability to process information to think creatively, we resort to primitive behaviors learned too much and that makes us dysfunctional, but if we are passionate about what we are doing, if "We are motivated or on the impulses of a positive emotion we think very, very clearly, so there was an immediate obvious implication for business there and I wrote that my new work on social intelligence has been stimulated by the same breakthrough in brain science now as them." By studying not just one brain, one body, and one person, but two interactions, we discovered that this is the key to why a leader like Herb Kellerer at Southwest was so spectacularly successful in growing the airline we've been seeing in the past. video. of Herb Kellerer walking down the aisle at Love Field in Dallas and it's like there was a circle of good feelings radiating around him wherever he went, all the passengers, uh, staff, you know, the passersby, suddenly light up because he It was someone. that involved people who were positive and who let you know that they were tuning into you and doing it with such positivity that it was contagious to you now, what about leaders who don't have that natural innate instinct, how can they use their knowledge? on emotional and social intelligence to enhance your leadership experience.

First, for leadership, our data shows that social intelligence counts. The greatest social intelligence is being able to tune in to other people, read them and know how they think. things that they are feeling right now and use that to communicate effectively with them and the good news is that although we learn our habits, for example, what type of listener you are, we learn them early in life, we can change them at any time. If we are motivated, if we know what to do and if we have a little help, there is a simple five-step process to basically improve social intelligence skills in a leader.

The first thing to ask yourself is: do you care? Are you motivated because it is? it's going to take some effort, secondly, get some feedback, it's not that you're actually the worst person to judge where you need to improve, you need to ask the people around you in a way where they can be honest, they can be honest and that's often with a 360 device where they rate you anonymously, you don't know who said it, but you're getting the truth, you look at that profile and you identify your strengths, your weaknesses, where I can improve, where I can get a raise and then you do it. a learning agreement with yourself to do your best at every opportunity that naturally presents itself, if you do it for a few months you will see real change, so how can a company use social intelligence to increase organizational performance?

So many companies are doing that. Now I just spent the morning with a group where you are a national insurance company, a global pharmaceutical company, a world-famous medical center. We are all doing the same thing with emotional intelligence, they are using it to improve the effectiveness of their leadership, but also to change the culture and the way they are doing that is integrating it into the human resources function, they are trying to hire people who they already have these skills, that was the strategy that Southwest used, they seem like people who were like the little grass Kellers and so it worked very well, you know, it worked wonderfully for them, they are promoting these skills, it becomes part of how they evaluate you and part of what you're looking to take people to the next level in the organization and they're also putting a lot of effort into individual development to help everyone develop these skills, to greater strength, so if we were to go back and summarize For our audience today, you would say that the difference between emotional and social intelligence is that emotional intelligence is really about yourself. -Master how you handle yourself and that makes you outstanding individual artists.

There are many people in the working world who are excellent, but they are excellent thanks to their own efforts and they have very good discipline. They have very good motivation. They have momentum. These are individual skills, but when it comes to leadership, your success depends on everyone else being effective, so you must be successful by influencing, persuading, developing, growing, inspiring, motivating other people. That's the social intelligence capability that requires empathy and requires skillful interaction, and that's what makes a great leader. Dan, one of the problems that companies really have is figuring out how to hire people because it's very difficult to hire people and know which ones. are your emotional and social intelligence levels, so how can you try to find Little Herb Kellers right first?

All in all, if you're looking for a type of herb ker, you have to broaden your criteria because Herb was a unique individual, he was extremely outgoing, extremely elevated, but social intelligence doesn't always look like that. One of the sure signs of social intelligence is Rapport you. you feel comfortable with the person you feel like they're giving you their full attention you feel like they're really listening to you they're really in tune they're really empathizing and we all know what we feel when you're with someone like that you have chemistry, that's one of the sure signs Dan Goldman , thank you very much Diane cotu it was a real pleasure, thank you