HBR's 10 Must Reads On Emotional Intelligence (Summary)

HBR's 10 Must Reads On Emotional Intelligence (With Featured Article "What Makes A Leader?" By Daniel Goleman) (HBR's 10 Must Reads)
Hardcover  


Source: Harvard Business School Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-63369-019-6

©2015 By Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation
Adapted By Permission Of Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

Key Concepts

• Awareness and self-control are at the heart of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence requires understanding oneself and others and, based on that understanding, making deliberate choices about how to behave and lead.
• The defining characteristic of a great leader is emotional intelligence. Leaders differ from one another not only in technical expertise but in personality and style. However, highly successful leaders all possess emotional intelligence, the characteristic that sets them apart from other leaders.
• Emotional intelligence can be learned. Though some individuals are more naturally adept at some or all of the characteristics that constitute emotional intelligence, anyone who wants to become more skilled in this area can do so through awareness and purposeful effort.
• Good leaders can make bad decisions if they do not practice emotional intelligence. Unconscious cognitive tendencies can lead even the best leader to make a bad decision. Awareness and preventative measures in the face of red flag conditions are manifestations of emotional intelligence and can prevent poor decision making.
• Mood, fairness, and civility matter. A leader’s mood affects his or her employees’ moods and can have an impact on an entire organization. Organizations that treat employees fairly perform better overall than organizations that do not. Allowing rudeness in the workplace has serious performance and financial consequences.

Introduction

Skill, talent, and experience are all requirements for good leadership. But what distinguishes a great leader from all the others is emotional intelligence—the awareness of and ability to regulate one’s emotions to drive a high-performing organization. Emotional intelligence is rapidly becoming a core leadership competency. HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Emotional Intelligence culls from experts in the field to offer wisdom on a variety of emotional intelligence topics, providing leaders with practical insights about how to enhance their own emotional intelligence and nurture it in others.

What Makes A Good Leader?

By Daniel Goleman

Leaders differ from one another in many ways. Some leadership qualities and skills suit specific situations better than others. However, one characteristic all great leaders have in common is emotional intelligence. Studies have shown that, all other skills and capabilities being equal, a leader with emotional intelligence will be far more successful than his or her counterparts. Emotional intelligence comprises the following components:

• Self-awareness is foundational to emotional intelligence. It is the source for understanding one’s strengths, weaknesses, attitudes, and relationships toward others—all of which are impacted and influenced by emotional intelligence.
• Self-regulation is the ability to control one’s actions, impulses, responses, attitudes, and behaviors toward others. Stemming from self-awareness, self-regulation leads to thoughtful, level-headed, and even-tempered attitudes and behaviors in all situations.
• Motivation to achieve in any circumstance is a key trait of those with emotional intelligence. A strong sense of motivation leads such individuals to keep accurate track of their performance, be optimistic in the face of adversity, and lead others in a team effort toward excellence.
• Empathy allows people to understand and care about others’ circumstances, thoughts, and feelings. Empathetic leaders are able to inspire trust and confidence in their employees, even in difficult times—which often leads to better outcomes for everyone.
• Social skill is the ability to find common ground and develop good relationships with others, no matter who they are, and motivate people in a positive direction. Socially skilled individuals are good at persuading others, which is a sign of effective leadership.

While some people are more naturally adept at certain qualities of emotional intelligence, with self-awareness and commitment anyone can become emotionally intelligent.

Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver Of Great Performance

By Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, And Annie McKee

Research indicates a leader’s mood has a profound impact on organizational performance. Through the process of mood contagion, employees adopt the prevailing mood of their leaders. Positive, optimistic, and genuine leaders inspire a similar mood in the people they manage—leading to successful short- and long-term business results. Negative, overbearing leaders who inspire stress in their employees may achieve strong short-terms results, but over the long term, organizational performance suffers. Therefore, leaders must not only possess emotional intelligence but also use that intelligence to monitor and adjust their moods.

The following five-step process can help any leader monitor and improve his or her mood to drive organizational effectiveness:

1. Define the ideal state. The first step to creating an improved mood is identifying what the ideal mood would be.
2. Recognize the current state. Self-awareness and soliciting feedback from others can help a leader objectively evaluate her or his prevalent mood, as seen through the eyes of employees.
3. Define a path toward creating the ideal state. Leaders must develop an action plan and take concrete steps toward improving their moods.
4. Take measures to ensure the change is sustainable. Ongoing, deliberate practice and continually envisioning the desired mood state can help leaders ensure that this state is long-lasting and ingrained.
5. Seek support. Leaders should enlist others to provide support and feedback toward helping them manage their moods on an ongoing basis.

Why It’s So Hard To Be Fair

By Joel Brockner

While leaders might be reluctant to admit it, being fair has often proven to be difficult in the business environment. Sometime unfairness stems from emotional discomfort, sometimes it is financially driven, and sometimes it is simply a by-product of corporate policy.

Businesses will sometimes try to financially compensate for uncomfortable and seemingly unfair practices—for example, by offering robust severance packages rather than engaging the organization in an open discussion about terminations. Ironically, not being fair is often more costly than being fair. For example, wrongful termination lawsuits happen much more often when employees have been left out of the information loop.

Process fairness comes in many forms, ranging from explaining why one person received a promotion over another to why an organization is downsizing. Often, the fairness issue is more a matter of explanation than action. Individuals are far more tolerant of negative impacts when they have a clear understanding of why they happened and have been involved in the decision-making process.

There are three drivers behind process fairness:

1. Whether or not employees feel their opinions are heard and taken into account.
2. If employees believe decisions are made consistently and fairly.
3. How honestly and respectfully managers behave toward employees.

Process fairness is not only the right thing to do, it also drives organizational effectiveness and is financially prudent. Companies should take the following steps to ensure they are successfully practicing process fairness:

• Address knowledge gaps. Forewarning managers about the emotional impacts of being open and honest with employees during difficult situations and equipping them with the right information can help managers better cope with uncomfortable situations and conversations.
• Invest in training. Properly training managers in how to implement process fairness helps ensure better results, which often includes improvements to the bottom line.
• Make process fairness a top priority. Organizational alignment, from top to bottom, is a prerequisite for making process fairness intrinsic to the business.

Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions

By Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, And Sydney Finkelstein

Even the best leaders can make bad decisions, and bad information is usually not to blame. There are unconscious cognitive patterns at work that can distort decision making. Leaders with emotional intelligence are aware of these patterns and can take deliberate steps to make good decisions in spite of them.

Pattern recognition is a cognitive process that makes individuals either react to or ignore current information based on familiar patterns from previous life experiences. Emotional tagging is a cognitive process through which an individual ascribes an emotional connection to current information based on previous emotional experiences. That emotional connection inspires action.

The following three red flag conditions can trigger one or more of these cognitive tendencies, leading to diminished decision making:

1. Inappropriate self-interest. Individuals are emotionally biased toward information they are in some way personally connected to.
2. Distorting attachments. Personal bonds to people, places, and things can distort judgement.
3. Misleading memories. Memories individuals have of similar situations can lead them away from making the right decisions based solely on current circumstances.

Fortunately, astute and aware leaders can overcome these red flag conditions simply by involving others in the decision-making process. Leaders can safeguard against bad decision making when cognitive issues come into play through the following three practices:

1. Bringing new information, experience, or analysis into the situation.
2. Inviting additional debate and challenge on the issues.
3. Imposing stronger governance practices.

Building The Emotional Intelligence Of Groups

By Vanessa Urch Druskat And Steven B. Wolff

A substantial amount of the work accomplished in today’s business environment is done so by teams. Therefore, it makes sense that companies should strive to create emotionally intelligent teams. While it might seem logical that staffing a team with emotionally intelligent team members would be enough to ensure an emotionally intelligent team, this is not the case. Emotional intelligence must be built into the group by creating trust among members, as well as promoting a sense of group identity and group efficacy.

Similar to individual emotional intelligence, emotional awareness and regulation are at the foundation of creating an emotionally intelligent team. An emotionally intelligent team puts in place practices that promote mindfulness of individual team members’ emotions as well as the emotions of other groups and people with whom the team interacts. Emotionally intelligent teams also create norms that help them regulate interactions and maintain emotional balance as a group in a variety of circumstances, including successes, challenges, and failures. These norms emphasize and reinforce trust, group identity, and group efficacy.

Teams that are able to become emotionally intelligent as a group are better able to consistently drive high performance. Such teams thrive in organizations that adopt cultures that value their employees’ emotions.

The Price Of Incivility: Lack Of Respect Hurts Morale—And The Bottom Line

By Christine Porath And Christine Pearson

Rudeness in the workplace might not be the first thing leaders think about when they consider employee-based risks to the bottom line, but incivility is in fact on the rise and can be very costly. Those costs come in many forms, including:

• Reduced creativity, poor performance, and employee attrition.
• Retaliation in the form of lower productivity or poor product or service quality levels.
• Loss of business when customers are put off by witnessing rude behavior.
• Incident management when incivility is reported to Human Resources.

Incivility can range from demeaning, emotional outbursts to subtle teasing. Any level of incivility in the workplace can be destructive and demoralizing. Whether perpetrated by a peer or a leader, it can impact individuals or entire groups and departments. Unfortunately, incivility is often overlooked as a damaging and costly force.

Leaders and managers play a very important role in eliminating incivility from the workplace through:

• Modeling civil behavior.
• Asking subordinates for feedback.
• Tracking improvements.
• Hiring the right people.
• Teaching civility to their teams.
• Establishing group norms that support civil behavior.
• Rewarding good behavior and penalizing bad behavior.

Leaders need to be on the watch for rudeness in the workplace and create an environment in which employees feel safe sharing about how they are being treated by others. While exit interviews can be a good resource for uncovering uncivil behavior, they can be even more revealing when feedback is gathered a few months after an employee has left the company. At that later time, former employees tend to be more honest and feel more comfortable sharing negative experiences.

How Resilience Works

By Diane L. Coutu

Resilience often affects whether a business succeeds or fails. It can be very powerful in overcoming even the most dire situations, and is therefore talked about frequently in today’s business world.

As a personal attribute, resilience is based on three characteristics:

1. The ability to accept reality, for good or for bad.
2. A strongly held, value-based belief that there is meaning in life, regardless of circumstances.
3. The ability to improvise in any situation.

Resilience should not be confused with optimism. Though resilient people may frequently display a positive attitude, they are realists and face life honestly. Even in the worst of circumstances and under very adverse conditions, resilient people derive inspiration from deeply held values that allow them to creatively devise solutions and pathways out of difficulty.

Organizations that are resilient face reality head on; they have created a strong set of core values that enable them to weather the winds of change and develop innovative solutions, even in a crisis. Their employees understand these values and are able to apply them creatively to develop solutions to challenges. Organizations will be better served by building this type of resiliency into their operating structures than by simply hiring resilient people.

Both individuals and organizations can become more resilient by understanding the characteristics that lead to resiliency and working to strengthen those characteristics by:

• Looking at situations realistically rather than through wishful thinking.
• Developing a core set of guiding and sustainable values that give meaning to every situation and interaction.
• Exercising opportunities to be creative in a cycle of continuous improvement.

Emotional Agility: How Effective Leaders Manage Their Negative Thoughts And Feelings

By Susan David And Christina Congleton

Even the most successful people can be plagued by negative thoughts, which can derail their progress forward and sap them of energy. When negative thoughts arise, individuals may often:

• Internalize the thoughts and try to avoid situations that bring them up.
• Challenge or rationalize the thoughts so they will go away.
• Force themselves into situations that are counter to their personal values in order to get over the thoughts.

All of these approaches can make the situation worse, increasing rather than decreasing the power of negative thoughts.

While negative thoughts are unavoidable, individuals can use the following techniques to make sure those thoughts are not counterproductive:

• Recognize the patterns. Simply becoming aware of when a negative thought pattern arises can help defuse its power. Awareness opens the opportunity for resolution.
• Label thoughts and emotions. By appropriately naming a negative thought or emotion (rather than considering it a personal truth), an individual can gain emotional distance from it and view it more rationally. This is a step toward control.
• Accept negative thoughts. Instead of resisting a negative thought, an individual can merely accept it and not seek to control it in any way. By taking a self-compassionate approach, an individual is better able to examine the thought objectively and look for potential resolution.
• Act on personal values. Negative thoughts can be signs that there is a misalignment of personal values. Exploring negative thoughts can be a path toward making life changes that are more in alignment with one’s true desires.

Fear Of Feedback

By Jay M. Jackman And Myra H. Strober

Many people fear feedback, equating it with early childhood experiences of being reprimanded. They will often avoid feedback at all costs. However, feedback— especially constructive feedback—offers individuals the opportunity to learn about themselves and grow.

Often the biggest problem with feedback is not the feedback itself but the person’s attitude toward it. Many times, individuals exhibit maladaptive behaviors, such as procrastination, denial, brooding, jealousy, and self-sabotage, in response to feedback—effectively turning the feedback into a negative, self-fulfilling prophecy.

A simple four-step process can help individuals avoid those maladaptive behaviors and instead embrace feedback as a growth opportunity:

1. Recognize emotions and responses. Awareness of feelings of fear and an impending maladaptive behavior is the first step toward avoiding that behavior and accepting the feedback with self-honesty.
2. Get support. When individuals are emotionally vulnerable, support from others can be very helpful. Enlisting the help of trusted friends and colleagues in working through the feedback can help an individual make the necessary changes.
3. Reframe the feedback. By removing negative connotations and approaching the feedback as a growth opportunity rather than a criticism, an individual is more emotionally prepared to apply the feedback toward positive change.
4. Break up the task. Even small steps in the right direction are productive. An individual can make better progress by dividing feedback into smaller tasks and setting time frames for completion.

Internalizing and applying feedback is an achievement. Individuals should make the time to reward and incentivize themselves for these constructive accomplishments. Further, the more one seeks out feedback, the less daunting it is.

Individuals can improve their attitude toward feedback, while at the same time growing in their careers, by continually assessing their own progress, looking for external feedback, rationally internalizing the feedback they receive, and then taking action for further improvement—benefiting both themselves and the organizations they work for.

The Young And The Clueless

By Kerry A. Bunker, Kathy E. Kram, And Sharon Ting

Organizations are always on the lookout for young, bright, talented, energetic, promising individuals to bring into the company. Once in, these individuals are often quickly promoted up through the leadership ranks, lest they defect to another company with more opportunities.

But there is a risk in this practice. All too often these individuals do not yet possess the emotional maturity required to lead effectively at higher levels. Simply put, their people skills are not yet developed enough to handle the responsibilities that come with executive positions. This can lead to some critical situations that are costly to both the company and the employee the company has over-promoted.

The solution to this problem is to make emotional competence and emotional maturity top priorities and to embed their development into the organization’s operations. The following five strategies can help ensure an organization develops its promising young leaders into seasoned, accomplished veterans:

1. Deepen 360-degree feedback by supplementing questionnaires and rating scales with interviews of peers and subordinates, and devoting time to follow-up reviews and conversations.
2. Interrupt the ascent of young executives by moving them out of their comfort zones and assigning them to roles that extend beyond their career paths. Not to be confused with job rotation, this effort includes removing direct leadership authority.
3. Act on commitments when destructive behavior emerges, in terms of following through on any consequences or threats. Failure to do so discredits the initiative.
4. Institutionalize personal development by including emotional competence as a concrete performance measure and defining what is expected of employees.
5. Cultivate informal networks outside of the organization’s hierarchy to help individuals broaden and deepen their people skills. Mentorships and peer networking are two useful channels.

While delaying a promotion can be frustrating for an upwardly mobile executive, it can be the best thing for both that individual and the company. Effective leaders are emotionally intelligent leaders. It takes time and experience to develop the emotional maturity required to effectively lead at the highest levels.

About The Authors

Richard Boyatzis chairs the department of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

Joel Brockner is the Phillip Hettleman Professor of Business at Columbia School.

Kerry A. Bunker is a manager of the Awareness Program for Executive Excellence at the Center for Creative Leadership.

Andrew Campbell is a director of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre in London.

Christina Congleton, who was formerly a researcher on mindfulness and the brain at Massachusetts General Hospital, is an associate at Evidence Based Psychology and a certified coach.

Diane L. Coutu is a former senior editor of Harvard Business Review.

Susan David is the CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a cofounder of the Institute of Coaching, and an instructor in psychology at Harvard University.

Sydney Finklestein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

Daniel Goleman cochairs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University.

Jay M. Jackman is a psychiatrist and human resources consultant in Stanford, California.

Kathy E. Kram is a professor of organizational behavior at the Boston University School of Management.

Annie McKee is on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Christine Pearson is a professor of global leadership at Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Christine Porath is an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Myra H. Strober is a labor economist and professor at Stanford University’s School of Education, and by courtesy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is also a human resources consultant.

Sharon Ting is a manager of the Awareness Program for Executive Excellence at the Center for Creative Leadership.

Vanessa Urch Druskat is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

Jo Whitehead is a director of Ashridge Strategic Management Centre in London.

Steven B. Wolff is an assistant professor of management at the School of Management at Marist College.

Amazon.com

In His Defining Work On Emotional Intelligence, Bestselling Author Daniel Goleman Found That It Is Twice As Important As Other Competencies In Determining Outstanding Leadership.

If you read nothing else on emotional intelligence, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you boost your emotional skills―and your professional success.

This book will inspire you to:

• Monitor and channel your moods and emotions
• Make smart, empathetic people decisions
• Manage conflict and regulate emotions within your team
• React to tough situations with resilience
• Better understand your strengths, weaknesses, needs, values, and goals
• Develop emotional agility

This collection of articles includes: 

“What Makes a Leader” by Daniel Goleman, 

“Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance” by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, 

“Why It’s So Hard to Be Fair” by Joel Brockner, 

“Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions” by Andrew Campbell, Jo Whitehead, and Sydney Finkelstein, 

“Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups” by Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steve B. Wolff, 

“The Price of Incivility: Lack of Respect Hurts Morale―and the Bottom Line” by Christine Porath and Christine Pearson, 

“How Resilience Works” by Diane Coutu, 

“Emotional Agility: How Effective Leaders Manage Their Negative Thoughts and Feelings” by Susan David and Christina Congleton, 

“Fear of Feedback” by Jay M. Jackman and Myra H. Strober, and 

“The Young and the Clueless” by Kerry A. Bunker, Kathy E. Kram, and Sharon Ting.