Emotional Intelligence: The #1 ability for leaders | Daniel Goleman

you know in the future I think emotional intelligence will be one of several abilities that we need another of course is cognitive ability IQ and maybe AI will take over more and more of that however emotional intelligence is a human ability and will always remain so IQ predicts how well you'll do in your school years and how much salary you can make over the course of a career because it says what job you can get into like being a business executive or doctor or lawyer but once you're in those professions everybody else is about as

smart as you are that's where emotional intelligence kicks in people who emerge as outstanding performers or the best leaders have high emotional intelligence and their IQ is not that relevant at that point I'm Daniel Gman I've written many books mostly on emotional intelligence that's really my favorite topic the book emotional intelligence many years ago was an international bestseller I've written now five books on the topic my most recent is optimal how to sustain personal and organizational Excellence every day emotional intelligence is a set of personal skills that we learn in life it's a combination of

self-awareness managing your emotions well empathy tuning into other people and putting that all together to have harmonious or effective relationships emotional intelligence has been talked about for centuries philosophers were talking about know thyself that self-awareness but when I wrote the emotional intelligence book in '95 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 in doing so I came across a very obscure article called

emotional intelligence and I loved the title it was by Peter salave who's just stepping down as the president of Yale University and his then graduate student John Mayer and I thought wow what a great phrase It's seems like an oxymoron you don't put emotions together with intelligence but actually it's being intelligent about emotions when I wrote emotional intelligence I was actually thinking of bringing it to schools it seemed to me that kids should learn from the get-go how to manage themselves how to tune into themselves how to tune into to other people how to get

along how to behave well and so on I was a big advocate of what's now called social emotional learning and from early on my view of emotional intelligence hasn't really changed much but I integrated it with findings from research on outstanding performers and I saw that different abilities of high performers like being able to manage your emotions fit well in the model and now I talk about four domains of emotional intelligence and then 12 particular competencies of people who are high in emotional intelligence [Music] self-awareness means you know what you're feeling you know how it

shapes your perceptions and your thoughts and your impulse to act 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 self-management means when you're upset when you're angry when you're anxious can you manage your emotions can you keep them from disrupting your focus on what you have to do right now we're having more instance of road rage of shootings of people blowing up at other people there's a growing

need for people in general to get better at this ability the third part is social awareness which in one sense means practicing empathy you not only know how the person thinks and how they feel you care about them this is what you want in your parents this is what you want in your spouse this is what you want in your lover this is what you want in your friends and this is what you want in your teachers doctors leaders of any kind people who have influence the fourth part of emotional intelligence is relationship management can

you handle conflicts well can you keep yourself calm and listen to the other person are you being an effective Communicator full Rapport means that you feel close you feel you can work with this person you can trust them unlike IQ which barely budges over the course of our life emotional intelligence can change is learned and learnable and it's learned and learnable at any point in life emotional intelligence is not one thing it's like going to a doctor for physical you get your lipids and your good cholesterol bad cholesterol you get 15 data points emotional intelligence

is a set of abilities and each of us has strengths and limitations across that Spectrum so if you want to improve your emotional intelligence see where you need to improve first one of the common colds of emotional intelligence is poor listening you know we think about about what we want to say and we don't really listen to the other person and we cut them off we interrupt let's say you wanted to change that this is a basic of empathy listening well so if you want to learn to be better at empathy you might say my

habit and I've done it thousands of times is cutting people off and interrupting I'm going to make the effort to do it differently I'm going to listen to the person out say what I think they mean and then say what I think that is a different behavioral sequence and it comes down to the basics of what we call neuroplasticity how the brain changes with repeated experience and that's what underlies habit change it's a little like crossing your arms in a new way Cross Your Arms in the old way please now cross them with the other

arm on top that feels uncomfortable that's what it's like to change a habit so with listening you have to first make an intentional effort might feel uncomfortable but as you persist it gets more and more comfortable until finally it's an automatic habit that will stay with you for years you know I've gone around the world talking to different audiences and one of things I love to ask is tell me about a leader you've loved and a leader you hate and tell me one quality that makes a leader so good or so bad basically the leader

you hate is low in emotional intelligence [Music] they don't manage their emotions very well they blow up at people don't empathize they don't tune in they don't understand how clueless they are the leader you love is high in it having a boss with high emotional intelligence means you feel not only inspired not only motivated you feel supported you feel guided you feel you have clarity about what's expected from you you give your best in your best state in the optim State not in a desperate stressed out State research at the Yale School of Management has

found that emotions are contagious and they're most contagious from the leader outward the leader is most often the center of strong emotions either negative or positive and the this very research by Seagal barsade has shown that if the leader is in a negative mood very anxious for example people on that team will catch that mood and performance goes down if the leader is in a very positive mood I feel really good I feel enthusiastic then people catch that positive mood and their performance as a team or as a group goes up so the leader state

is actually much more important on the ability of people to do good work than many people realize particularly many leaders actually but if you have a leader that you hate for example and sadly too many people do then you really don't give your best in fact you're more likely to leave as soon as you can particularly if you're talented so a leader with low emotional intelligence is actually draining the organization in the long term they may get results for the quarter by driving people by stressing them out but they're burning them out and they're going

to lose good people so in the short term they may look good in the long term it's a disaster I once took a bus up Madison Avenue in New York City on a very hot humid day people had a kind of bubble around them like don't touch me don't talk to me I had the bubble too I got on the bus and the bus driver shocked me he looked at me and very warmly said welcome to the bus how's your day going and then I realized sitting on the bus that he was carrying on a

conversation with everyone on the bus you're looking for suits are you well there's a great sale up here on the right at this department store did you see the exhibit in the museum on the left on and on and on then people would get off that bus and they've been transformed from kind of grumpy to pretty upbeat it was kind of magical and years later I saw an article in the New York Times about that bus driver his name it turned out was Goen Brown he had fans people would wait for his bus he got

3,000 letters saying what a a great bus driver he was not one complaint and he it turned out was the pastor of a church and he saw the people on his bus as part of his flock he was tending to his flock he had a purpose that was far greater than that of the New York Transit Authority which is something like getting as many people to where they want to go on time as we can he had a splendid sense of what he was doing it gave a greater meaning to what he did and he

did it superbly I've always felt that the more emotional intelligence in society the better I think we would have parents who are more effective in raising kids who are Kinder we'd have more compassion for each other in our interaction with friends and loved ones as well as with strangers I think we would care more about the environment which is why I've been happy to be a kind of evangelist for emotional intelligence if you will I'm not the originator of the phrase I think I made it more famous I just think it would make a better

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