view. These books tend to come from people with perhaps a few preconceived notions of what makes a good leader, and they approach the subject by evaluating data that encompasses both successful and unsuccessful leadership. Basically, these books use evidence-based procedures in interesting and enlightening ways to evaluate what truly differentiates successful and unsuccessful leaders. Examples include Kouzes and Posner13 and Jim Collins.14
Jim Collins, for example, in his book Good to Great15 started his work by practically discounting the importance of leadership and focusing on the structures, rules, and processes of large iconic companies that had been around for many years. By contrasting successful and unsuccessful companies, matched within the same industry, he came to the conclusion, which was contradictory to his expectations, that leadership does make a difference, in fact, a rather large one. He has championed the Level 5 Leadership in which humility and “fire in the belly” play a dominant role. As he states it:
The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.16
In this book, I hope to borrow largely from the researcher's tradition. While I start out with the preconceived notion that emotional intelligence does make a difference in leadership, it has taken more than 20 years for me to reach the clarity of this position. When I started researching emotional intelligence and its importance in the workplace in the early 1990s, my focus was largely on individual performance and the enhancement of performance through emotional intelligence. I was interested in how emotional intelligence could help people better achieve their desired level of success – both at work and at home. Much of this work appears in the book I coauthored with Howard Book, The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success.17 Then I went on to explore how organizations, as a collective whole, could be emotionally intelligent.18
Over the years, the pull toward my study of leadership increased. It was an area I consciously avoided at first, maybe because of what I didn't want to find out about mistakes in my own leadership. But as more articles, books, blogs, and talks came out about emotional intelligence and leadership, I eventually felt I had to join the conversation. Part of the motivation was some of the misconceptions out there about the connection. There were spurious reports of overly high estimates – 85 percent or so – of effective leadership due to emotional intelligence and very few of the claims were based on good evidence. At the same time, at Multi-Health Systems (MHS), where we have been testing people's emotional intelligence since the early 1990s, we've built up a database of approximately 2 million people. Many thousands of these were currently leaders, emergent leaders, or identified as high potential future leaders. Not only do we have lots of data, but it's global. We've tested the emotional intelligence of people from all parts of the world; as a result, we are compelled to share our findings on how emotional intelligence influences leadership.
So while I've been committed to the importance of emotional intelligence in human performance for many years, I didn't start with any preconceived notions of how emotional intelligence might impact leadership. In fact, early on in this endeavor, I had radio and TV interviews in which commentators told me why they believed emotional intelligence was a detriment to good leadership. I was told that being “nice” would get you eaten for breakfast in some companies. Of course, I'd have to explain that emotional intelligence was not about being nice. We'll get to the definition in Chapter 3.
Leadership: What's the Status?
What does it take to be a successful leader in today's organizations? Everyone has his or her own image of who a great leader is or what a leader should be. To complicate matters even further, experts have developed hundreds of theories about leadership. We probably know more about leadership today than we have at any other time in our history. Yet, we continue to read about the poor state of leadership in organizations around the world.
In a recent report, the Deloitte Global Human Capital Survey (2014)19 questioned more than 2,532 leaders in 94 countries and found that the biggest workforce “readiness gap” was leadership. Over 38 percent of respondents rated this issue as “urgent” for their organizations (86 percent rated it as either important or urgent) – more than 50 percent higher than the next identified gap – retention and engagement. Interesting, these two issues are quite closely tied together.
The biggest leadership needs reported include developing new leaders faster, globalizing leadership programs, and building deeper bench strength for succession planning. As you will see in the following case study, finding great leaders is not always solved by promoting from within.
Promoting Leaders from Within
Demetri never felt so anxious before. It was worse than his first day at work at the exclusive menswear store. He had been the top salesperson for four years in a row and had fought hard to be promoted to sales manager. He had all the best customers on his roster. Out of the entire sales force, he was the best at establishing profitable relationships. Now that he was rewarded with a promotion and pay raise he felt the pressure to perform at a much higher level than before.
Worry set in. First, he was unsure about how his coworkers would react to him in his new role. He knew at least one of them, Carlos, also applied for the manager position. Would Carlos be upset, perhaps even jealous? Then he worried about the effect his promotion would have on the team. They were a tight team, not just celebrating each other's successes, but socializing together. How would they now respond to him? How should he treat them? Could he keep the relationships the same? Treat them all as his buddies still? Never did Demetri think a promotion, something he worked so hard for, would create so many mixed emotions. Unfortunately, there was no preparation provided for him or the team he was now supposed to lead.
This scenario has been repeated so many times across many industries. People with good technical or sales skills are placed into management positions. The thinking seems to be – if they can sell, do great accounting, make the most widgets, design the best buildings, build the best software, well, then they can probably lead and help others do just as well as they did on the front line.
Unfortunately, leadership doesn't work quite that way. The skills and competencies that help you sell things, build things, analyze things, fix things, and so on, have little to do with being a good leader. Many people I've spoken with shake their heads when they hear about companies such as GE, Google, Microsoft, FedEx, and American Express that spend so much money on leadership training. They're even more surprised when I talk about it in terms of succession planning, but, the fact is, without a willingness to invest in selecting and training leaders, companies are likely to suffer the adverse effects of poor leadership.
When I speak with fellow CEOs they usually can recount a situation where they promoted someone on the basis of technical or industry skills and knowledge. While these skills are important for frontline job performance, leadership, whether supervisory or upper management, requires a different or additional skill set. What are these skills precisely? How do we develop them? These questions will be the theme of this book. I'll be presenting a combination of real stories, modified examples, research studies, personal anecdotes, new data that we've compiled at MHS and some very public examples to illustrate these points. Our emotional intelligence testing over the past 20 years includes over 2 million working people worldwide, and we'll use these sources to inform our leadership discussion.
Yesterday's Leaders
Whenever I give leadership presentations, I generally ask audiences to name an iconic business leader from 100 years ago. Anywhere in the world, whether I'm in Beijing, Buenos Aires, Helsinki, St. Lucia, Sydney, Bangkok, Dubai, Vancouver, or New York City, the