This video stresses the importance of social intelligence and emotional intelligence in determining good leadership and organizational success. Goleman explains the difference between emotional intelligence and social intelligence and how to develop your emotional/social intelligence.

Daniel Goleman is an author, psychologist, and science journalist. He is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, specializing in psychology and brain sciences.

Here is the interview with Daniel Goleman entitled ‘Social Intelligence and Leadership

Transcript of the interview below:

Diane: Hello im Diane Coutu, senior editor at Harvard business review and im delighted today to have as my guest Dan Goleman. Dan is the psychologist known around the world for his expertise in social and emotional intelligence. He’s also the co-author of the Harvard business review article ‘social intelligence and the biology of leadership’. Dan welcome to the program

Daniel Goleman: Thanks it’s a real pleasure to be here.

Great to have you. Dan, we’ve invited you because we wanted to talk about social and emotional intelligence and how they effect organizations and leaders. So lets just start at the beginning. Emotional intelligence – What is it and why is it important for us?

Emotional intelligence refers to how we handle ourselves. Are we aware of our feelings, our passions, the things that turn us on, the things that turn us off. What makes us effective, what gets in our way. Also how we manage our emotions. Do we let things interrupt our ability to focus, to get work done effectively or not. Empathy – recognizing other peoples emotions. Knowing how the other person sees things. How their feeling, and using that all to interact with people effectively.

You know your work has changed how leaders and businesses do their work around the world. Can you think of a leader who has changed how he’s done his work or how she’s done her work based on your insights into emotional intelligence.

Well you know I hear about hundreds but I can’t name any. Erm.. I can think of a very highly placed executive who was hearing from direct reports that things weren’t going so well. The messages came for example in the form of people leaving, as well as a lot of grumblings. It turned out that when he really faced what was going on people were saying “you know you just don’t listen”. You just tell us what you think. You say you want to hear what we know and we know a lot, but you don’t really care about that.

What he had to do was get better at the social intelligence ability of listening, of tuning into other people. It’s a real problem for many executives because of course you know a lot but you don’t know everything. But because your the boss people defer to you so they start listening but the really excellent, the outstanding leaders, are people who first listen, and get other people to say what they think and what they know and then put that altogether for a higher order integration, that’s real leadership. That’s what he had to learn. Through coaching he was able to change and his business performance and the performance at his unit was much much better afterward then before.

Diana: So the level of a leader’s emotional intelligence affects a leader’s performance

Daniel Goleman: We have so much data now, about 10 years accumulated data from organizations of all kinds showing that there’s a direct correlation between the emotional intelligence of leaders at every level and how that organization performs by what ever performance metric you want to use.

Diana: Well but it seems to me that leaders often think they have more emotional intelligence then they do. How do you begin to assess your level of emotional intelligence?

Daniel Goleman: Actually I think we all think we have more emotional intelligence then we do. One of the most brutal ways is to ask your teenage child, but at work what you can do is ask other people because it turns out that we ourselves are not the best gage of how we’re impacting other people. But other people if you can get them to be candid can tell you what your strengths are, and we all have them and what you can get better at and that’s the most interesting, valuable information because that’s where any leader can get a bump in improvement. by getting better at listening as that executive did 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 whole organization benefits.

Diana: Dan, you talk about emotional intelligence and I’m very curious how you got from that to social intelligence.

Daniel Goleman: Well emotional intelligence when I first wrote about it was prompted by me by a new breakthrough in brain science and our understanding of the emotional centres of the brain and how that effects our ability to think well. It turns out that when we’re upset it hampers our ability to process information, to think creatively. We fall back on over-learned primitive behaviours, it makes us dysfunctional. But if were passionate about what were doing, if were motivated in the throw of positive emotion we think very very clearly. So there is an immediate obvious implication for business there and I wrote about that.

My new work on social intelligence has been stimulated by the same thing – Big breakthroughs in brain science. Now their not just studying one brain and one body and one person but two – the interaction. We’re finding out that this is the key to why a leader like Herbert Kelleher of Southwest airlines was so spectacularly successful in growing that airline. We have been looking at video of Herb Kelleher just walking down the hallway of lovefield in Dallas and its though there was a circle of good feeling radiating around him wherever he went. Everyone, passengers, personal, passers by, all of a sudden lighten up and beam because he was someone who engaged people, who was positive and let you know that he was tuning into you, and was doing it with such positivity that it was contagious for you.

Diana: Now how about leaders that do not have that natural inborn instinct. How can they use your insights in emotional and social intelligence in order to improve their leadership expertise.

Daniel Goleman: First of all for leadership its social intelligence that our data is showing counts the most. Social intelligence is being able to tune into other people, to read them, to know how they are thinking about things, what their feeling right now and using that to communicate effectively with them, and the good news is that even though we learn our habits – for example, what kind of listener you are. We learn those early in life. We can change them at any point if we are motivated, if we know what to do and if we have a little help. So there is an easy five step process basically for enhancing social intelligence abilities in a leader.

First the question to ask yourself is “do you care”, “are you motivated”. Second, get some feedback. You’re actually probably the worse person to judge where you need to improve. You need to ask the people around you in a way that they can be candid, they can be honest, and that’s often with the 360 device where they anonymously rate you. 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 can I get better? Where can I get a bump? Then you make a learning agreement to yourself to do it in a better way at every naturally occurring opportunity. If you do that for a few months you will see real change.

Diana: So how can a company use social intelligence in order to increase organizational performance?

Daniel Goleman: So many companies are doing that now. I just spent the morning with a group where a national insurance company, a global pharmaceutical company, a world famous medical centre. Their all doing the same thing with emotional intelligence. Their using it to enhance the effectiveness of their leadership but also to change the culture. And the way their doing it is integrating it into the HR function. Their trying to hire people who have these abilities already. That was the strategy that south-west used. They look for people that are like little Herb Kelleher’s and it worked great, it worked beautifully for them. Their promoting these abilities. It becomes part of how you evaluate it and part of what’s looked for in taking people to the next level in the organization. They are also putting a lot of effort into individual development to help everybody grow these abilities to a greater strength.

Diana: So if we were going to go back and sum up for our audience today you would say the difference between emotional and social intelligence is…

Daniel Goleman: Emotional intelligence really has to do with self mastery. How you handle yourself and it makes outstanding individual performers. There are so many people in the world of work that are excellent. But their excellent because of their own efforts and they have very good discipline, very good motivation, they have drive. These are individual abilities. But when it comes to leadership your success depends on every one else being effective so you need to be successful by influencing, persuading, developing, growing, inspiring and motivating other people. That’s the social intelligence ability. Requires empathy, and requires skills and interaction and that’s what make s great leader.

Diana: Dan, one of the problems that companies really have is figuring out how to hire people because it’s so difficult to hire people and know what their emotional and social intelligence level’s are. So how do you go about trying to find little herb Kelleher’s?

Daniel Goleman: Well first of all if your looking for a Herb Kelleher type you have to expand the criteria because Herb was a unique. He was extremely , extroverted extremely up. But social intelligence doesn’t always look like that. One of the sure signs of social intelligence is rapport. You feel comfortable with the person. You feel they are paying full attention. You feel they are really listening to you, they are really attuning, their really empathizing. We know what that feels like. We feel felt. When your with someone like that you have chemistry. That is one of the sure signs.

Diana: Daniel Goleman, thank you very much.

Daniel Goleman: Thank you too, it was a great pleasure

Diana: Thank you

In this video Marshal Goldsmith answers two main questions. Firstly how leadership has changed over time and secondly how to influence upper management.

Dr. Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority in helping successful leaders get even better – by achieving positive, lasting change in behavior: for themselves, their people and their teams.

Here is the interview with Marshal Goldsmith entitled ‘Ask the Coach”.

Transcript of the interview below:

Paul: Hello I’m Paul Michaelman Michelman director of content for Harvardbusiness.org and I am delighted to be joined today by executive coaching guru, teacher and author Marshall Goldsmith. Marshal writes the ask the coach blog for Harvardbusiness.org and his latest book is “What got you here wont get you there”. Marshal thanks for joining us today.

Marshal: Very happy to be here

Paul: Marshal, in your ask the coach blog you address questions from our readers as well as other managers you encounter about their biggest challenges on the job and what I would like to do today is look at a couple of questions. Here is the first.

How is the role of a business leader changing and will the qualities of a great leader be different in the future or is great leadership timeless?

Marshal Goldsmith: And the answer is both of the above. How is the role of a leader changing?, erm, we did some research on this interviewing 200 specially selected high potential leaders from around the world and asked them how’s the leader of the future different from the leader in the past. Some will answer the same and will probably be the same 100 years from today. Things like integrity, customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, communicating a vision. You can pretty much guess a lot of these characteristics have always been important for leaders.

On the other hand we found 5 characteristics that were different for the future then they were in the past. These were changing dynamics of leadership. The first one is called thinking globally. If you look at the leader of the past, leadership was largely domestic; it was regional and perhaps countrywide. Not really global for most leaders. Today even leaders that deal in a domestic market have to look at global implications in terms of suppliers, in terms of support staff. So global thinking came out as a big change.

Another big thing that came out as a difference is appreciating cross culture diversity. In America historically we had virtually no diversity. It was largely white males. Then we came into diversity dealing with women, perhaps minorities in America. Today we are looking at cross culture diversity which is a whole wide element of what does it mean to work with different religions, different cultures, and different peoples from around the world. That’s also a change in the world of leadership.

The third one is called technological savvy. Now that doesn’t mean that every great leader has to be a technician. What It means is you have to know how technological impacts your core business. You have to be able to hire people that are technologically gifted and you have to be technically competent enough to really navigate in the new world.

Then we came up with two others. The next one is building alliances and partnerships. Historically leaders often didn’t work in the area of alliance and partnerships and today it’s a common part of the job. A great example is IBM. In the old days IBM had no alliances and partnerships. They were proud of the fact that everything was just IBM. Today in IBM they have a different alliance or partnership every day almost or every week. Just a constant changing in terms of alliances and partnerships. Building all kinds of different relationships. Then the final one we came up in our research is called “sharing leadership”. Peter Drucker said “The leader of the past knew how to tell, the leader of the future knows how to ask”. A big change in leadership today is historically the leader knew more then the direct reports. There was an apprentice model. The direct reports would work up then learn more, no more then the next direct reports and evolved.

Today most leaders manage people called ‘knowledge workers’. What’s the definition of a ‘knowledge worker’. They know more about what they are doing then their boss does. When we manage people that know more about what their doing then we do we can’t tell them what to do and how to do it. We have to ask, listen and learn and leadership becomes a shared responsibility.

Now I mentioned these 5 in my blog but I got a great post from one of our readers and he came up with an idea that I think looking back on our research kind of got left out. Its called ‘learning agility’. Really the leader of the future e is a person who is continuously learning and growing and as the world has changed this learning agility has become more and more and more important.

Paul: Marshal I hear one kind of common theme. The notion of openness and the need to be more open. Open to the ideas of other people. Open to learning new ideas. Open to learning about new cultures. I think we all like to think we are very open but we are probably not. How do we train ourselves to think differently?

Well you know I’m going to give you an even bigger challenge. How do we train ourselves to act differently? Because if you think differently but you don’t act differently it doesn’t help a whole lot. That’s basically what I do in my day job. I teach leaders how to learn and what I teach leaders is the importance of asking for input. How can I be a better leader. How can I learn from you. How can I help the team.

Peter Drucker really instilled in me the value of asking which was a big theme of his work. Asking and getting feedback, responding to people, following up, learning. I did a research study with 86,000 respondents and I showed that leaders who asked for input, listened, responded in an open way, follow up in a disciplined way invariably are seen as more effective leaders. Leaders that don’t respond, don’t follow up typically don’t get better.

Paul: lets move on to a different question that has recently been submitted to your blog. This one has to do with influencing these leaders we have just been talking about. Here is the question that came in.

The biggest challenge that I face at work is not managing my team. Its dealing with my boss and upper management. Any suggestions.

Marshal: Well effectively influencing upper management is a critically important topic and I noticed this is important because it touches everyone. You don’t have to be a in a leadership role. It touches every employee and every company that has to make a difference.

A couple of guidelines: The next thing I’m going to say is going to sound incredibly simple. Its amazing how few people ever existentially get this point. Every decision in the world is made on the bases of one variable. Who has the power to make the decision. Not who’s pretty, or right, or good, or fair. Its who has the power to make the decision. Think of the school child coming home. “Its not fair, the teacher gave me a C, I deserved an A”. Well you didn’t sell to the teacher. The teacher had the power to make the decisions. Grow up and live with it. This is the way life works.

Now as obvious as that sounds its amazing how few people ever get this. The first thing to do in effectively influencing up is, think like a great sale person. Think like a salesperson and you have to realise that it is not their responsibility to buy. It is your responsibility to sell. And when you start thinking like a sales person you get much more effective. Next you sell to the higher level. You don’t sell to your needs you sell to their needs. So many people and organizations basically whine. “You need to give me this”, “Why”, “I need it”. That’s like a sales person saying “You need to buy this”, “Why”, “Well I want to collect my commission”. Who cares, that’s not their problem.

You also have to realise when you’re influencing up your taking away resources from somebody else when you’re asking for resources for yourself. You’ve got to be sensitive to your peers. What am I doing to my peers when I’m asking for these resources for me. How is this going to influence them. Prepare for objections. Develop a cost benefit analysis. Do your homework. Sell to the bigger needs of the business. Then when you go to influence up you may not win but you will dramatically improve your odds of success. And finally if you cant sell it make peace. Sell what you can sell make peace with what you cant sell.

Finally never stick it to the boss if you can’t sell it. Never go down and stay “that idiot told me to tell you”, especially if you are in middle management. I always teach middle managers this. If you’re a middle manager, you stab your boss in the back in front of your direct reports. What will you teach your direct reports to do. Stab you in the back when they disagree with you. So you treat your manager with the same courtesy that you would like to be treated with if those roles were reversed. Just a couple of quick guidelines.

Paul: So you said one thing that struck me. At the same time that your trying to exert your influence you said you also need to be cognisant of the needs of your peers and the fact that you may be taking resources away from them. Seems like a pretty delicate balance.

Marshal: It is a delicate balance. Something very important – lets say X is critically important to your peer, Y is minimal important to you. If you get Y and your peer looses X, be very sensitive about asking for Y. Because one day the roles are going to be reversed and your going to need your peer to help you. So its important when we influence up not just to think about our management. Also think about our peers. And by the way let me expand this concept a little bit. Sometimes it isn’t influencing up with just your boss. What I’ve jus talked about applies to any situation where you have to influence people without direct line authority. So if you don’t have direct line authority you have to sell. You may not want to sell. You may not feel the need to sell. If you want to make a difference you have to sell because they don’t have to buy.

Paul: Marshal Goldsmith, thank you very much.

Marshal: thank you

Paul: for more of Marshals ideas visit his ask the coach blog at harverdbusiness.org.