"EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE "

February 8, 1999

David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News and World Report, talks with Daniel Goleman, a former New York Times reporter and author of Working With Emotional Intelligence.

DAVID GERGEN: Daniel, you've been doing an awful lot of work looking at what makes organizations and what makes people effective in organizations. What have you found? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, what I found is very interesting and I think really counterintuitive. You think of the person who's going to get ahead as the one who has the best degree, went to the best school, and so on. But if you look at, within an organization, who the people who actually get ahead, it turns out that that's not exactly the case. I was lucky enough to have access to data from close to 200 companies and other organizations around the world where they looked at people in jobs of all kinds in order to find out what makes a person in a given role really outstanding here. And there are three domains of excellence, really: One is technical skills -- you can be fabulous there; another is IQ; and a third is emotional intelligence-- how you handle yourself and how you handle relationships. And it turns out that emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ, plus technical skill combined, in the ingredients of outstanding performance. That's for jobs of all kinds. The higher you go in the organization, the more it matters. For top leaders, it's 85 to 90 percent of the ingredients of star performance. DAVID GERGEN: You also found that organizations themselves that had people of that character at the top outperformed other organizations. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, it's very interesting. A study - I can name a company -- Pepsico did analysis of division leaders around the world, and they found that in every part of the world, if a division leader had strengths in six or more emotional and intelligence abilities, then they outperformed their yearly revenue targets about 15 to 20 percent. If they didn't have them, they under-performed by about 20 percent, so you can see, for a company, that makes a huge difference in revenue. DAVID GERGEN: You identified, so we can sort of nail this down a bit, essentially five key components of emotional intelligence - DANIEL GOLEMAN: Five. DAVID GERGEN: -- three that pertain to oneself and two that pertained to how one relates to others. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Right. The few that have to do with how we handle ourselves, self-awareness, knowing what you're feeling, knowing what your values are in a moment when you're making a given decision -- that's one element of emotional intelligence. Another is how you handle your impulses or your distressing feelings. Do you blow up, or can you be patient? Can you let it pass and be more effective in how you respond? Another is motivation. Are you the kind of person that really sets high enough goals for yourself and keeps trying to better? Or are you willing to put up with however you're doing? Then there's how you get along with other people. Can you empathize? Can you see things from the other person's perspective? Can you really listen well? Can you -- the fifth element is social skill. How do you get along with other people? Can you be persuasive? Can you work together on a team well? Do you have what it takes to be a leader? DAVID GERGEN: In reading this, I was reminded of the famous comment by Justice Holmes after he met a newly elected Franklin Roosevelt. He said, "he has a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." DANIEL GOLEMAN: Absolutely, yes. DAVID GERGEN: And that's what distinguished him in the end.   DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, and I think that's an elegantly put formula for leadership. It's not that intellect doesn't matter; you do need to be able to comprehend the complexity of the issues, but lots of people do. What sets a leader apart is, first of all, being grounded in the sense of your own values, of where you're going, what you think matters, what you think has meaning; and the second is being able to connect with people and persuade them, and that means speaking to the heart as well as the head. DAVID GERGEN: Do you find that with smart people who fail as leaders that there are one or two characteristics that are the most common that account for their failures? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, I can actually tell you about data. It was study of very promising leaders who derailed along their career, and it turned out that one reason was that they were just tuned out. They were arrogant, rude. They didn't feel anybody else understood things as well as they did, so they didn't listen, so they alienated people. Another interesting finding is that they couldn't adapt to change. They were too rigid, too fixed in their way of looking at things. DAVID GERGEN: How does one recognize emotional intelligence in yourself, and how can you develop it? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, I think the good news about emotional intelligence, unlike IQ, which is fixed in life, the good news is you can improve it at any point. These are learned abilities. When you're talking about taking initiative or really listening to people or whatever it may be, you can assess it, and you can improve it. Now, the assessment is interesting. You can't do it based on your own sense of "well, maybe I'm not so good here; maybe I'm good there." For example, if you ask people, "how empathic are you?," the answer of people's own opinion correlates about zero with an objective test of empathy. If you ask people who know them well, "how empathic is he?," you get a very high correlation. So you need to get feedback from people around you, and there are good, systematic ways of doing that these days. Once you know where it is you need to work, what you need to improve on, then you need to have a plan for learning, which uses your on-the-job, everyday situations as your learning lab. You're not going to get it -- and this a big mistake that's made these days -- by going to, like, a day-long seminar on listening or leadership or teamwork. I'm co-chair of a consortium, which estimates about $10 billion a year is wasted by companies on training that just doesn't work, because they don't give people the follow-though. DAVID GERGEN: Leadership training or executive training. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Leadership training, executive training, collaboration, customer service -- all of these abilities that are based on emotional intelligence. So if you wanted to learn to listen better, you'd have to look at the moments that come up in the day where you don't do it so well and start monitoring yourself, and start making the effort, and start getting some feedback on how you're doing. And you have to do that for quite a while, I'd say three months or more, in order to see a lasting change. Then you get the transfer to on- the-job performance that you don't get in the one-day quick-and-easy seminar. DAVID GERGEN: These are really habits that one has to develop over time. DANIEL GOLEMAN: We're talking about changing habits. You know, you can go back to Ben Franklin. There's a lot of wisdom on this. DAVID GERGEN: Right. You raise an issue in your book, Daniel, that I found quite interesting, and that is that IQ's have gone up since the First World War, I think you said by some 24 points on the various tests. DANIEL GOLEMAN: Yes. DAVID GERGEN: The average IQ of a population. But you thought -- are you worried that emotional intelligence was going down in the younger generation? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, I am worried. The reason is that there was a national random survey done in the mid-70's, then the late 80's, tracking that generation, and they asked parents and teachers to evaluate kids, so these are grown-ups who know them very well. They found out that over a decade and a half, America's kids declined across the board. They didn't go up in anything. They were more lonely, more aggressive, more disobedient, more anxious across the board. And it's a very disturbing trend. This doesn't mean there aren't great individual kids, of course, but I think childhood is changing for kids, and they're not learning these skills the way they once did. DAVID GERGEN: And you would suggest what? DANIEL GOLEMAN: Well, I'm an advocate myself of teaching these abilities in schools. I think that we're cheating kids if we don't realize that being able to handle your impulse or your anger or to work well with others or to discipline yourself is as important for life's success as math or language. And also, from a point of view of employability, these are the attributes that companies are looking for in the people they're hiring. And in fact, from a company's point of view, if people come into the work force, as is happening now with the entry-level cohort, they come in under-prepared here, new hires who, when someone gives them performance feedback, they get personally offended, they get angry, they can't take feedback, or who won't collaborate, they're big problems. Then the company has to be, you know, the agent for us. DAVID GERGEN: Daniel Goleman, thank you very much. DANIEL GOLEMAN: A pleasure.