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Daniel Goleman looks beyond IQs to determine the emotional qualities that distinguish corporate leaders. It's not how intelligent someone is that predicts his ultimate success in life; it's how well he handles himself and other people that eventually marks him as a star performer or just an average working drone. "Emotional intelligence" is the phrase used to describe an individual's ability to connect with the people and the world around him. A person with high emotional intelligence is gifted with great self-aware- ness, discipline, persistence, and empathy. For eight years Daniel Goleman has argued persuasively that emotionally intelligent managers become the best and most profitable business leaders in the world. Beginning with his 1995 best seller Emotional In Primal Leadership, you divide leaders into six types: visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, and commanding. Without summarizing the entire book in a paragraph, can you describe which of these styles is the most effective and why? Every one of those styles has its place in a leader's repertoire. The problem is that two styles tend to be overused in ways that make them very negative. One is the style of the pacesetter, who has very high inter- Intelligence, Goleman has sought to strip away conventional notions of what it means to be intelligent by examining how key personality traits can lead to measurable success. Although his background is in psychology—he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in clinical psy- chology and personality development—he has become a powerful voice in the corporate world. Through books such as Working with Emotional Intelligence and Primal Leadership, he has explored the value of emotional intelli- gence in the office—and the business school. He and co- author Richard E. Boyatzis have produced the university edi- tion of the Emotional Competence Inventory (or ECI-U), an evaluation tool that can help business students target their weakest leadership qualities and work to improve them. It's Goleman's contention that top leaders will recognize that they cannot function without a clear understanding of their own feelings and those of the people around them. "Emotions have their place, and your emotions have an enor- mous impact on how well you can do the task at hand," he says. In a recent interview, Goleman discusses his belief that experiential learning—in the business school environment and the real world—can improve anyone's level of emotion- al intelligence and enhance his ability to grow into a dynam- ic and powerful leader. by Sharon Shinn photos by Christopher Navin nal standards and often is a great individual performer. However, once he's been promoted to some level—say, divi- sion leader or team leader—he doesn't really know how to lead. He just knows how to perform the way he did as an indi- vidual. On the one hand, he's very self-critical— that's how he drives himself—but he's also hypercritical of people who fail to meet his stan- dards. That kind of boss becomes very impatient of someone who's not as good as he is. He never tries to develop people; instead, he dumps on them or micromanages them. This attitude alienates and demotivates employees. The coercive, commanding leader—who believes in com- mand and control, who leads just by virtue of authority—very often will bark orders at people. That style also alienates peo- ple and poisons the climate. However, each of those two negative styles has its place. If you have a highly skilled, highly motivated team, you can use the pacesetter style and develop a star team. If you are in a turnaround, you need to be an emphatic boss. You need to take control and give commands to make it clear that things are being done in a new way. But if that's all you do, if you don't draw on the other four styles that create a very positive climate, then you'll fail. As part of the mix, however, both of those styles can be effective. Similarly, while the visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic styles all have very posi- tive effects, no leader should adopt only one of them. The best leaders exhibit four or more leadership styles. Are the same leadership styles to be found in the top management at business schools? Actually, in the U.K., the education ministry recently com- missioned a study of the heads of schools. The study found that the best academic results could be predicted when heads of schools exhibited four or more management styles. And if they exhibited only one or two of the worst styles, the stu- dents at their schools had the worst academic records. This was a study in which demographics were held to a constant and where the education level was equivalent for the parents of the students. BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2003 19