What Makes a Leader (0.5)

An Essential Ingredient

Many years ago I sat down for the first time in the atrium at Imperial College London Business School [1]. I had just collected my readings for the term and set myself to skimming through my fancy new material. I stumbled upon an old Harvard Business Review article by Daniel Goleman called “What Makes a Leader” [2]. I still remember reading the line: “Emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership”. Not knowing what sine qua non meant and not having an iPhone (I was fresh off the purchase of a £5 Samsung at Carphone Warehouse) I was forced to read on, using only the power of context clues.

Looking back over more than a decade, I still hold Goleman’s basic idea in that article to be among the most profound insights I came across in business school [3]. Goleman compacted the essence of “What Makes a Leader” into this tidy paragraph:

“It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as threshold capabilities. Emotional intelligence is the sine qua non for leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.”

The power of that insight has only been reinforced during the first 10 years of my own leadership career. A shocking phenomenon I’ve witnessed since getting into the wild is that the smartest people—sometimes totally brilliant people—are often far from the best performers. In fact, they frequently have fatal flaws that lead to ball-of-fire meltdowns.

Bad Examples

Examples of what not to do are sometimes more instructive than examples of what to do. There’s a strong emotional reaction associated with bad-practice that seems to imprint on experience more intensely than does best-practice.

Here’s such an example: One of our team leads (we’ll call him Bob) is notoriously volatile. On the one hand he’s a great guy: kind, cheerful and nurturing. On the other hand he’s a pain in the rear end: passive-aggressive, overly-sensitive, curmudgeon-y, and insatiable. Stress is normally what tips the scales from “great guy” to “pain in the rear end”. But, hey, nobody’s perfect, right? You can’t please all of the people all of the time. I get it. The problem here is (1) Bob is stressed a lot and (2) Bob is a big pain, not just a little pain, when he’s stressed.

To add some more flavor, here’s a recent whopper from Bob: “I’ll defer to you all to make sure we’re not building a company on a toxic waste site.” Ouch. Those are the facepalm moments. The pin gets pulled from the grenade. The air is sucked out of the room. I read that George Washington used to punish perpetrators with 1,000 lashes. I get that instinct. But, alas, it’s 2000-something and we handle things differently now.

I don’t mean to pick on poor Bob. He doesn’t mean it. But Bob is instructive. Put in a leadership position, otherwise run-of-the-mill foibles are weaponized into cultural carcinogens. Everyone feels them. They metastasize. Safety breaks down. Soon everyone is walking on eggshells. Communication stops flowing. Part of the organization becomes a gangrenous limb threatening the whole system.

DNA of Emotional Intelligence

So many of Goleman’s ideas resonate when I think about Bob. Bob is a good guy. Bob is extremely smart. But Bob is under pressure. And someone hits Bob with an incremental stressor. Now Bob feels further in the hole. Bob snaps. It’s easy to snap. But the true leaders don’t snap. For them, the playing field slows down when things speed up. What is the DNA of that person, I wonder? What Makes a Leader?

The golden nuggets I pull from the literature—and from slogging through my own leadership journey—really come down to how three strands of emotional intelligence (namely self-awareness, self-regulation and empathy) weave together to unlock real leadership skill [4].

Strand 1: Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the building block of a functional human being and the atomic element of leadership. If we don’t understand what makes us tick, there’s not much hope for a successful and well-adjusted life—let alone the potential to successfully steward multitudes. Self-awareness, at least for me, starts with understanding how our brain works. In particular an understanding of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex [5].

In a nutshell the amygdala is the ancient, reptilian part of our brain. It’s the structure that activates when we’re under stress and in fight-or-flight mode. Conversely, the prefrontal cortex is the most evolved, sophisticated, “human” part of our brain. We use it for the creative, analytical, innovative, and uniquely human things we do. We’re at our best when we’re leveraging our prefrontal cortex. When it comes to leadership, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex are our kryptonite and our super-power, respectively.

When we get stressed, we’re catapulted through the corridors of time and reduced to the primordial cognitive abilities of our ancient ancestors. This is called amygdala hijack. Research has shown that an active amygdala shuts down neural pathways to our prefrontal cortex, and we become something like 30% less intelligent. Operating from the amygdala is such an extreme liability that I’ve become increasingly convinced so much of self-awareness comes down to understanding “is my amygdala calling the shots right now?”

Strand 2: Self-regulation

The next strand of the emotional intelligence helix is self-regulation. It’s one thing to be self-aware, but can you parlay that awareness to shape your actions? As Mr. Rogers would ask: What do you do with the mad that you feel?

There’s any number of analogs for self-regulation, from religion to cognitive behavioral therapy [6]. I like the Buddhist proverb of the First and Second Darts: The First Dart is the dart the world throws at us. It comes from an external stimulus that acts on us and that we cannot control. The Second Dart is the dart we throw at ourselves, respresting how we respond to the First Dart. The insight is that there’s not one, but two events: (1) the involuntary stimulus that creates an impulse (2) and our voluntary response to that stimulus. Self-regulation represents our ability to avail ourselves of the gap between our impulse and our ultimate response. Predictably, Daniel Goleman puts it best:

“You can widen the gap between impulse and reactivity. Instead of doing the first thing that comes to mind you can live in that gap for a moment. The wider the gap the more mature you can be because you can consider other alternatives.”

There’s an interesting erosion that occurs between self-awareness and self-regulation. One might think self-regulation is a natural extension of self-awareness. But, of course, that’s not the case. It’s a fascinating phenomenon to see really smart people act in self-destructive ways and be aware of it. I imagine it’d be like sitting in a car with its breaks cut speeding toward a cliff. You know what’s going to happen, but you're missing the critical component to prevent the disaster.

Stand 3: Empathy

Whereas self-awareness and self-regulation are about self-management, empathy is about the management of other people, which requires us to understand them. Part of what makes this so difficult is the lack of self-management skills in others. Many people can’t easily articulate what they are experiencing. As a result, we aren’t able to simply ask them “what’s going on with you?” and expect an accurate answer. To compound the challenge, people misdiagnose themselves and offer up red herring after red herring. Alas, it’s our job to cut through the noise, get inside their skin, and understand what is really true. That’s not easy. It’s also one reason why screening for self-management skills during the hiring process is so important [7].

In his research, psychologist Brian Little writes about degrees of freedom, which basically means being open to various interpretations of how things are [8]. He points out an interesting paradox: when we assess other people, we are creating the attributes that we regard as emanating from them. In other words, our assessments of others are in many ways a reflection of ourselves, filled with our own constructs and biases.

With this in mind, I view empathy as a triangulation process whereby we gradually pick up on signals to home in on what’s going on with others. It requires us to widen our aperture—to have broader degrees of freedom—in order to really understand what is true.

Weaving it Together: Executive Presence

Some folks are energizing. They are articulate. They are to the point. They know how to disagree without being disagreeable. They resist the urge to fight every fight and die on every hill. They understand that how they communicate is even more important than what they communicate. They have a preternatural awareness that every interaction they have is a debit or credit from their leadership account.

I think of my friend, who we’ll call Tom mainly because that’s his real name. Tom is a true leader. In addition to having all the threshold IQ stills, there’s a magic feeling you get around Tom. He’s a lift and thrust, never a pull and a drag. He’s energizing. He brings all the strands of emotional intelligence together seamlessly.

I like the term executive presence for people like Tom. I look at it as the phenotype to emotional intelligence’s genotype—the visible expression of those underlying traits. It’s a representation of whether someone has the strands of emotional intelligence and whether they can put them into action. Executive presence, fundamentally, is the mobilization of emotional intelligence. The output of exercising executive presence is what gives us what French and Raven call referent power, also known as street cred. It’s that referent power that allows us to lead effectively, because it engenders followership and energizes folks to rally alongside us.

Executive presence is often looked at as an intangible, je ne sais quoi soft skill. But the underlying skills it represents are real. No one comments specifically on Tom Brady’s ability to use an overhand motion to send a football through a semi-parabolic arc while simultaneously positioning its angular momentum in the direction of its long axis thereby giving it the smallest possible cross-sectional area against oncoming air to causes the least amount of aerodynamic drag. They just know he’s great. Similarly, with executive presence, we don’t look at each piece of the mosaic. We just know when someone is the real deal.

Final Thoughts

Leadership is hard. No one catapults out of the womb ready to lead. No one starts their first day of work chock full of executive presence. Becoming a leader is an arduous process of many, many setbacks. Why is it so hard? It comes down to leverage. There’s a tremendous amount of leverage in leadership. Like in finance, leverage can be an asset or liability. It can magnify our strengths, but it can just as easily magnify our weaknesses. Put in a place of leadership, folks like Tom can have an impact far greater than they could have had individually. Conversely, folks like Bob trigger a never ending series of margin calls. Leadership, therefore, is about managing that leverage. The people put in that position must have real skill—but it is emotional intelligence that is the sine qua non of leadership.

Notes & References:

[1] Norman + Foster. Projects: Imperial College Business School

As an aside, the business school is housed in a beautiful glass building designed by Norman Foster. Although it’s nice looking, it is freezing in the winter and a greenhouse in the summer. Beautiful but perpetually uncomfortable.

[2] Daniel Goleman (1998). What Makes a Leader. Harvard Business Review.

This essay is not a full deconstruction of emotional intelligence, nor is it meant to add substantially to the evidence base of emotional intelligence research (clearly). I am a practitioner, not an ardent researcher. A practitioner's point of view has merits and demerits, just as an academic’s does. Whereas a researcher may take a deeply data-driven and evidence-based approach, a practitioner largely relies on case-learning whereby they leverage basic principles and apply common sense to real-world scenarios they see over and over again. Academics can, and will, spin for ages looking at the same subjects through different lenses. Sometimes there is value in that. Sometimes those pursuits are careerist and do not add value. What I am interested in is not a thorough-going reassessment of emotional intelligence. Rather, my goal is to use basic principles to get a common sense view on the world (and not get too persnickety about it). As John Maynard Keynes said: “It’s better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

[3] Other profound insights were mostly from economists, particularly Thorsten Veblen, Adam Smith, and Joseph Schumpeter.

[4] This is simplifying the elements of emotional intelligence. Goleman’s source material is the place to start for a thorough background.

[5] This is simplifying the brain to get the main point across. Apologies to people who know things about the brain and are offended by my gross simplification.

[6] Another analog I like is the ABC Model in the rational emotive behavioral therapy framework developed by Albert Ellis. Here is a full therapy session by Albert Ellis applying rational emotive therapy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcq4RMzSyng

[7] Screening for self-management skills is so important during hiring processes because self-management skills in individuals are critical for the success of the team as a whole. We want to play easy games. You don’t want to have to be a therapist and a manager. That is a hard game.

[8] Brian Little (2016). Me, Myself, and Us. Public Affairs.

This is a tremendous book.