EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND LEADERSHIP MANAGEMENT ASSIGNMENT QUESTIONS
Enhancing one’s leadership impact is clearly much more than applying a recipe or following a list of steps. First, recipes may or may not fit one’s style and personality. Second, if one is not skilled or genuine in using the recipe, potential followers will see through it in a New York minute. And third, formulaic approaches to managing people often run into the dilemma of what to do with the exceptions. People are so “organic,” they keep creating variations on themes. Even in surgery, for example, doctors know that every person’s anatomy will be a little bit different. That said, most observers believe that intelligence is an important precursor to effective leadership. Smart people are generally considered to have the best potential for being the leaders of industry, nations, and institutions. Interestingly, a study of valedictorians, however, indicates that after twenty years, most of them are working for their classmates.1 This counter-intuitive result causes us to rethink our beliefs about intelligence and its relationship to effective leadership.
For more than a century, business leaders have, for the most part, tried to downplay emotions in business as unprofessional, undisciplined, and unrelated to good decision-making. This stems in part from the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment in western civilization. Knowledge, said Sir Francis Bacon, is power. Like the other philosophers of the Enlightenment, Bacon saw knowledge as the pathway to universal liberation and emotions and passions as obstacles to knowledge. Many of the leadership models taught in business schools have focused on rational decision making in which emotions are viewed as detriments or obstacles to making good decisions. Students are taught to search for the “right answer” and to do so in a rigorously analytical and logical way.
Further, American school systems have focused on the notion of rational intelligence in striving to educate millions of children. The concept of intelligence quotient (or IQ) has been the most prominent measure of intelligence. School systems designed curricula with the intent of utilizing more of students’ IQs if not adding to them. While the validity of IQ tests and their general intelligence or aptitude substitutes have come into question in recent years,2 tests of purely rational thinking—the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the General Management Aptitude Test (GMAT), for example—still wield a great deal of influence over our individual academic opportunities and those of our children.
Recently, however, some startling conclusions about the nature of intelligence—many of them directly at odds with old assumptions—have begun to emerge. Daniel Goleman points out three important inferences we can draw from recent studies:
- Existing standardized intelli- gence tests fail to predict success in life or in business because they do not tell the whole story. Intelligence is not singular; it comes in a number of forms—i.e.,multiple intelligences—and intellectual intelligence, the kind measured by IQ tests, is only one
- Emotion, while it can sometimes sabotage clear-headed thought, has been scientifically shown to be an indispensable contributor to rational thinking and decision-making. As oxymoronic as it would have seemed to Sir Francis Bacon, there is a range of intelligences which can be called emotional; they are important for aspiring business leaders to understand better.
- Despite traditional views that IQ is inherited and that one cannot do much to change it, the newly recognized various intelligences seem to be, to a large extent,
Not One Intelligence, But Many: Gardner’s Research
Goleman draws on the work of several researchers to demonstrate the existence of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Harvard University School of Education, found the longstanding notion of a single kind of intelligence both wrongheaded and injurious. He blamed this belief largely on the IQ test itself—calling it the “IQ way of thinking: people are either smart or not, are born that way, that there’s nothing much you can do about it, and that tests can tell you if you are one of the smart ones. The SAT test for college admissions is based on the same notion of a single kind of aptitude that determines your future. This way of thinking permeates society.”3 Statistically speaking, IQ measurements, SAT scores, and grades turn out to be relatively poor predictors of who will succeed in life and who will not. (Goleman puts the contribution of IQ to a person’s success at about 20 percent.)
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