HBR- Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?

Managers and Leaders
Are They Different?
by Abraham Zaleznik
BEST OF HBR 1977

Abstract:
Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers’ goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization’s day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. In this article, first published in 1977, the author argues that businesses need both managers and leaders to survive and succeed. But in the larger U.S. organizations of that time, a “managerial mystique” seemed to perpetuate the development of managerial personalities–people who rely on, and strive to maintain, orderly work patterns. The managerial power ethic favors collective leadership and seeks to avoid risk. That same managerial mystique can stifle leaders’ development–How can an entrepreneurial spirit develop when it is submerged in a conservative environment and denied personal attention? Mentor relationships are crucial to the development of leadership personalities, but in large, bureaucratic organizations, such relationships are not encouraged. Businesses must find ways to train good managers and develop leaders at the same time.

Business leaders have much more in common with artists than they do with managers.

The traditional view of management, back in 1977 when Abraham Zaleznik wrote this article, centered on organizational structure and pro¬cesses. Managerial development at the time fo¬cused exclusively on building competence, con¬trol, and the appropriate balance of power. That view, Zaleznik argued, omitted the essential lead¬ership elements of inspiration, vision, and human passion—which drive corporate success. The difference between managers and lead¬ers, he wrote, lies in the conceptions they hold, deep in their psyches, of chaos and order. Manag¬ers embrace process, seek stability and control, and instinctively try to resolve problems quickly—sometimes before they fully under¬stand a problem’s significance. Leaders, in con¬trast, tolerate chaos and lack of structure and are willing to delay closure in order to understand the issues more fully. In this way, Zaleznik ar¬gued, business leaders have much more in com¬mon with artists, scientists, and other creative thinkers than they do with managers. Organiza¬tions need both managers and leaders to suc¬ceed, but developing both requires a reduced focus on logic and strategic exercises in favor of an environment where creativity and imagina¬tion are permitted to flourish.

What is the ideal way to develop leadership? Every society provides its own answer to this question, and each, in groping for answers, de¬fines its deepest concerns about the purposes, distributions, and uses of power. Business has contributed its answer to the leadership ques¬tion by evolving a new breed called the man¬ager. Simultaneously, business has established a new power ethic that favors collective over individual leadership, the cult of the group over that of personality. While ensuring the competence, control, and the balance of power among groups with the potential for ri¬valry, managerial leadership unfortunately does not necessarily ensure imagination, cre¬ativity, or ethical behavior in guiding the des¬tinies of corporate enterprises.

Leadership inevitably requires using power to influence the thoughts and actions of other people. Power in the hands of an individual entails human risks: first, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate re¬sults; second, the risk of ignoring the many dif¬ferent ways people can legitimately accumu¬late power; and third, the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power. The need to hedge these risks accounts in part for the de¬velopment of collective leadership and the managerial ethic. Consequently, an inherent conservatism dominates the culture of large organizations. In The Second American Revolu¬tion, John D. Rockefeller III describes the conservatism of organizations:
“An organization is a system, with a logic of its own, and all the weight of tradition and in¬ertia. The deck is stacked in favor of the tried and proven way of doing things and against the taking of risks and striking out in new di¬rections.”

Out of this conservatism and inertia, organi¬zations provide succession to power through the development of managers rather than indi¬vidual leaders. Ironically, this ethic fosters a bureaucratic culture in business, supposedly the last bastion protecting us from the en¬croachments and controls of bureaucracy in government and education.

Manager vs. Leader Personality

A managerial culture emphasizes rationality and control. Whether his or her energies are di¬rected toward goals, resources, organization structures, or people, a manager is a problem solver. The manager asks: “What problems have to be solved, and what are the best ways to achieve results so that people will continue to contribute to this organization?” From this per¬spective, leadership is simply a practical effort to direct affairs; and to fulfill his or her task, a manager requires that many people operate ef¬ficiently at different levels of status and respon¬sibility. It takes neither genius nor heroism to be a manager, but rather persistence, tough-mindedness, hard work, intelligence, analytical ability, and perhaps most important, tolerance and goodwill.

Another conception of leadership, however, attaches almost mystical beliefs to what a leader is and assumes that only great people are worthy of the drama of power and politics. Here leadership is a psychodrama in which a brilliant, lonely person must gain control of himself or herself as a precondition for control¬ling others. Such an expectation of leadership contrasts sharply with the mundane, practical, and yet important conception that leadership is really managing work that other people do.

Three questions come to mind. Is this lead¬ership mystique merely a holdover from our childhood—from a sense of dependency and a longing for good and heroic parents? Or is it true that no matter how competent managers are, their leadership stagnates because of their limitations in visualizing purposes and gener¬ating value in work? Driven by narrow pur¬poses, without an imaginative capacity and the ability to communicate, do managers then per¬petuate group conflicts instead of reforming them into broader desires and goals?

If indeed problems demand greatness, then judging by past performance, the selection and development of leaders leave a great deal to chance. There are no known ways to train “great” leaders. Further, beyond what we leave to chance, there is a deeper issue in the relationship between the need for competent managers and the longing for great leaders.

What it takes to ensure a supply of people who will assume practical responsibility may inhibit the development of great leaders. On the other hand, the presence of great leaders may undermine the development of managers who typically become very anxious in the rela¬tive disorder that leaders seem to generate.

It is easy enough to dismiss the dilemma of training managers, though we may need new leaders or leaders at the expense of managers, by saying that the need is for people who can be both. But just as a managerial culture dif¬fers from the entrepreneurial culture that de¬velops when leaders appear in organizations, managers and leaders are very different kinds of people. They differ in motivation, personal history, and in how they think and act.

Attitudes Toward Goals

Managers tend to adopt impersonal, if not passive, attitudes toward goals. Managerial goals arise out of necessities rather than de¬sires and, therefore, are deeply embedded in their organization’s history and culture.

Frederic G. Donner, chairman and chief ex¬ecutive officer of General Motors from 1958 to 1967, expressed this kind of attitude toward goals in defining GM’s position on product de¬velopment:

“To meet the challenge of the marketplace, we must recognize changes in customer needs and desires far enough ahead to have the right products in the right places at the right time and in the right quantity.

“We must balance trends in preference against the many compromises that are neces¬sary to make a final product that is both reli¬able and good looking, that performs well and that sells at a competitive price in the neces¬sary volume. We must design not just the cars we would like to build but, more important, the cars that our customers want to buy.”2

Nowhere in this statement is there a notion that consumer tastes and preferences arise in part as a result of what manufacturers do. In reality, through product design, advertising, and promotion, consumers learn to like what they then say they need. Few would argue that people who enjoy taking snapshots need a camera that also develops pictures. But in re¬sponse to a need for novelty, convenience, and a shorter interval between acting (snapping the picture) and gaining pleasure (seeing the shot), the Polaroid camera succeeded in the marketplace. It is inconceivable that Edwin Land responded to impressions of consumer need. Instead, he translated a technology (po¬larization of light) into a product, which prolif¬erated and stimulated consumers’ desires.

The example of Polaroid and Land suggests how leaders think about goals. They are active instead of reactive, shaping ideas instead of re¬sponding to them. Leaders adopt a personal and active attitude toward goals. The influence a leader exerts in altering moods, evoking im¬ages and expectations, and in establishing spe¬cific desires and objectives determines the di¬rection a business takes. The net result of this influence changes the way people think about what is desirable, possible, and necessary.

Conceptions of Work

Managers tend to view work as an enabling process involving some combination of people and ideas interacting to establish strategies and make decisions. They help the process along by calculating the interests in opposi¬tion, planning when controversial issues should surface, and reducing tensions. In this enabling process, managers’ tactics appear flexible: on one hand, they negotiate and bar¬gain; on the other, they use rewards, punish¬ments, and other forms of coercion.

Alfred P. Sloan’s actions at General Motors illustrate how this process works in situations of conflict. The time was the early 1920s when Ford Motor Company still dominated the au¬tomobile industry using, as did General Mo¬tors, the conventional water-cooled engine. With the full backing of Pierre du Pont, Charles Kettering dedicated himself to the de¬sign of an air-cooled copper engine, which, if successful, would be a great technical and mar¬keting coup for GM. Kettering believed in his product, but the manufacturing division heads opposed the new design on two grounds: first, it was technically unreliable, and second, the corporation was putting all its eggs in one bas¬ket by investing in a new product instead of at¬tending to the current marketing situation.

In the summer of 1923, after a series of false starts and after its decision to recall the copper engine Chevrolets from dealers and customers, GM management scrapped the project. When it dawned on Kettering that the company had rejected the engine, he was deeply discouraged and wrote to Sloan that, without the “orga¬nized resistance” against the project, it would have succeeded and that, unless the project were saved, he would leave the company.

Alfred Sloan was all too aware that Ketter¬ing was unhappy and indeed intended to leave General Motors. Sloan was also aware that, while the manufacturing divisions strongly op¬posed the new engine, Pierre du Pont sup¬ported Kettering. Further, Sloan had himself gone on record in a letter to Kettering less than two years earlier expressing full confi¬dence in him. The problem Sloan had was how to make his decision stick, keep Kettering in the organization (he was much too valuable to lose), avoid alienating du Pont, and encourage the division heads to continue developing product lines using conventional water-cooled engines.

Sloan’s actions in the face of this conflict re¬veal much about how managers work. First, he tried to reassure Kettering by presenting the problem in a very ambiguous fashion, suggest¬ing that he and the executive committee sided with Kettering, but that it would not be practi¬cal to force the divisions to do what they were opposed to. He presented the problem as being a question of the people, not the prod¬uct. Second, he proposed to reorganize around the problem by consolidating all functions in a new division that would be responsible for the design, production, and marketing of the new engine. This solution appeared as ambiguous as his efforts to placate Kettering. Sloan wrote: “My plan was to create an independent pilot operation under the sole jurisdiction of Mr. Kettering, a kind of copper-cooled car division. Mr. Kettering would designate his own chief engineer and his production staff to solve the technical problems of manufacture.”3

Sloan did not discuss the practical value of this solution, which included saddling an in¬ventor with management responsibility, but in effect, he used this plan to limit his conflict with Pierre du Pont.

Essentially, the managerial solution that Sloan arranged limited the options available to others. The structural solution narrowed choices, even limiting emotional reactions to the point where the key people could do noth¬ing but go along. It allowed Sloan to say in his memorandum to du Pont, “We have discussed the matter with Mr. Kettering at some length this morning, and he agrees with us absolutely on every point we made. He appears to receive the suggestion enthusiastically and has every confidence that it can be put across along these lines.”4

Sloan placated people who opposed his views by developing a structural solution that appeared to give something but in reality only limited options. He could then authorize the car division’s general manager, with whom he basically agreed, to move quickly in designing water-cooled cars for the immediate market demand.

Years later, Sloan wrote, evidently with tongue in cheek, “The copper-cooled car never came up again in a big way. It just died out; I don’t know why.”5

To get people to accept solutions to prob¬lems, managers continually need to coordinate and balance opposing views. Interestingly enough, this type of work has much in com-. mon with what diplomats and mediators do, with Henry Kissinger apparently an outstand¬ing practitioner. Managers aim to shift bal¬ances of power toward solutions acceptable as compromises among conflicting values.

Leaders work in the opposite direction. Where managers act to limit choices, leaders develop fresh approaches to long-standing problems and open issues to new options. To be effective, leaders must project their ideas onto images that excite people and only then develop choices that give those images sub¬stance.

John F. Kennedy’s brief presidency shows both the strengths and weaknesses connected with the excitement leaders generate in their work. In his inaugural address he said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any bur¬den, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

This much-quoted statement forced people to react beyond immediate concerns and to identify with Kennedy and with important shared ideals. On closer scrutiny, however, the statement is absurd because it promises a posi¬tion, which, if adopted, as in the Vietnam War, could produce disastrous results. Yet unless ex¬pectations are aroused and mobilized, with all the dangers of frustration inherent in height¬ened desire, new thinking and new choice can never come to light.

Leaders work from high-risk positions; in¬deed, they are often temperamentally dis¬posed to seek out risk and danger, especially where the chance of opportunity and reward appears promising. From my observations, the reason one individual seeks risks while another approaches problems conservatively depends more on his or her personality and less on con¬scious choice. For those who become manag¬ers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work. Leaders sometimes react to mundane work as to an affliction.

Relations with Others

Managers prefer to work with people; they avoid solitary activity because it makes them anxious. Several years ago, I directed studies on the psychological aspects of careers. The need to seek out others with whom to work and collaborate seemed to stand out as an im¬portant characteristic of managers. When asked, for example, to write imaginative sto¬ries in response to a picture showing a single figure (a boy contemplating a violin or a man silhouetted in a state of reflection), managers populated their stories with people. The fol¬lowing is an example of a manager’s imagina¬tive story about the young boy contemplating a violin:

“Mom and Dad insisted that their son take music lessons so that someday he can become a concert musician. His instrument was ordered and had just arrived. The boy is weigh¬ing the alternatives of playing football with the other kids or playing with the squeak box. He can’t understand how his parents could think a violin is better than a touchdown.

“After four months of practicing the violin, the boy has had more than enough, Dad is going out of his mind, and Mom is willing to give in reluctantly to their wishes. Football sea¬son is now over, but a good third baseman will take the field next spring.”

For those who become managers, a survival instinct dominates the need for risk, and with that instinct comes an ability to tolerate mundane, practical work.

This story illustrates two themes that clarify managerial attitudes toward human relations. The first, as I have suggested, is to seek out ac¬tivity with other people (that is, the football team), and the second is to maintain a low level of emotional involvement in those rela¬tionships. Low emotional involvement appears in the writer’s use of conventional metaphors, even clichés, and in the depiction of the ready transformation of potential conflict into har¬monious decisions. In this case, the boy, Mom, and Dad agree to give up the violin for sports.

These two themes may seem paradoxical, but their coexistence supports what a manager does, including reconciling differences, seek¬ing compromises, and establishing a balance of power. The story further demonstrates that managers may lack empathy, or the capacity to sense intuitively the thoughts and feelings of others. Consider another story written to the same stimulus picture by someone thought of as a leader by his peers:
“This little boy has the appearance of being a sincere artist, one who is deeply affected by the violin, and has an intense desire to master the instrument.
“He seems to have just completed his nor¬mal practice session and appears to be some¬what crestfallen at his inability to produce the sounds that he is sure lie within the violin.
“He appears to be in the process of making a vow to himself to expend the necessary time and effort to play this instrument until he sat¬isfies himself that he is able to bring forth the qualities of music that he feels within himself.
“With this type of determination and carry-through, this boy became one of the great vio¬linists of his day.”

Empathy is not simply a matter of paying attention to other people. It is also the capac¬ity to take in emotional signals and make them meaningful in a relationship. People who de¬scribe another person as “deeply affected,” with “intense desire,” “crestfallen,” and as one who can “vow to himself” would seem to have an inner perceptive ness that they can use in their relationships with others.

Managers relate to people according to the role they play in a sequence of events or in a decision-making process, while leaders, who are concerned with ideas, relate in more intui¬tive and empathetic ways. The distinction is simply between a manager’s attention to how things get done and a leader’s to what the events and decisions mean to participants.

In recent years, managers have adopted from game theory the notion that decision-making events can be one of two types: the win-lose situation (or zero-sum game) or the win-win situation in which everybody in the action comes out ahead. Managers strive to convert win-lose into win-win situations as part of the process of reconciling differences among people and maintaining balances of power.

As an illustration, take the decision of how to allocate capital resources among operating divisions in a large, decentralized organization. On the surface, the dollars available for distri¬bution are limited at any given time. Presum¬ably, therefore, the more one division gets, the less is available for other divisions.
Managers tend to view this situation (as it affects human relations) as a conversion issue: how to make what seems like a win-lose prob¬lem into a win-win problem. From that per¬spective, several solutions come to mind.
First, the manager focuses others’ attention on pro¬cedure and not on substance. Here the players become engrossed in the bigger problem of how to make decisions, not what decisions to make. Once committed to the bigger problem, these people have to support the outcome since they were involved in formulating the decision-making rules. Because they believe in the rules they formulated, they will accept present losses, believing that next time they will win.

Second, the manager communicates to sub¬ordinates indirectly, using “signals” instead of “messages.” A signal holds a number of im¬plicit positions, while a message clearly states a position. Signals are inconclusive and subject to reinterpretation should people become upset and angry; messages involve the direct consequence that some people will indeed not like what they hear. The nature of messages heightens emotional response and makes man¬agers anxious. With signals, the question of who wins and who loses often becomes ob¬scured.

Third, the manager plays for time. Manag¬ers seem to recognize that with the passage of time and the delay of major decisions, compro¬mises emerge that take the sting out of win-lose situations, and the original “game” will be superseded by additional situations. Compro¬mises mean that one may win and lose simul¬taneously, depending on which of the games one evaluates.

There are undoubtedly many other tactical moves managers use to change human situa¬tions from win-lose to win-win. But the point is that such tactics focus on the decision-making process itself, and that process interests man¬agers rather than leaders. Tactical interests in¬volve costs as well as benefits; they make orga¬nizations fatter in bureaucratic and political intrigue and leaner in direct, hard activity and warm human relationships. Consequently, one often hears subordinates characterize manag¬ers as inscrutable, detached, and manipulative. These adjectives arise from the subordinates’ perception that they are linked together in a process whose purpose is to maintain a con¬trolled as well as rational and equitable struc¬ture.

In contrast, one often hears leaders referred to with adjectives rich in emotional content. Leaders attract strong feelings of identity and difference or of love and hate. Human rela¬tions in leader-dominated structures often ap¬pear turbulent, intense, and at times even dis¬organized. Such an atmosphere intensifies individual motivation and often produces un¬anticipated outcomes.

Senses of Self

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, Will¬iam James describes two basic personality types, “once-born” and “twice-born.” People of the former personality type are those for whom adjustments to life have been straight¬forward and whose lives have been more or less a peaceful flow since birth. Twice-borns, on the other hand, have not had an easy time of it. Their lives are marked by a continual struggle to attain some sense of order. Unlike once-borns, they cannot take things for granted. According to James, these personali¬ties have equally different worldviews. For a once-born personality, the sense of self as a guide to conduct and attitude derives from a feeling of being at home and in harmony with one’s environment. For a twice-born, the sense of self derives from a feeling of pro¬found separateness.

A sense of belonging or of being separate has a practical significance for the kinds of in¬vestments managers and leaders make in their careers. Managers see themselves as conserva¬tors and regulators of an existing order of af¬fairs with which they personally identify and from which they gain rewards. A manager’s sense of self-worth is enhanced by perpetuat¬ing and strengthening existing institutions: he or she is performing in a role that harmonizes with ideals of duty and responsibility. William James had this harmony in mind—this sense of self as flowing easily to and from the outer world—in defining a once-born personality.
Leaders tend to be twice-born personalities, people who feel separate from their environ¬ment. They may work in organizations, but they never belong to them. Their sense of who they are does not depend on memberships, work roles, or other social indicators of iden¬tity. And that perception of identity may form the theoretical basis for explaining why certain individuals seek opportunities for change. The methods to bring about change may be tech¬nological, political, or ideological, but the ob¬ject is the same: to profoundly alter human, economic, and political relationships.

In considering the development of leader¬ship, we have to examine two different courses of life history: (1) development through social¬ization, which prepares the individual to guide institutions and to maintain the existing bal¬ance of social relations; and (2) development through personal mastery, which impels an in¬dividual to struggle for psychological and so¬cial change. Society produces its managerial talent through the first line of development; leaders emerge through the second.

Development of Leadership

Every person’s development begins with fam¬ily. Each person experiences the traumas asso¬ciated with separating from his or her parents, as well as the pain that follows such a wrench. In the same vein, all individuals face the diffi¬culties of achieving self-regulation and self-control. But for some, perhaps a majority, the fortunes of childhood provide adequate gratifications and sufficient opportunities to find substitutes for rewards no longer available. Such individuals, the “once-borns,” make moderate identifications with parents and find a harmony between what they expect and what they are able to realize from life.

But suppose the pains of separation are am¬plified by a combination of parental demands and individual needs to the degree that a sense of isolation, of being special, or of wariness dis¬rupts the bonds that attach children to parents and other authority figures? Given a special aptitude under such conditions, the person be¬comes deeply involved in his or her inner world at the expense of interest in the outer world. For such a person, self-esteem no longer depends solely on positive attachments and real rewards. A form of self-reliance takes hold along with expectations of performance and achievement, and perhaps even the desire to do great works.

Such self-perceptions can come to nothing if the individual’s talents are negligible. Even with strong talents, there are no guarantees that achievement will follow, let alone that the end result will be for good rather than evil. Other factors enter into development as well. For one, leaders are like artists and other gifted people who often struggle with neuro¬ses; their ability to function varies considerably even over the short run, and some potential leaders lose the struggle altogether. Also, be¬yond early childhood, the development pat¬terns that affect managers and leaders involve the selective influence of particular people. Managerial personalities form moderate and widely distributed attachments. Leaders, on the other hand, establish, and also break off, intensive one-to-one relationships.

It is a common observation that people with great talents are often indifferent students. No one, for example, could have predicted Ein¬stein’s great achievements on the basis of his mediocre record in school. The reason for me¬diocrity is obviously not the absence of ability. It may result, instead, from self-absorption and the inability to pay attention to the ordinary tasks at hand. The only sure way an individual can interrupt reverie-like preoccupation and self-absorption is to form a deep attachment to a great teacher or other person who under¬stands and has the ability to communicate with the gifted individual.

Whether gifted individuals find what they need in one-to-one relationships depends on the availability of teachers, possibly parental surrogates, whose strengths lie in cultivating talent. Fortunately, when generations meet and the self-selections occur, we learn more about how to develop leaders and how tal¬ented people of different generations influ¬ence each other.

While apparently destined for mediocre ca¬reers, people who form important one-to-one apprenticeship relationships often are able to accelerate and intensify their development. The psychological readiness of an individual to benefit from such a relationship depends on some experience in life that forces that person to turn inward.

Consider Dwight Eisenhower, whose early career in the army foreshadowed very little about his future development. During World War I, while some of his West Point classmates were already experiencing the war firsthand in France, Eisenhower felt “embedded in the mo¬notony and unsought safety of the Zone of the Interior.. that was intolerable punishment.”

Shortly after World War I, Eisenhower, then a young officer somewhat pessimistic about his career chances, asked for a transfer to Pan¬ama to work under General Fox Connor, a se¬nior officer whom he admired. The army turned down his request. This setback was very much on Eisenhower’s mind when Ikey, his first born son, succumbed to influenza. Through some sense of responsibility for its own, the army then transferred Eisenhower to Panama, where he took up his duties under General Connor with the shadow of his lost son very much upon him.

In a relationship with the kind of father he would have wanted to be, Eisenhower reverted to being the son he had lost. And in this highly charged situation, he began to learn from his teacher. General Connor offered, and Eisen¬hower gladly took, a magnificent tutorial on the military. The effects of this relationship on Eisenhower cannot be measured quantita¬tively, but in examining his career path from that point, one cannot overestimate its signifi¬cance.

As Eisenhower wrote later about Connor, “Life with General Connor was a sort of gradu¬ate school in military affairs and the humani¬ties, leavened by a man who was experienced in his knowledge of men and their conduct. I can never adequately express my gratitude to this one gentleman….In a lifetime of associa¬tion with great and good men, he is the one more or less invisible figure to whom I owe an incalculable debt.”7

Some time after his tour of duty with Gen¬eral Connor, Eisenhower’s breakthrough oc¬curred. He received orders to attend the Com¬mand and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, one of the most competitive schools in the army. It was a coveted appoint¬ment, and Eisenhower took advantage of the opportunity. Unlike his performance in high school and West Point, his work at the Com¬mand School was excellent; he was graduated first in his class.

Psychological biographies of gifted people repeatedly demonstrate the important part a teacher plays in developing an individual. An¬drew Carnegie owed much to his senior, Tho¬mas A. Scott. As head of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott recognized talent and the desire to learn in the young te¬legrapher assigned to him. By giving Carnegie increasing responsibility and by providing him with the opportunity to learn through close personal observation, Scott added to Carn¬egie’s self-confidence and sense of achieve¬ment. Because of his own personal strength and achievement, Scott did not fear Carnegie’s aggressiveness. Rather, he gave it full play in encouraging Carnegie’s initiative.

Great teachers take risks. They bet initially on talent they perceive in younger people. And they risk emotional involvement in work¬ing closely with their juniors. The risks do not always pay off, but the willingness to take them appears to be crucial in developing leaders.

Can Organizations Develop Leaders?

A myth about how people learn and develop that seems to have taken hold in American culture also dominates thinking in business. The myth is that people learn best from their peers. Supposedly, the threat of evaluation and even humiliation recedes in peer relations because of the tendency for mutual identifica¬tion and the social restraints on authoritarian behavior among equals. Peer training in orga¬nizations occurs in various forms. The use, for example, of task forces made up of peers from several interested occupational groups (sales, production, research, and finance) supposedly removes the restraints of authority on the in¬dividual’s willingness to assert and exchange ideas. As a result, so the theory goes, people interact more freely, listen more objectively to criticism and other points of view, and, finally, learn from this healthy interchange.

Another application of peer training exists in some large corporations, such as Philips N.V. in Holland, where organizational struc¬ture is built on the principle of joint responsi¬bility of two peers, one representing the com¬mercial end of the business and the other the technical. Formally, both hold equal responsi¬bility for geographic operations or product groups, as the case may be. As a practical mat¬ter, it may turn out that one or the other of the peers dominates the management. Neverthe¬less, the main interaction is between two or more equals.

The principal question I raise about such ar¬rangements is whether they perpetuate the managerial orientation and preclude the for¬mation of one-to-one relationships between se¬nior people and potential leaders.

Aware of the possible stifling effects of peer relationships on aggressiveness and individual initiative, another company, much smaller than Philips, utilizes joint responsibility of peers for operating units, with one important difference. The chief executive of this com¬pany encourages competition and rivalry among peers, ultimately rewarding the one who comes out on top with increased responsi¬bility. These hybrid arrangements produce some unintended consequences that can be di¬sastrous. There is no easy way to limit rivalry. Instead, it permeates all levels of the operation and opens the way for the formation of cliques in an atmosphere of intrigue.

One large, integrated oil company has ac¬cepted the importance of developing leaders through the direct influence of senior on jun¬ior executives. The chairman and chief execu¬tive officer regularly selects one talented uni¬versity graduate whom he appoints his special assistant, and with whom he will work closely for a year. At the end of the year, the junior ex¬ecutive becomes available for assignment to one of the operating divisions, where he or she will be assigned to a responsible post rather than a training position. This apprenticeship acquaints the junior executive firsthand with the use of power and with the important anti¬dotes to the power disease called hubris—performance and integrity.

Working in one-to-one relationships, where there is a formal and recognized difference in the power of the players, takes a great deal of tolerance for emotional interchange. This in¬terchange, inevitable in close working arrange¬ments, probably accounts for the reluctance of many executives to become involved in such relationships. Fortune carried an interesting story on the departure of a key executive, John W. Hanley, from the top management of Procter & Gamble to the chief executive of¬ficer position at Monsanto.8 According to this account, the chief executive and chairman of P&G passed over Hanley for appointment to the presidency, instead naming another execu¬tive vice president to this post.

The chairman evidently felt he could not work well with Hanley who, by his own ac¬knowledgment, was aggressive, eager to exper¬iment and change practices, and constantly challenged his superior. A chief executive of¬ficer naturally has the right to select people with whom he feels congenial. But I wonder whether a greater capacity on the part of se¬nior officers to tolerate the competitive im¬pulses and behavior of their subordinates might not be healthy for corporations. At least a greater tolerance for interchange would not favor the managerial team player at the ex¬pense of the individual who might become a leader.

I am constantly surprised at the frequency with which chief executives feel threatened by open challenges to their ideas, as though the source of their authority, rather than their spe¬cific ideas, was at issue. In one case, a chief ex¬ecutive officer, who was troubled by the ag¬gressiveness and sometimes outright rudeness of one of his talented vice presidents, used var¬ious indirect methods such as group meetings and hints from outside directors to avoid deal¬ing with his subordinate. I advised the execu¬tive to deal head-on with what irritated him. I suggested that by direct, face-to-face confron¬tation, both he and his subordinate would learn to validate the distinction between the authority to be preserved and the issues to be debated.

The ability to confront is also the ability to tolerate aggressive interchange. And that skill not only has the net effect of stripping away the veils of ambiguity and signaling so charac¬teristic of managerial cultures, but also it encourages the emotional relationships leaders need if they are to survive.

HBR- What Makes a Leader?

What Makes a Leader?
by Daniel Goleman

Abstract:
When asked to define the ideal leader, many would emphasize traits such as intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision–the qualities traditionally associated with leadership. Often left off the list are softer, more personal qualities–but they are also essential. Although a certain degree of analytical and technical skill is a minimum requirement for success, studies indicate that emotional intelligence may be the key attribute that distinguishes outstanding performers from those who are merely adequate. Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman first brought the term “emotional intelligence” to a wide audience with his 1995 book of the same name, and Goleman first applied the concept to business with this 1998 classic HBR article. In his research at nearly 200 large, global companies, Goleman found that truly effective leaders are distinguished by a high degree of emotional intelligence. Without it, a person can have first-class training, an incisive mind, and an endless supply of good ideas, but he or she still won’t be a great leader. The chief components of emotional intelligence–self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill–can sound unbusinesslike, but Goleman, cochair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based at Rutgers University, found direct ties between emotional intelligence and measurable business results.

What Makes a Leader?
by Daniel Goleman

What distinguishes the outstanding leader from the merely adequate?

Emotional intelligence— a powerful combination of self-management skill and the ability to work with others.

The Idea in Brief
Asked to define the ideal leader, many would emphasize traits such as intelligence, toughness, determination, and vision. Often left off the list are softer, more personal quali¬ties—but recent studies indicate that they are also essential. Although a certain degree of analytical and technical skill is a minimum requirement for success, what is called “emotional intelligence” may be the key attribute that distinguishes outstanding per¬formers from those who are merely adequate. For example, in a 1996 study of a global food and beverage company, where senior managers had a certain critical mass of emotional intelli¬gence, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%. Division leaders without that critical mass underperformed by almost the same amount.

The Idea at Work
There are five components to emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. All five traits sound desirable to just about everyone. But organizations too often implicitly discour¬age their people from developing them.

Self-management skills
1. Self-awareness. Emotional intelligence begins with this trait. People with a high degree of self-awareness know their weak¬nesses and aren’t afraid to talk about them. Someone who understands that he works poorly under tight deadlines, for example, will work hard to plan his time carefully, and will let his colleagues know why. Many executives looking for potential leaders mistake such candor for “wimpiness.”
2. Self-regulation. This attribute flows from self-awareness, but runs in a different direc¬tion. People with this trait are able to con¬trol their impulses or even channel them for good purposes.
3. Motivation. A passion for achievement for its own sake—not simply the ability to respond to whatever incentives a company offers—is the kind of motivation that is essential for leadership.

The ability to relate to others
4. Empathy. In addition to self-management skills, emotional intelligence requires a facility for dealing with others. And that starts with empathy—taking into account the feelings of others when making deci¬sions—as opposed to taking on everyone’s troubles.
EXAMPLE:
Consider two division chiefs at a company forced to make layoffs. One manager gave a hard¬hitting speech emphasizing the number of people who would be fired.The other manager, while not hiding the bad news, took into account his people’s anxieties. He promised to keep them informed and to treat everyone fairly. Many exec¬utives would have refrained from such a show of consideration, lest they appear to lack tough¬ness. But the tough manager demoralized his talented people—most of whom ended up leaving his division voluntarily.
5. Social skill. All the preceding traits culmi¬nate in this fifth one: the ability to build rapport with others, to get them to cooper¬ate, to move them in a direction you desire. Managers who simply try to be sociable— while lacking the other components of emotional intelligence—are likely to fail. Social skill, by contrast, is friendliness with a purpose.

Can you boost your emotional intelligence?
Absolutely—but not with traditional training programs that target the rational part of the brain. Extended practice, feedback from col¬leagues, and your own enthusiasm for making the change are essential to becoming an effective leader.

IQ and technical skills are important, but emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership.

What Makes a Leader?

by Daniel Goleman
Daniel Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence (Ban¬tam, 1995) and Working with Emotional Intelligence (Bantam, 1998). He is cochairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, which is based at Rut¬gers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology in Piscataway, New Jersey. He can be reached at Goleman@j avanet. com.

EVERY BUSINESS PERSON knows a story about a highly intelligent, highly skilled executive who was promoted into a leader¬ship position only to fail at the job. And they also know a story about someone with solid-but not extraordinary – intellectual abilities and technical skills who was promoted into a similar position and then soared.

Such anecdotes support the widespread belief that identifying individuals with the “right stuff” to be leaders is more art than science. After all, the personal styles of superb leaders vary: some lead¬ers are subdued and analytical; others shout their manifestos from the mountaintops. And just as important, different situations call for different types of leadership. Most mergers need a sensitive negotiator at the helm, whereas many turnarounds require a more forceful authority.

I have found, however, that the most effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emo¬tional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but mainly as “threshold capabilities”; that is, they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. But my research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analyti¬cal mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.

Effective leaders are alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

In the course of the past year, my colleagues and I have focused on how emotional intelligence operates at work. We have exam¬ined the relationship between emotional intelligence and effec¬tive performance, especially in leaders. And we have observed how emotional intelligence shows itself on the job. How can you tell if someone has high emotional intelligence, for exam¬ple, and how can you recognize it in yourself? In the following pages, we’ll explore these questions, taking each of the components of emotional intelligence – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill – in turn.

Evaluating Emotional Intelligence

Most large companies today have employed trained psychologists to develop what are known as “com¬petency models” to aid them in identifying, train¬ing, and promoting likely stars in the leadership firmament. The psychologists have also developed such models for lower-level positions. And in re¬cent years, I have analyzed competency models from 188 companies, most of which were large and global and included the likes of Lucent Technolo¬gies, British Airways, and Credit Suisse.

In carrying out this work, my objective was to determine which personal capabilities drove out¬standing performance within these organizations, and to what degree they did so. I grouped capabili¬ties into three categories: purely technical skills like accounting and business planning; cognitive abilities like analytical reasoning; and competen¬cies demonstrating emotional intelligence such as the ability to work with others and effectiveness in leading change.

To create some of the competency models, psy¬chologists asked senior managers at the companies to identify the capabilities that typified the organi¬zation’s most outstanding leaders. To create other models, the psychologists used objective criteria such as a division’s profitability to differentiate the star performers at senior levels within their organi¬zations from the average ones. Those individuals were then extensively interviewed and tested, and their capabilities were compared. This process re¬sulted in the creation of lists of ingredients for highly effective leaders. The lists ranged in length from 7 to 15 items and included such ingredients as initiative and strategic vision.

When I analyzed all this data, I found dramatic results. To be sure, intellect was a driver of out¬standing performance. Cognitive skills such as big-picture think¬ing and long-term vision were particularly important. But when I calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelli¬gence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelli¬gence proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels.

Moreover, my analysis showed that emotional intelligence played an increasingly important role at the highest levels of the company, where differ¬ences in technical skills are of negligible impor¬tance. In other words, the higher the rank of a per¬son considered to be a star performer, the more emotional intelligence capabilities showed up as the reason for his or her effectiveness. When I com¬pared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to emotional intel¬ligence factors rather than cognitive abilities.

Other researchers have confirmed that emotional intelligence not only distinguishes outstanding leaders but can also be linked to strong perfor¬mance. The findings of the late David McClelland, the renowned researcher in human and organiza¬tional behavior, are a good example. In a 1996 study of a global food and beverage company, McClelland found that when senior managers had a critical mass of emotional intelligence capabilities, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%. Meanwhile, division leaders without that critical mass underperformed by almost the same amount. McClelland’s findings, interestingly, held as true in the company’s U.S. divisions as in its divi¬sions in Asia and Europe.

In short, the numbers are beginning to tell us a persuasive story about the link between a compa¬ny’s success and the emotional intelligence of its leaders. And just as important, research is also demonstrating that people can, if they take the right approach, develop their emotional intelligence. (See the insert “Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?”)

Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the first component of emotional intelligence – which makes sense when one con¬siders that the Delphic oracle gave the advice to “know thyself” thousands of years ago. Self-aware¬ness means having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically hopeful. Rather, they are honest-with themselves and with others.

People who have a high degree of self-awareness recognize how their feelings affect them, other peo¬ple, and their job performance. Thus a self-aware person who knows that tight deadlines bring out the worst in him plans his time carefully and gets his work done well in advance. Another person with high self-awareness will be able to work with a demanding client. She will understand the client’s impact on her moods and the deeper rea¬sons for her frustration. “Their trivial demands take us away from the real work that needs to be done,” she might explain. And she will go one step further and turn her anger into something constructive.

Self-aware job candidates will be frank in admitting to failure-and will often tell their tales with a smile.

Self-awareness extends to a person’s understanding of his or her values and goals. Someone who is highly self-aware knows where he is headed and why; so, for example, he will be able to be firm in turning down a job offer that is tempting financially but does not fit with his principles or long-term goals. A person who lacks self-awareness is apt to make decisions that bring on in¬ner turmoil by treading on buried values. “The money looked good so I signed on,” someone might say two years into a job, “but the work means so lit¬tle to me that I’m constantly bored.” The decisions of self-aware people mesh with their values; conse¬quently, they often find work to be energizing.

How can one recognize self-awareness? First and foremost, it shows itself as candor and an ability to assess oneself realistically. People with high self-awareness are able to speak accurately and openly -although not necessarily effusively or confession-ally-about their emotions and the impact they have on their work. For instance, one manager I know of was skeptical about a new personal-shopper service that her company, a major department-store chain, was about to introduce. Without prompting from her team or her boss, she offered them an ex¬planation: “It’s hard for me to get behind the rollout of this service,” she admitted, “because I really wanted to run the project, but I wasn’t selected. Bear with me while I deal with that.” The manager did indeed examine her feelings; a week later, she was supporting the project fully.

Such self-knowledge often shows itself in the hiring process. Ask a candidate to describe a time he got carried away by his feelings and did some¬thing he later regretted. Self-aware candidates will be frank in admitting to failure-and will often tell their tales with a smile. One of the hallmarks of self-awareness is a self-deprecating sense of humor. Self-awareness can also be identified during per¬formance reviews. Self-aware people know-and are comfortable talking about-their limitations and strengths, and they often demonstrate a thirst for constructive criticism. By contrast, people with low self-awareness interpret the message that they need to improve as a threat or a sign of failure.

Self-aware people can also be recognized by their self-confi¬dence. They have a firm grasp of their capabilities and are less likely to set themselves up to fail by, for example, overstretching on assignments. They know, too, when to ask for help. And the risks they take on the job are cal¬culated. They won’t ask for a challenge that they know they can’t handle alone. They’ll play to their strengths.

Consider the actions of a mid-level employee who was invited to sit in on a strategy meeting with her company’s top execu¬tives. Although she was the most junior person in the room, she did not sit there quietly, listening in awestruck or fearful silence. She knew she had a head for clear logic and the skill to present ideas persuasively, and she offered cogent suggestions about the company’s strategy. At the same time, her self-awareness stopped her from wandering into territory where she knew she was weak.

Despite the value of having self-aware people in the workplace, my research indicates that senior executives don’t often give self-awareness the credit it deserves when they look for potential leaders. Many executives mistake candor about feelings for “wimpiness” and fail to give due respect to employ¬ees who openly acknowledge their shortcomings. Such people are too readily dismissed as “not tough enough” to lead others.

In fact, the opposite is true. In the first place, peo¬ple generally admire and respect candor. Further, leaders are constantly required to make judgment calls that require a candid assessment of capa¬bilities-their own and those of others. Do we have the management expertise to acquire a competitor?
Can we launch a new product within six months? People who assess themselves honestly – that is, self-aware people-are well suited to do the same for the organizations they run.

Can Emotional Intelligence Be Learned?
For ages, people have debated if leaders are born or made. So too goes the debate about emotional intel¬ligence. Are people born with certain levels of em¬pathy, for example, or do they acquire empathy as a result of life’s experiences? The answer is both. Scien¬tific inquiry strongly suggests that there is a genetic component to emotional intelligence. Psychological and developmental research indicates that nurture plays a role as well. How much of each perhaps will never be known, but research and practice clearly demonstrate that emotional intelligence can be learned.

One thing is certain: emotional intelligence in¬creases with age. There is an old-fashioned word for the phenomenon: maturity. Yet even with maturity, some people still need training to enhance their emo¬tional intelligence. Unfortunately, far too many train¬ing programs that intend to build leadership skills-including emotional intelligence-are a waste of time and money. The problem is simple: they focus on the wrong part of the brain.

Emotional intelligence is born largely in the neuro-transmitters of the brain’s limbic system, which gov¬erns feelings, impulses, and drives. Research indi¬cates that the limbic system learns best through motivation, extended practice, and feedback. Com¬pare this with the kind of learning that goes on in the neocortex, which governs analytical and technical ability. The neocortex grasps concepts and logic. It is the part of the brain that figures out how to use a com¬puter or make a sales call by reading a book. Not sur¬prisingly – but mistakenly-it is also the part of the brain targeted by most training programs aimed at en¬hancing emotional intelligence. When such programs take, in effect, a neocortical approach, my research with the Consortium for Research on Emotional In¬telligence in Organizations has shown they can even have a negative impact on people’s job performance.

To enhance emotional intelligence, organizations must refocus their training to include the limbic sys¬tem. They must help people break old behavioral habits and establish new ones. That not only takes much more time than conventional training pro¬grams, it also requires an individualized approach.

Imagine an executive who is thought to be low on empathy by her colleagues. Part of that deficit shows itself as an inability to listen; she interrupts people and doesn’t pay close attention to what they’re say¬ing. To fix the problem, the executive needs to be mo¬tivated to change, and then she needs practice and feedback from others in the company. A colleague or coach could be tapped to let the executive know when she has been observed failing to listen. She would then have to replay the incident and give a better re¬sponse; that is, demonstrate her ability to absorb what others are saying. And the executive could be directed to observe certain executives who listen well and to mimic their behavior.

With persistence and practice, such a process can lead to lasting results. I know one Wall Street execu¬tive who sought to improve his empathy – specifically his ability to read people’s reactions and see their per¬spectives. Before beginning his quest, the executive’s subordinates were terrified of working with him. Peo¬ple even went so far as to hide bad news from him. Naturally, he was shocked when finally confronted with these facts. He went home and told his family-but they only confirmed what he had heard at work. When their opinions on any given subject did not mesh with his, they, too, were frightened of him.

Enlisting the help of a coach, the executive went to work to heighten his empathy through practice and feedback. His first step was to take a vacation to a for¬eign country where he did not speak the language. While there, he monitored his reactions to the unfa¬miliar and his openness to people who were different from him. When he returned home, humbled by his week abroad, the executive asked his coach to shadow him for parts of the day, several times a week, in order to critique how he treated people with new or differ¬ent perspectives. At the same time, he consciously used on-the-job interactions as opportunities to prac¬tice “hearing” ideas that differed from his. Finally, the executive had himself videotaped in meetings and asked those who worked for and with him to critique his ability to acknowledge and understand the feel¬ings of others. It took several months, but the execu¬tive’s emotional intelligence did ultimately rise, and the improvement was reflected in his overall perfor¬mance on the job.

It’s important to emphasize that building one’s emotional intelligence cannot-will not-happen without sincere desire and concerted effort. A brief seminar won’t help; nor can one buy a how-to manual. It is much harder to learn to empathize-to internal¬ize empathy as a natural response to people-than it is to become adept at regression analysis. But it can be done. “Nothing great was ever achieved without en¬thusiasm,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. If your goal is to become a real leader, these words can serve as a guidepost in your efforts to develop high emotional intelligence.

Self-Regulation

People who have mastered their emotions are able to roll with the changes. They don’t panic.

Biological impulses drive our emotions. We cannot do away with them – but we can do much to man¬age them. Self-regulation, which is like an ongoing inner conversation, is the component of emotional intelligence that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings. People engaged in such a conversation feel bad moods and emotional impulses just as everyone else does, but they find ways to control them and even to channel them in useful ways.

Imagine an executive who has just watched a team of his em¬ployees present a botched analy¬sis to the company’s board of directors. In the gloom that fol¬lows, the executive might find himself tempted to pound on the table in anger or kick over a chair. He could leap up and scream at the group. Or he might maintain a grim silence, glaring at every¬one before stalking off.

But if he had a gift for self-regu¬lation, he would choose a differ¬ent approach. He would pick his words carefully, acknowledging the team’s poor performance without rushing to any hasty judgment. He would then step back to consider the reasons for the fail¬ure. Are they personal-a lack of effort? Are there any mitigating factors? What was his role in the de¬bacle? After considering these questions, he would call the team together, lay out the incident’s conse¬quences, and offer his feelings about it. He would then present his analysis of the problem and a well-considered solution.

Why does self-regulation matter so much for leaders? First of all, people who are in control of their feelings and impulses – that is, people who are reasonable-are able to create an environment of trust and fairness. In such an environment, politics and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity is high. Talented people flock to the organization and aren’t tempted to leave. And self-regulation has a trickle-down effect. No one wants to be known as a hothead when the boss is known for her calm ap¬proach. Fewer bad moods at the top mean fewer throughout the organization.

Second, self-regulation is important for competi¬tive reasons. Everyone knows that business today is rife with ambiguity and change. Companies merge and break apart regularly. Technology transforms work at a dizzying pace. People who have mastered their emotions are able to roll with the changes. When a new change program is announced, they don’t panic; instead, they are able to suspend judg¬ment, seek out information, and listen to execu¬tives explain the new program. As the initiative moves forward, they are able to move with it.
Sometimes they even lead the way. Consider the case of a manager at a large manufacturing com¬pany. Like her colleagues, she had used a certain software program for five years. The program drove how she col¬lected and reported data and how she thought about the company’s strategy. One day, senior execu¬tives announced that a new pro¬gram was to be installed that would radically change how in¬formation was gathered and as¬sessed within the organization. While many people in the com¬pany complained bitterly about how disruptive the change would be, the manager mulled over the reasons for the new program and was convinced of its potential to improve performance. She eagerly attended training sessions – some of her colleagues refused to do so-and was eventually promoted to run several divisions, in part because she used the new technology so effectively.

I want to push the importance of self-regulation to leadership even further and make the case that it enhances integrity, which is not only a personal virtue but also an organizational strength. Many of the bad things that happen in companies are a func¬tion of impulsive behavior. People rarely plan to ex¬aggerate profits, pad expense accounts, dip into the till, or abuse power for selfish ends. Instead, an op¬portunity presents itself, and people with low im¬pulse control just say yes.

By contrast, consider the behavior of the senior executive at a large food company. The executive was scrupulously honest in his negotiations with local distributors. He would routinely lay out his cost structure in detail, thereby giving the distribu¬tors a realistic understanding of the company’s pric¬ing. This approach meant the executive couldn’t al¬ways drive a hard bargain. Now, on occasion, he felt the urge to increase profits by withholding information about the company’s costs. But he challenged that impulse-he saw that it made more sense in the long run to counteract it. His emotional self-regulation paid off in strong, lasting relationships with distributors that benefited the company more than any short-term financial gains would have.

The signs of emotional self-regulation, therefore, are not hard to miss: a propensity for reflection and thought-fulness; comfort with ambiguity and change; and integrity-an ability to say no to impulsive urges.

Like self-awareness, self-regulation often does not get its due. People who can master their emotions are some¬times seen as cold fish-their consid¬ered responses are taken as a lack of passion. People with fiery tempera¬ments are frequently thought of as “classic” leaders – their outbursts are considered hallmarks of charisma and power. But when such people make it to the top, their impulsiveness often works against them. In my research, extreme displays of negative emotion have never emerged as a driver of good leadership.

Motivation

If there is one trait that virtually all ef¬fective leaders have, it is motivation. They are driven to achieve beyond ex¬pectations-their own and everyone else’s. The key word here is achieve. Plenty of people are motivated by exter¬nal factors such as a big salary or the status that comes from having an im¬pressive title or being part of a presti¬gious company. By contrast, those with leadership potential are motivated by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the achievement.

If you are looking for leaders, how can yotify people who are motivated by the dachieve rather than by external rewards? Tsign is a passion for the work itself-suchseek out creative challenges, love to leartake great pride in a job well done. They aplay an unflagging energy to do things bettple with such energy often seem restless wstatus quo. They are persistent with theitions about why things are done one waythan another; they are eager to explore nproaches to their work.

A cosmetics company manager, for example, was frustrated that he had to wait two weeks to get sales results from people in the field. He finally tracked down an automated phone system that would beep each of his salespeople at 5 P.M. every day. An automated message then prompted them to punch in their numbers-how many calls and sales they had made that day. The system short¬ened the feedback time on sales results from weeks to hours.

That story illustrates two other common traits of people who are driven to achieve. They are forever raising the performance bar, and they like to keep score. Take the performance bar first. During per¬formance reviews, people with high levels of motiva¬tion might ask to be “stretched” by their superiors. Of course, an employee who combines self-aware¬ness with internal motivation will recognize her limits-but she won’t settle for objectives that seem too easy to fulfill.

And it follows naturally that people who are driven to do better also want a way of tracking progress – their own, their team’s, and their com¬pany’s. Whereas people with low achievement mo¬tivation are often fuzzy about results, those with high achievement motivation often keep score by tracking such hard measures as profitability or mar¬ket share. I know of a money manager who starts and ends his day on the Internet, gauging the perfor¬mance of his stock fund against four industry-set benchmarks.

Interestingly, people with high motivation re¬main optimistic even when the score is against them. In such cases, self-regulation combines with achievement motivation to overcome the frustration and depression that come after a set¬back or failure. Take the case of an another portfo¬lio manager at a large invest¬ ment company. After several successful years, her fund tum¬bled for three consecutive quar¬ters, leading three large insti¬tutional clients to shift their business elsewhere.

Some executives would have blamed the nosedive on cir¬cumstances outside their con¬trol; others might have seen the setback as evidence of personal failure. This portfolio manager, however, saw an opportunity to prove she could lead a turn¬around. Two years later, when she was promoted to a very senior level in the com¬pany, she described the experience as “the best thing that ever happened to me; I learned so much from it.”

Executives trying to recognize high levels of achievement motivation in their people can look for one last piece of evidence: commitment to the organization. When people love their job for the work itself, they often feel committed to the orga¬nizations that make that work possible. Commit¬ted employees are likely to stay with an organiza¬tion even when they are pursued by headhunters waving money.

It’s not difficult to understand how and why a motivation to achieve translates into strong leader¬ship. If you set the performance bar high for your¬self, you will do the same for the organization when you are in a position to do so. Likewise, a drive to surpass goals and an interest in keeping score can be contagious. Leaders with these traits can often build a team of managers around them with the same traits. And of course, optimism and organizational commitment are fundamental to leader¬ship-just try to imagine running a company with¬out them.

Empathy

The very word empathy seems unbusinesslike, out of place amid the tough realities of the marketplace.

Of all the dimensions of emotional intelligence, empathy is the most easily recognized. We have all felt the empathy of a sensitive teacher or friend; we have all been struck by its absence in an unfeeling coach or boss. But when it comes to business, we rarely hear people praised, let alone rewarded, for their empathy. The very word seems unbusi¬nesslike, out of place amid the tough realities of the marketplace.

But empathy doesn’t mean a kind of “I’m okay, you’re okay” mushiness. For a leader, that is, it doesn’t mean adopting other people’s emotions as one’s own and trying to please everybody. That would be a nightmare-it would make action impossi¬ble. Rather, empathy means thoughtfully considering em¬ployees’ feelings-along with other factors – in the process of making intelligent decisions. For an example of empathy in action, consider what hap¬pened when two giant broker¬age companies merged, creat¬ing redundant jobs in all their divisions. One division man¬ager called his people together and gave a gloomy speech that emphasized the number of people who would soon be fired. The manager of another divi¬sion gave his people a different kind of speech. He was upfront about his own worry and confusion, and he promised to keep people informed and to treat everyone fairly.

The difference between these two managers was empathy. The first manager was too worried about his own fate to consider the feelings of his anxiety-stricken colleagues. The second knew intuitively what his people were feeling, and he acknowledged their fears with his words. Is it any surprise that the first manager saw his division sink as many demor¬alized people, especially the most talented, departed? By contrast, the second manager continued to be a strong leader, his best people stayed, and his divi¬sion remained as productive as ever.

Empathy is particularly important today as a component of leadership for at least three reasons: the increasing use of teams; the rapid pace of global¬ization; and the growing need to retain talent.

Consider the challenge of leading a team. As any¬one who has ever been a part of one can attest, teams are cauldrons of bubbling emotions. They are often charged with reaching a consensus-hard enough with two people and much more difficult as the numbers increase. Even in groups with as few as four or five members, alliances form and clash¬ing agendas get set. A team’s leader must be able to sense and understand the viewpoints of everyone around the table.

That’s exactly what a marketing manager at a large information technology company was able to do when she was appointed to lead a troubled team. The group was in turmoil, overloaded by work and missing deadlines. Tensions were high among the members. Tinkering with procedures was not enough to bring the group together and make it an effective part of the company.

So the manager took several steps. In a series of one-on-one sessions, she took the time to lis¬ten to everyone in the group-what was frustrating them, how they rated their colleagues, whether they felt they had been ignored. And then she directed the team in a way that brought it together: she encouraged people to speak more openly about their frustrations, and she helped peo¬ple raise constructive complaints during meetings. In short, her empathy allowed her to under¬stand her team’s emotional makeup. The result was not just heightened collaboration among members but also added business, as the team was called on for help by a wider range of internal clients.

Globalization is another reason for the rising im¬portance of empathy for business leaders. Cross-cultural dialogue can easily lead to miscues and misunderstandings. Empathy is an antidote. Peo¬ple who have it are attuned to subtleties in body language; they can hear the message beneath the words being spoken. Beyond that, they have a deep understanding of the existence and importance of cultural and ethnic differences.

Consider the case of an American consultant whose team had just pitched a project to a potential Japanese client. In its dealings with Americans, the team was accustomed to being bombarded with questions after such a proposal, but this time it was greeted with a long silence. Other members of the team, taking the silence as disapproval, were ready to pack and leave. The lead consultant gestured them to stop. Although he was not particularly familiar with Japanese culture, he read the client’s face and posture and sensed not rejection but inter¬est-even deep consideration. He was right: when the client finally spoke, it was to give the consult¬ing firm the job.

Finally, empathy plays a key role in the retention of talent, particularly in today’s information econ¬omy. Leaders have always needed empathy to de¬velop and keep good people, but today the stakes are higher. When good people leave, they take the company’s knowledge with them.

That’s where coaching and mentoring come in. It has repeatedly been shown that coaching and men¬toring pay off not just in better performance but also in increased job satisfaction and decreased turnover. But what makes coaching and mentoring work best is the nature of the relationship. Out¬standing coaches and mentors get inside the heads of the people they are helping. They sense how to give effective feedback. They know when to push for better performance and when to hold back. In the way they motivate their protégés, they demonstrate empathy in action.

In what is probably sounding like a refrain, let me repeat that empathy doesn’t get much re¬spect in business. People wonder how leaders can make hard deci¬sions if they are “feeling” for all the people who will be affected. But leaders with empathy do more than sympa¬thize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle but important ways.

Social Skill

Social skill is Friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire.

The first three components of emotional intelli¬gence are all self-management skills. The last two, empathy and social skill, concern a person’s ability to manage relationships with others. As a compo¬nent of emotional intelligence, social skill is not as simple as it sounds. It’s not just a matter of friendli¬ness, although people with high levels of social skill are rarely mean-spirited. Social skill, rather, is friendliness with a purpose: moving people in the direction you desire, whether that’s agreement on a new marketing strategy or enthusiasm about a new product.

Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances, and they have a knack for finding common ground with people of all kinds – a knack for building rapport. That doesn’t mean they social¬ize continually; it means they work according to the assumption that nothing important gets done alone. Such people have a network in place when the time for action comes.

Social skill is the culmination of the other di¬mensions of emotional intelligence. People tend to be very effective at managing relationships when they can understand and control their own emo¬tions and can empathize with the feelings of others. Even motivation contributes to social skill. Re¬member that people who are driven to achieve tend to be optimistic, even in the face of setbacks or fail¬ure. When people are upbeat, their “glow” is cast upon conversations and other so¬cial encounters. They are popular, and for good reason.

Because it is the outcome of the other dimensions of emotional intelligence, social skill is recog¬nizable on the job in many ways that will by now sound familiar. Socially skilled people, for in¬stance, are adept at managing teams-that’s their empathy at work. Likewise, they are expert persuaders-a manifestation of self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy combined. Given those skills, good persuaders know when to make an emotional plea, for instance, and when an appeal to reason will work better. And motivation, when publicly visible, makes such people excellent collaborators; their passion for the work spreads to others, and they are driven to find solutions.

But sometimes social skill shows itself in ways the other emotional intelligence components do not. For instance, socially skilled people may at times appear not to be working while at work. They seem to be idly schmoozing-chatting in the hall¬ways with colleagues or joking around with people who are not even connected to their “real” jobs. So¬cially skilled people, however, don’t think it makes sense to arbitrarily limit the scope of their relation¬ships. They build bonds widely because they know that in these fluid times, they may need help some¬day from people they are just getting to know today.

For example, consider the case of an executive in the strategy department of a global computer man¬ufacturer. By 1993, he was convinced that the com¬pany’s future lay with the Internet. Over the course of the next year, he found kindred spirits and used his social skill to stitch together a virtual community that cut across levels, divisions, and nations. He then used this de facto team to put up a corpo¬rate Web site, among the first by a major company. And, on his own initiative, with no budget or for¬mal status, he signed up the company to participate in an annual Internet industry convention. Calling on his allies and persuading various divisions to donate funds, he recruited more than 50 people from a dozen different units to represent the com¬pany at the convention.

Emotional intelligence can be learned. The process is not easy. It takes time and commitment.

Management took notice: within a year of the conference, the executive’s team formed the basis for the company’s first Internet division, and he was formally put in charge of it. To get there, the executive had ignored conven¬tional boundaries, forging and maintaining connections with people in every corner of the or¬ganization.

Is social skill considered a key leadership capability in most companies? The answer is yes, especially when compared with the other components of emo¬tional intelligence. People seem to know intuitively that leaders need to manage relationships effectively; no leader is an island. After all, the leader’s task is to get work done through other people, and social skill makes that possi¬ble. A leader who cannot express her empathy may as well not have it at all. And a leader’s moti¬vation will be useless if he cannot communicate his passion to the organization. Social skill allows lead¬ers to put their emotional intelligence to work.

It would be foolish to assert that good-old-fash¬ioned IQ and technical ability are not important ingredients in strong leadership. But the recipe would not be complete without emotional intelli¬gence. It was once thought that the components of emotional intelligence were “nice to have” in busi¬ness leaders. But now we know that, for the sake of performance, these are ingredients that leaders “need to have.”

It is fortunate, then, that emotional intelligence can be learned. The process is not easy. It takes time and, most of all, commitment. But the bene¬fits that come from having a well-developed emo¬tional intelligence, both for the individual and for the organization, make it worth the effort.