The leader Everyone Called Emotionally Intelligent

Deliberately Influencing Your Own Behaviour

I have watched this happen so often now that I can very nearly predict it. Someone is brilliant in their role, the strongest individual on the team, the person everyone goes to when something genuinely needs to get done, and so we promote them, because that is simply what organisations do with their best people. And within a year they are struggling, and everyone around them is a little confused, including them, because the skills that made them so good have not gone anywhere, and they are working as hard as they ever have, and yet something is plainly not landing. The new role is asking something different of them, not more of what they were already good at but something else in kind, and nobody warned them it would, because we have a habit of talking about capability as though it were a single thing you either have or you do not.

And then, because we cannot quite put our finger on what has gone wrong, we send them off on a course about emotional intelligence and hand them a profile with their scores printed on it, and we call that development, and everyone feels a little better for a fortnight.

Here is the part about that profile that I think we skate past. Daniel Goleman, who did more than just about anyone to put emotional intelligence on the map, drew a line himself that most of the industry chose to forget. He separated emotional intelligence, the underlying capacity, from emotional competence, which he defined as a learned capability, built on that capacity, that actually shows up as performance at work (Goleman, 1998). A profile measures the first and tells you almost nothing about the second, in much the same way that knowing somebody has good hands tells you nothing at all about whether they can play the piano. Capacity is not competence, and competence, the part that actually matters, is something you build rather than something you are born holding or simply diagnosed as having.

What I have slowly come to see is that there is not one intelligence a leader needs, there are several, and they are genuinely different from one another, each with its own home in the research. There is the self-awareness and self-management that lets you lead yourself first, which is where most of us begin, and which the self-leadership research traces back to the unglamorous discipline of deliberately influencing your own behaviour instead of running on autopilot and reaction (Manz, 1986). There is the social intelligence to read and shape the relationships sitting right in front of you. There is the political intelligence to get things done across a wider web of interests you do not control, and I want to stay on that word for a moment, because political tends to make good people flinch, as though it were a slightly dirty business. The research says otherwise. Gerald Ferris and his colleagues showed that political skill, properly understood as sincere and well-judged influence rather than manoeuvring, can be measured, can be developed, and actually predicted the performance ratings of managers, while having no relationship at all to raw general intelligence (Ferris et al., 2005). Which is to say it is a real and learnable capability in its own right, and being clever is no substitute for it.

Then there is the organisational intelligence to see the whole system rather than only the corner of it you happen to sit in, and beyond that the capability to work well across cultures, and the capacity to make a group of people genuinely think well together. That last one is worth slowing right down for, because it undoes an assumption most of us carry around without ever testing it. We assume that if you put clever people in a room you will get a clever room. Anita Woolley and her colleagues tested precisely that, and found that the collective intelligence of a group, its measurable ability to solve a whole range of problems together, was not strongly predicted by the average or even the peak individual intelligence of the people in it. What predicted it was how socially attuned the members were to one another, and how evenly the conversation was shared, whether people genuinely took turns or whether a couple of voices ran the show (Woolley et al., 2010). The smartest group was not the one stacked with the smartest people. It was the one where people read each other and made room for each other. Which means a team can be full of genuinely capable individuals and still, together, be remarkably stupid, and I suspect every one of us has sat in that exact room and felt it happen.

The reason any of this matters is that these intelligences do not transfer neatly from one to the next, and we keep behaving as though they do. The self-mastery that made someone a superb individual contributor hands them no political intelligence whatsoever, and we promote them on the strength of the first and act surprised by the absence of the second. The leader who is wonderful one to one can still chair a team that thinks badly, because reading a single person and building collective thinking in a group are simply not the same skill. Each of these is real, each is its own capability, and the good news buried in all of it is that each one can be grown, but only once we stop treating the entire human side of leadership as one undifferentiated lump labelled emotional intelligence and measured the once.

This is where pause earns its place again, because pause is what lets you notice which intelligence the moment actually in front of you is asking for, instead of reaching, as we all do under pressure, for the one that comes most naturally. The leader people experience as present is not the one with the highest score on any single dimension. It is the one grounded enough to read what the situation genuinely needs and to bring the right capability to it, rather than bringing their favourite capability to absolutely everything and hoping it fits. So if you wanted something to carry into your week, it would be that. Before the next hard conversation or the next stuck meeting, take the half second to ask what this actually needs from me, and notice how often the honest answer is not the thing you happen to be best at.

And underneath the whole lot of it sits the one thing none of these intelligences can replace, which is how you see the people you are using them on. All the social and political and organisational skill in the world curdles into manipulation the instant it stops resting on a genuine conviction that the people in front of you are capable adults whose worth does not depend on how useful they are to you. That conviction is the soil, and the intelligences are only ever what grows in it.

So the question I would sit with, if I were in your shoes, is not whether you are emotionally intelligent, because honestly that question is far too blunt to be of any use to you. It is which intelligence your current role is asking you to grow into, and whether you keep on defaulting, as nearly all of us do, to the one that made you so successful in the role you used to have.

References

Ferris, G. R., Treadway, D. C., Kolodinsky, R. W., Hochwarter, W. A., Kacmar, C. J., Douglas, C., & Frink, D. D. (2005). Development and validation of the political skill inventory. Journal of Management, 31(1), 126–152.

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.

Manz, C. C. (1986). Self-leadership: Toward an expanded theory of self-influence processes in organizations. Academy of Management Review, 11(3), 585–600.

Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., & Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688.