Emotional Intelligence: When Spin Meets
Timing (Archive copy, originally written in
1998)
Harry Onsman
There is a tide in the affairs of management
writing which if taken at the flood leads on to
greatness. Or so it seems in the world of management
fads. The art of creating “the next big thing”
in management is a bit like getting a rocket of the
ground: it’s all about timing and spin. A grand
example is “Emotional Intelligence”.
Whilst others have staked a claim to its
parenthood, the idea is now firmly associated with
Daniel Goleman. His Emotional Intelligence (1995) and
Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998) have just
about muscled the competition out of the way in
claiming pre-eminence in the field. A sure sign of
this is, of course, the Harvard Business Review
article, which duly appeared in late 1998 edition
under the title “What Makes a Leader?”
Goleman suggests that there are five components of
emotional intelligence: self-awareness: recognising
and understanding your moods and feelings, and
appreciating their impact on others self-regulation:
controlling disruptive impulses motivation: a desire
to work for intrinsic rewards and pursue goals with
persistence empathy: understanding other people’s
emotional make-up social skill: managing
relationships and associations by finding common
ground with others Having a high EI means
understanding your own and other people’s
emotional makeup well enough to move people in the
direction of accomplishing your goals.
In “What Makes a Leader”, he argues that
effective leaders are alike in one crucial way in
that they all have a high degree of EI. And
especially at the upper levels of organisations, EI
is what makes the difference. Without it, a person
can be highly trained, very clever and brilliantly
creative, but they will not cut the mustard as a
great leader. In terms of content, it is hardly
ground-breaking stuff. Many would recognise its
components as reminiscent of Dale Carnegie, Chris
Argyris, Eric Berne, Stephen Covey and many others.
However, it is an interesting case study in how the
not-so-original can become the one-and-only.
The publication of the HBR article completes the
traditional journey of management ideas from a good
kernel or clever summary to all-round panacea. In the
case of Goleman, this leads to the claim that “emotional
intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership”.
This claim marks an important development. It is
important since leadership is one of those key areas
of management writing that truly matters. If you want
to make it to real guru status, only a limited number
of fields are open to you. There is little point in
being the guru of, for example, “merchandising
in retail banks” as: no-one will be interested
no-one will pay you large fees for your views it is a
comprehensible topic. So the topic has to lead to one
of the big six fields in management: leadership;
strategy; organisational culture; corporate structure
and systems; customers and suppliers; personal
development. For each field, current gurus readily
springs to mind.
Goleman’s timing is impeccable. The mood in
management thinking is swinging away from one-minute
prescriptions to an acceptance of complexity; from
rational modes of thinking to learning to live with
paradox and chaos; from singular solutions to
multiple perspectives. Re-invigorating the notion of
the affective domain of the brain and applying it to
an organisational setting in the midst of all this
management turmoil and confusion is a stroke of near
genius. Spin and timing!
Now, the reality of course is that the idea of
management as a non-rational activity, at least in
part, has always been there. Being able to work with
that aspect of the management job wasn’t called
“emotional intelligence” but it was there.
It was called interpersonal intelligence or empathy
or character or even just feeling. (1) Even the term
“emotional intelligence” predates guru
Goleman. (2)
In fact, going back a few generations (not
something generally encouraged in management
thinking), there is an enormously rich tradition of
writings on this subject including Rousseau, Kant,
Goethe, Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Merleau-Ponty,
and Foucault. But this tradition has simply not
touched modern management thinking. About the only
exception is Henry Mintzberg, the well-known writer
on strategy who has argued for most of his published
life that the non-rational aspects in strategising
are as important as the rational ones. For a man
celebrated for works like The Rise and Fall of
Strategic Planning (1994), it is ironic that he
actually pans most approaches to strategic planning
as ineffectual. His concept of “emergent
strategy” (read, making it up as you go along)
has provided the post facto justification for many a
managerial decision.
Goleman has brought this non-cognitive side of
human nature back into the limelight, not by relying
on philosophy but on neurological research. After
all, in the cynical world of management, you can
hardly quote a philosopher as your spiritual
forebear. Better something hard-nosed like
neurological research. So recent brain research makes
the prescription (is it too disingenuous to summarise
it as ‘Be Nice’?) acceptable to generations
of managers brought up on a diet of
hyper-rationality. Goleman has come up with an action
plan that addresses the well-documented phenomena of
“cognitive bias” in our thinking. (3)
Thankfully, at last, we will be able to do
something about all those tortured work-place
relationships out there in the real world. If Jack
Nicholson asked when the Martians invaded, “Why
can’t we all just get along?”, Goleman has
the answer in terms of “how”. But there is
a catch. As Goleman observes in his closing paragraph
in HBR: “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
benefits that come from having a well-developed
emotional intelligence, both for the individual and
for the organization, make it worth the effort.”
Now there’s an invitation to consulting nirvana.
The learning process is time-consuming, requiring
expert assistance, and if it doesn’t work, it’s
your fault, not the consultant’s. In the world
of organisational consulting, I predict 1999 to be
the Year of Emotional Intelligence.
--
Harry Onsman is author of the book The Uncertain
Art of Management.
hjonsman @ ozemail.com.au
--
_____________________________
Footnotes:
1. For example in Etzioni (1993) or Hoffman (1984)
2. One example is Salovey and Mayer (1990)
3. Knights and Morgan (1991
References: Etzioni, A (1993), Character building
and moral conduct: the spirit of community, Crown
Goleman D (1995), Emotional Intelligence
Goleman, D (1998), Working with Emotional
Intelligence
Goleman, D (1998), “What Makes a Leader?”
Harvard Business Review, Nov-Dec
Hoffman, M (1984), “Empathy, social cognition,
and moral action”, Moral Behavior and
Development
Kurtines, W and Gerwirtz, J (Eds) Wiley Knights, D
and Morgan, G (1991), “Corporate Strategy,
organizations and subjectivity: a critique”,
Organization Studies, 12/2, 251-273
Mintzberg, H (1994), The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning, Macmillan
Salovey, P and Mayer, J (1990), “Emotional
Intelligence”, Imagination, Cognition and
Personality, 9:185-211