EQI.org Home | Daniel Goleman It's Popular but Is
It Science?
Catherine Aman
Corporate Counsel
02-15-2000
This is a backup copy
of an article from law.com
Another windowless hotel
ballroom, another keynote speech. This speaker, however,
is different. He's psychologist and best-selling author
Daniel Goleman. And he has the audience -- several
hundred members of the International Personnel Management
Association -- in the palm of his hand.
His topic is emotional intelligence. It's a phrase that
appears in the titles of both of his best-selling books
and a subject on which he has made himself something of a
guru. The lecture is a well-crafted package, one of
hundreds of talks he has given here and abroad. It not
only summarizes recent research on psychology and the
brain without putting the listeners to sleep, but also
demonstrates how this arcana is invaluable to corporate
managers. Salted with humorous anecdotes from the world
of work -- many drawn from his latest book, "Working
with Emotional Intelligence" (Bantam Books, 1998) --
and delivered with I've-been-there-too affability, the
speech is entertaining as well as convincing. Goleman's
enormously popular argument is all here in a nutshell.
He starts with a painless lesson on the architecture of
the human brain, using simple drawings to point out the
various cerebral blobs and bulges that embody our
sensory, emotional, and intellectual powers. The brain
grew from the bottom up, he explains, and the amygdala, a
sort of neurological basement crammed with our emotional
memories, is the foundation of it all. "Emotions
have primacy over thought," he says, "because
they're essential for survival."
Occasionally, however, the emotional brain runs amok,
abruptly unleashing strong and inappropriate reactions
that can be disastrous in the workplace. Even in a
business as brutal as professional boxing, the unchecked
amygdala can wreak havoc on a career. When Mike Tyson
gnawed off Evander Holyfield's ear, says Goleman,
"that was a bad business decision."
Goleman now can easily pivot his chuckling audience from
the undisputed terrain of brain science to the somewhat
fuzzier realm of emotional intelligence and what it has
to contribute to corporate America. Emotional
intelligence, he explains, is made up of four elements:
self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and
social skill (or, as he puts it, "managing emotions
in other people"). Within each of these quadrants
are a handful of learned abilities, or competencies, such
as self-confidence, emotional awareness, and
persuasiveness.
Goleman is making a very compelling case. There's only
one small glitch. When the woman charged with putting
transparencies on the overhead projector gets ahead of
Goleman's text, he shoots her a severe look and snaps,
"Do you think we're there yet?" Flustered, she
hastily switches the slide.
Though this momentary lapse in Goleman's friendly
demeanor is fleeting, at least a few in the audience take
note. Afterward, one woman in the elevator asks others
whether anyone else noticed the incident. Someone says
that he did, and both agree they're pretty skeptical of
this guy Goleman.
Nonetheless, conference attendees quickly snap up 40
hardcover copies of his latest book and 30 of his
previous one, "Emotional Intelligence" (Bantam
Books, 1995). A long line, mostly female, rapidly forms
to get the author's signature. As he signs, Goleman chats
briefly with each book-buyer. They all seem to leave
smiling.
While Goleman's area of expertise may expose him to
sniping about his own emotional intelligence, there can
be no doubt that he has plenty of the traditional kind of
intelligence. His resume includes a Harvard Ph.D. in
psychology and a 12-year stint writing about behavioral
and brain sciences for The New York Times. Clearly
driven, Goleman wrote or edited a total of 12 books -- on
topics ranging from meditation and the creative spirit to
the psychology of self-deception -- before hitting the
jackpot with "Emotional Intelligence."
According to the author, there are now nearly 5 million
copies of the book in print, in 30 different languages.
The idea that emotional and motivational competencies,
rather than IQ, are major indicators of job success was
developed by Goleman's teacher at Harvard, the late David
McClelland. McClelland took his concept to market in
1964, founding McBer & Company, which pioneered the
use of these competencies to select, assess, and train
employees. McBer began working with the Hay Group in
1985, after both companies were acquired by Saatchi &
Saatchi plc. In 1989 they bought themselves out from the
Saatchis and formed a partnership together.
Like his mentor, Goleman founded and heads his own
company, Emotional Intelligence Services, which has a
working relationship with the Hay Group, consulting with
it on certain clients and referring business back and
forth. Founded in 1943 "to focus on the human
element in industry," Hay is now one of the world's
biggest human resources consulting firms, with 70 offices
in 34 countries. Competency evaluation and development
make up a significant chunk of that business. During its
35 years in this field, the company has amassed a vast
database of the competencies it has found to be necessary
to succeed in a wide variety of jobs. Goleman drew on the
data in writing his latest book. Hay's database also
supports a test of emotional intelligence, called the
Emotional Competence Inventory, that is jointly owned by
Goleman, Hay, and Richard Boyatzis, a professor at
Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve
University who is also one of McClelland's former
students. The fee for three days of training in how to
administer the ECI is $3,000. A so-called 360-degree
evaluation tool, the ECI gathers an individual's
assessment of his or her own emotional intelligence
competencies as well as input from up to 12 people who
work closely with him or her.
Although the Hay-Harvard connection makes the link
between research psychology and its application in the
corporate workplace seem watertight, not all academics
are convinced. While they hail Goleman for winning
widespread attention and respect for the emotional
intelligence concept with his first book, some express
reservations about the specifics he supplies in the
second one.
Angelo DeNisi, a professor of management at Texas A&M
University and president of the Society for Industrial
and Organizational Psychology, believes the problem is
that no one has determined precisely what constitutes
emotional intelligence. "I find it an extremely
attractive idea that makes great intuitive sense,"
he says, "but measuring it is a problem." With
no standard measure, emotional intelligence tests run the
risk of being discriminatory, he says.
Jennifer George, a professor at the Jones Graduate School
of Management at Rice University, expresses concern about
Goleman's broad definition of emotional intelligence and
says that "more research is needed to narrow it down
from everything that might predict success apart from
IQ." And Yale professor Robert Sternberg sounded a
similar note when he reviewed "Working with
Emotional Intelligence" in the autumn 1999 issue of
Personnel Psychology. "As someone who has supported
the broadening of concepts of intelligence, I am somewhat
taken aback at how broad Goleman's conception is,"
he writes. "It includes a combination of abilities,
personality traits, motivations, and emotional
characteristics that seems to stretch even the most
liberal definition of intelligence, and seems close to a
conception of almost anything that matters beyond
IQ."
Lawrence Richard, a principal with Newtown Square,
Pennsylvania-based Altman Weil, Inc., who has worked
exclusively with lawyers on emotional intelligence issues
for 18 years, deems this "a naive criticism."
Richard, who was a trial lawyer for ten years before
getting a Ph.D. in organizational psychology, cites two
decades of behavioral science research on competencies
done by Boyatzis at Case Western Reserve and asserts,
"It's not fuzzy."
Despite the academic squabbles, everyone agrees that the
concept has tremendous allure. "I would be glad if
someone were able to define emotional intelligence and
find a way to measure it," says DeNisi. "It
really is an appealing idea."
The business community clearly is eager for more from
Goleman. He says that the direction of his next book will
probably be influenced by the huge response he received
for an article he wrote last year for the Harvard
Business Review called "What Makes a Leader."
Reprints of the piece are one of the review's all-time
best-selling items.
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