Emotionally unbalanced

Citation

Allio, R. (2002), "Emotionally unbalanced", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 30 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/sl.2002.26130dae.002

Emotionally unbalanced

Robert Allio

Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKeeHarvard Business School PressBoston, MA2002

Pssst, hey you. Yeah, you, and all the other harried CEOs in crisis over change management. The secret to running a high-performing business is ... focus on influencing people through emotional leadership! That's the not-so-convincing, nor totally rad premise of Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence. In this extension of Daniel Goleman's best selling earlier book on emotional intelligence (EI), we are offered the parochial notion that, rather than concentrating on driving earnings or strategy, leaders must learn to "drive emotions in the right direction." For leaders to be successful, claim the authors, they must generate good feelings in those they lead. This result can be accomplished, they propose, by creating "resonance."

Non-dazzling

The book's major thesis is that inattention to relationships will handicap any leader. It seems unlikely that this revelation will dazzle executives who have spent time in the corporate world. In fact, students of management history will recall that we have been to this movie before. The book's proposition is strongly reminiscent of models proposed in the 1960s by Douglas McGregor (Theory Y) and Frederic Herzberg and Abraham Maslow, who analyzed the various sources of job satisfaction and motivation. Two other theoreticians of the time, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, became famous for their Managerial Grid, a model they used to demonstrate that the authoritarian managers who gave primary attention to production or to task completion, and neglected to attend to personal relationships, would perform poorly. Blake and Mouton proposed instead that managers should balance their attention between production and relationships. To emphasize the importance of balance, they cautioned that a single-minded focus on building good relations would create the Country Club paradigm - good feelings, but little output.

• •

  "We are offered the parochial notion that, rather than merely attempting to drive earnings or strategy, leaders must learn to 'drive emotions in the right direction'."

In Primal Leadership's approach to relationship management, one that simplifies Goleman's original EI model a bit, the authors reduce the five emotional intelligence core domains to a set of four: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. A set of 18 skills or competencies (reduced from 25 in the original model) supports each of these domains. In the domain of social awareness, for example, the three important competencies are empathy, organizational awareness, and service to the client or customer.

Effective leaders, according to the authors, select from a repertoire of six styles, although they often switch between styles according to the situation. Four of these styles invariably generate a degree of resonance: visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic. Two other styles – pace-setting and commanding – may generate dissonance. However, when used appropriately (e.g. to get high quality results from a competent team or in a crisis) they can generate the desired resonance. Again, these stylistic choices are similar to those identified in the situational leadership model proposed ten years ago by Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard. In their model, choices of style are defined by task behavior, relationship behavior and follower readiness.

No evidence

The Primal Leadership authors tantalize us with promise of "scientific evidence" that links corporate success to their leadership model. Alas, we are offered only generalizations stemming from interviews with "hundreds" of executives and "decades of analysis" of data from "thousands of leaders." The results from a global database of research do appear to demonstrate that EI can be improved, and that higher EI yields improved organizational climate. Unfortunately, we look in vain for data to support the hypothesis that better EI produces better organizational performance. This is the critical issue: does greater EI improve return on investment or growth? Does it generate long-term benefits in shareholder value? Or enhance corporate longevity? We are left to speculate.

In lieu of correlations between EI and corporate performance, the book peppers the reader with leadership anecdotes, although not all of them are convincing. EMC, a corporate leader in data storage, for example, gets cited as an example of the successful application of a pace-setting leadership style. Yet EMC's performance over the past two years has been dismal at best – what went wrong?

What about mega churls?

The authors also miss the opportunity to provide the reader with exemplars of well-known leaders who distinguished themselves by their emotional intelligence (Herb Kelleher at Southwest Airlines? Bill Clinton at the White House?). Nor does the model appear to account for the success of some acknowledged industry leaders who, from many accounts, lacked even a modicum of EI. Henry Ford, who built one of the USA's great industrial organizations, was renowned for his churlishness. And what about the modern-day models of leadership – Steve Jobs at Apple Computer, Bill Gates at Microsoft, Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, and Jack Welch at GE – who are renowned for their insensitivity to the feelings of others? Known better for their intellectual acumen and entrepreneurial drive, these leaders built organizations that have left an indelible mark on corporate America. Conversely, it is a real stretch to use the absence of EI as the explanation for why industry leaders like Wang, Polaroid, and Digital Equipment lost their way. A more plausible explanation is that they ignored the fundamentals of strategic management.

Learning EI

Can we all learn to become resonant leaders? Data from the program at the Weatherhead School of Management of Case Western Reserve show that MBA students and others can improve their EI, which supports the theory that EI can be learned. The prescription for better EI is self-directed learning, which entails five stages: discovering an ideal vision of yourself, identifying your real self, developing a learning agenda for improving abilities, practicing new leadership skills, and developing relationships that make the change possible.

It is hard to disagree with the importance of emotional sensitivity and awareness. And it is reassuring to learn that we can become more emotionally intelligent. But driving emotions through primal leadership will not spare leaders the hard challenge of fending off bloodthirsty competitors, and satisfying customers who have insatiable appetites for better products at lower prices. As Blake and Mouton understood 40 years ago, balance is key – emotional intelligence and strategic intelligence need to work in harmony.

A PR blitz

But brace yourself for a massive public relations program on the part of the publisher to promulgate the authors' new doctrine. I would advise managers to retain their balance and their skepticism. High-performing leaders still need to innovate, develop deep understanding of market forces, competitive trends, and customer needs. They need to install the managerial systems that will support vigorous implementation. They need to innovate. And they need to have a reality-based vision. The sobering experiences of many dot-com companies during the past several years, driven by enthusiasts who lost touch with reality, remind us that there is no substitute for good management. Simply feeling good will not give us great companies, although we may all be smiling at one another and holding hands as our ship goes down.

In Primal Leadership you will find many good examples of leadership situations and some useful advice for how to get along with your team and your colleagues. But in sum, it is the twenty-first century version of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.