What do we really know about leadership? There's been a lot of talk about leadership lately. Judging from the vast number of books, articles, blogs, TED Talks, and more, you would think we have a treasure trove of information about the subject. A quick search on Amazon.com returned 192,136 books dedicated to leadership. In addition, there are hundreds of theses, thousands of articles in journals as well as thousands more research papers on the web. They have been written by a variety of professionals that not only include psychologists but also management theorists, historians, politicians and political scientists, theologians, philosophers, journalists, and other social commentators. Their contributions include scientific analyses, scholarly biographies, and popular accounts of leaders' lives. Knowing how to most effectively lead others can be pretty confusing with that amount of knowledge swirling around. In fact, it's hard to imagine that anyone could think of themselves as an expert in leadership in today's world when there's so much information available.
The Leadership Explosion
How do you deal with so many books on a single subject? Well I have to admit there's no way I was going to go through that many publications. But as I started doing my research, I found that most books fell into one of three categories.
Leader's View
The first group of books are written (or cowritten) by successful leaders. These include biographies of Bill Gates,1 Steve Jobs,2 Rudi Giuliani,3 Jack Welch,4 Carly Fiorina,5 Michael Dell,6 Richard Branson,7 and many others. These books can be very enlightening and educational, and the insights gained by the experiences of these successful people can guide others along certain pathways.
However, the downside I find is that the views presented tend to be idiosyncratic to those leaders. It's how the individual leader sees the world, which, unfortunately, doesn't always match events as they actually happened.
Having interviewed direct reports of some notable leaders, I can assure you that there are often discrepancies between a leader's reality and that of their direct reports. Anyone who has been involved in 360-degree evaluations of leaders, in which performance reports are taken from subordinates, peers, supervisors, and clients, will also know that the leader can see herself or himself somewhat differently than those around her or him. Therefore, although we can learn from each leader's perspective, these perspectives should not be misinterpreted as universal truths.
Observer's View
The next set of books I would classify as the observer's view. The observer is usually a consultant, a professor, a business writer, a business coach, or some variation of these. These people have had a lot of experience with one or more leaders (although they tend not to be leaders of organizations themselves). They bring a lot of insight out of their experiences working with leaders, theorizing about leaders, or studying leaders. Examples include books by John Maxwell,8 David Cottrell,9 Michael Useem,10 Peter Northouse,11 Simon Sinek,12 and others.
The caution with some of these books is that they may come out of preconceived theories with minimal empirical evidence, limited range of leadership settings, use of platitudes, and selective use of examples. There are often useful lessons from these books, but the recommendations are not always practical or easy to apply.
Researcher's View
The third group of books I call the researcher's view. These books tend to come from people with perhaps a few preconceived notions of what makes a good leader, and they approach the subject by evaluating data that encompasses both successful and unsuccessful leadership. Basically, these books use evidence-based procedures in interesting and enlightening ways to evaluate what truly differentiates successful and unsuccessful leaders. Examples include Kouzes and Posner13 and Jim Collins.14
Jim Collins, for example, in his book Good to Great15 started his work by practically discounting the importance of leadership and focusing on the structures, rules, and processes of large iconic companies that had been around for many years. By contrasting successful and unsuccessful companies, matched within the same industry, he came to the conclusion, which was contradictory to his expectations, that leadership does make a difference, in fact, a rather large one. He has championed the Level 5 Leadership in which humility and “fire in the belly” play a dominant role. As he states it:
The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.16
In this book, I hope to borrow largely from the researcher's tradition. While I start out with the preconceived notion that emotional intelligence does make a difference in leadership, it has taken more than 20 years for me to reach the clarity of this position. When I started researching emotional intelligence and its importance in the workplace in the early 1990s, my focus was largely on individual performance and the enhancement of performance through emotional intelligence. I was interested in how emotional intelligence could help people better achieve their desired level of success—both at work and at home. Much of this work appears in the book I coauthored with Howard Book, The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success.17 Then I went on to explore how organizations, as a collective whole, could be emotionally intelligent.18
Over the years, the pull toward my study of leadership increased. It was an area I consciously avoided at first, maybe because of what I didn't want to find out about mistakes in my own leadership. But as more articles, books, blogs, and talks came out about emotional intelligence and leadership, I eventually felt I had to join the conversation. Part of the motivation was some of the misconceptions out there about the connection. There were spurious reports of overly high estimates—85 percent or so—of effective leadership due to emotional intelligence and very few of the claims were based on good evidence. At the same time, at Multi-Health Systems (MHS), where we have been testing people's emotional intelligence since the early 1990s, we've built up a database of approximately 2 million people. Many thousands of these were currently leaders, emergent leaders, or identified as high potential future leaders. Not only do we have lots of data, but it's global. We've tested the emotional intelligence of people from all parts of the world; as a result, we are compelled to share our findings on how emotional intelligence influences leadership.
So while I've been committed to the importance of emotional intelligence in human performance for many years, I didn't start with any preconceived notions of how emotional intelligence might impact leadership. In fact, early on in this endeavor, I had radio and TV interviews in which commentators told me why they believed emotional intelligence was a detriment to good leadership. I was told that being “nice” would get you eaten for breakfast in some companies. Of course, I'd have to explain that emotional intelligence was not about being nice. We'll get to the definition in Chapter 3.
