The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence

This year has seen the popularisation of a new topic in Emotional Intelligence, namely that it has a dark side.

For example in the 2 January 2014 edition of The Atlantic Adam Grant argues that if Emotional Intelligence is defined as the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions then Adolf Hitler, who spent years practicing his hand gestures and analyzing images of his movements allowed him to become an absolutely spellbinding public speaker, was one of its greatest practitioners.

According to Grant another proficient EQ expert is the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick She leverages emotions to inspire her employees to fundraise for charity. As Roddick explained, “Whenever we wanted to persuade our staff to support a particular project we always tried to break their hearts.” However, Roddick also encouraged employees to be strategic in the timing of their emotion expressions. In one case, after noticing that an employee often “breaks down in tears with frustration,” Roddick said it was acceptable to cry, but “I told her it has to be used. I said, ‘Here, cry at this point in the ... meeting.”  

Grant argues that as people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.  Emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain.  What is seen on Shakespeare’s stage is common in the offices and corridors of power.  For example ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ appear 52 times in Othello, half of them used by Iago himself.  Iago is the master of the dark side of EQ as typified in his famous ironical quote where he explains what he will not do and why: "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am." (Daws are jackdaws – a bird noted for thievery.)

More than two decades have passed since psychologists Peter Salovey at Yale and John Mayer at the University of New Hampshire introduced the concept of emotional intelligence in 1990. After Daniel Goleman popularized the idea in 1995, emotional intelligence became a desirable moral quality for most people as it was gradually realised that it is not always the best workers who receive raises and promotions but the workers with the best social and political skills.

However while EQ can be used to help, protect, and promote oneself and others, it can also be used to promote oneself at the cost of others. In its extreme form, EQ is sheer Machiavellianism – the art of socially manipulating others in order to achieve one's own selfish ends.  Iago is wonderful example of this and so are corporate psychopaths.  Now there have been many recent studies that demonstrate the dominant people in group situations are often the best at deception.  Even more surprising for the researchers these people would openly admit that they would often (daily) engage in anti-social behaviour.

For those of us familiar with the seven Humm components none of this is a surprise.  A core emotional component of the Humm is the Hustler.  About 14% of the population have strong Hustler component which makes them opportunistic, shrewd, entrepreneurial, and charming. They quickly work out if you can help them succeed in life and will adopt Machiavellian strategies if they think you can.  do the deal or not. They’re also short-term – they want results now, or very soon. Promising an H a significant financial reward next year will probably not interest them. They are very loyal to their own families and team. But mostly they’re loyal to themselves and they will work hard to make sure they get what they believe they’re entitled to.  A personality with a high Hustler and high Normal will often be successful in life.  The combination of high Hustler and low Normal is generally a corporate psychopath.  I have blogged extensively about this topic and if you want to read some of them here is a list:

The Emotional Intelligence of a Psychopath

How do you recognise a corporate psychopath? Part 1

Recognising the Corporate Psychopath (Part II)

How common are corporate psychopaths in politics?

Is Kevin Rudd a 'corporate psychopath'?

Leaders are readers: What books should leaders read?

Recently I became involved in a LinkedIn discussion group suggesting 40 books to read before you turn 40.  The majority of the recommendations were either ‘New Age’ or ‘Organic/Health food’.  I had only read three of the 40 books, David Copperfield (highly recommended), Think and Grow Rich, and The Power of Positive Thinking and had no inclination to read any of the remaining 37..  As the group called itself Leadership Skills & Development for Business a subgroup of Small Business Evolution | Entrepreneurs & SMEs I thought I would expound on what books a prospective Leader should actually read.

If I could only recommend one book it would be what easily the best business book is ever written: Up the Organization by Robert Townsend. Peter Drucker wrote the first books on management, Townsend wrote the first and best book on leadership. There is a great video of him on YouTube. Search Robert Townsend Avis or link here. Also Marsha Evans has produced a reasonable introduction to the book on YouTube. The book was published in 1970 and I read it when I started my MBA at London Business School in 1971. There is a lot of drivel published on leadership but this book is the big exception.

Lists of what books leaders should read appear continually.  Here is another: 7 Business Books You Can Read In The Time It Takes To Eat Lunch.  This time the list is mercifully shorter and I have also read three, On Bullshit, The Peter Principle, and Parkinson’s Law.

What books should leaders read?  This question became personally relevant to me in 2005 when my elder daughter, Louisa began her career as a supervisor for Skandia and then was head hunted to run a team of 30 people at Perpetual before she was 30.  She asked me a good question, "Dad you have read all the business books, what do you recommend for me to read?"  

I began by quoting a study to her.  In 1994 the Karpin Industry Task Force on Leadership and Management Skills commissioned a research project to be carried out by Barraclough & Co.  The researcher asked 100 experienced business managers from Australia’s largest organisations what was the most important management component from the following list:

Change Agent, Ethics, Flexibility, Intelligence, People skills, Self management, Strategic thinker, Team player, Visionary

“People skills” was ranked far and away the most important component.  (Ethics, by the way was ranked stone motherless last.)  Thus I said to Louisa she should read a book that would improve her people skills.  After some thought, I realised that there was no practical handbook written to help new managers develop their people skills so I decided that I had to write one myself. Thus The Humm Handbook: Lifting Your Level of Emotional Intelligence was born and published in 2007.  If you want more information go to my website.  To me the secret to improving your people skills is to have a good profiling system.  People drive performance, emotions drive people, temperament drives emotions. So the best profiling system will be based on temperament.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.

However I did recommend to Louisa that in the meantime she read Steven Covey’s excellent book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People:

1: Be Proactive

2: Begin with the End in Mind

3: Put First Things First

4: Think Win/Win

5: Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood

6: Synergize

7. Sharpen the Saw

A Core Secret of Emotional Intelligence

One of the great misconceptions about Emotional Intelligence is that you should let emotions control your behaviour and “go with the flow”.  I have heard podium speakers repeatedly say this is the secret of emotional intelligence.  However the secret is the complete opposite.

Daniel Goleman’s widely accepted definition of emotionally intelligent people described them as having four characteristics:

1.      They were good at understanding their own emotions (self-awareness);

2.      They were good at managing their emotions (self-management);

3.      They were empathetic to the emotional drives of other people (social awareness); and

4.      They were good at handling other people’s emotions (social skills).

To help define EQ Goleman used the marshmallow experiment carried out by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s at the Bing Nursery School on the campus of Stanford University. To those unfamiliar with the study, Mischel got 653 four-year olds (including his three daughters) to participate in a simple task. They were taken into a room where there was a marshmallow on a table, and told they would be left alone for 15 minutes. If when they came back there was still a marshmallow on the table, they would be given a second one. About ten per cent of the children were able to hold back.  You can see a great video of the experiment here.

Walter Mischel, now 84 has now written his first popular book: The Marshmallow Test.  The key message of the book is that the secret of success in life is to be able to delay self-gratification.  And the way to do that is to change your perception of the object or action you want to resist. Trying to avoid the tasty treat in front of your nose? Put a frame around it in your mind, as if it were a picture or photograph, to make the temptation less immediate.  For example Mischel was diagnosed as a celiac late in his life but was able to overcome his adoration of Viennese pastries and pasta Alfredo by picturing these foods as poison.

Even more interesting is that Maria Konnikova, a former student of Mischel’s and a writer for The New Yorker has just written a blog about the book and her time with Mischel.  The blog is fascinating in that she describes how Mischel has great difficulty in practising what he preaches.  He has an infamous temper, cannot stand waiting in lines, and eats his food too rapidly even at formal dinner parties. 

If there is one critical EQ skill in self-management it is the ability to delay self-gratification.  A good definition of Emotional Intelligence is the delay between impulse and action.  It is the ability to control your emotions that distinguishes the emotionally intelligent leader.  I have ordered a Kindle version of the book but there is excellent summary of Mischel’s work in an earlier edition of The New Yorker: Don’t!: The secret of self-control. Surprisingly Konnikova does not mention it in her blog but the article provides a lot of background to the development of Mischel’s theories.

A counter argument to Is Emotional Intelligence Overrated?

Earlier this month Adam Grant (a Wharton Business School Professor) posted a blog on the Huffington Post Emotional Intelligence is Overrated.  The blog went viral in the Twittersphere. 

Grant described how he thought a CEO who considered EQ to be more important than IQ and who was spending millions on training and EQ assessment was wasting his company’s money.  In the end they agreed to a study which using hundreds of salespeople demonstrated that IQ was 5 times more powerful that EQ in determining compensation.  Grant then quoted a meta-analysis by Dana Joseph and Dan Newman which demonstrated that IQ accounted for 14% of job performance and EQ only 1%.  However after convincingly arguing the case that EQ is overrated Grant then backtracks saying that it is a set of skills that can be useful particularly in jobs where emotions are important such as sales (even though his own study showed it was not).

Part of the problem stems back to Daniel Goleman.  Unfortunately his book Emotional Intelligence contained the subtitle “Why It Can Matter More Than IQ”.  Since the book’s publication in 1995 many EQ practitioners have converted the result that IQ accounts for job 20% of performance into a hypothesis that EQ will predict 80% of future performance.  Even Daniel Goleman has publically disavowed the 80% hypothesis yet it is still continually repeated.  However what Goleman puts forward and I agree is that once “once you’re in a high-IQ position, intellect loses its power to determine who will emerge as a productive employee or an effective leader. For that, how you handle yourself and your relationships — in other words, the emotional intelligence skill set — matters more than your IQ.”

I have an interesting confirmation of this which I use in my training programs.  One question we discuss is the ideal components of leadership.  I ask my participants which are the two most important components from the following list:

·         Change Agent

·         Ethics

·         Flexibility

·         Intelligence

·         People skills

·         Self management

·         Strategic thinker

·         Team player

·         Visionary

The list was taken from a study done for the Karpin report (1994) which asked 100 experienced business managers from Australia’s largest organisations the same question.  “People skills” was ranked far and away the most important component.  (Ethics, by the way ranked stone motherless last.)  I have been running workshops since the early 1990s and my experience has been that the more senior the manager the higher the ranking of “people skills”.

So while I differ from Grant do not think that EQ is overrated I do agree with another statement in his blog namely EQ and IQ are correlated.  IQ is the capacity to learn. The higher your IQ, the easier it is for you to develop emotional intelligence.  However the key to emotional intelligence is understanding your core emotions compared to your transient emotions.  Your core emotions are driven by your temperament – what you are genetically born with.  Based on a study of 11,000 identical twins nature is around twice as important as nurture.  I have found the Humm-Wadsworth model of seven core emotions the most practical tool for people to use and once understood (takes a day) dramatically lifts their emotional intelligence.

People drive performance, emotions drive people, temperament drives emotions.