The Business Context from Which Emotional Intelligence Emerged
Thanks to the collective wisdom of the younger generations and those who are demanding a new model of leadership and ways of doing business, the leadership paradigms of yesterday are starting to budge—maybe not as much in practice or as quickly as we'd like, but they are shifting. A senior leader I worked with in the investment management industry once told me he thought emotional intelligence was a bunch of hooey. Instead, he wanted us all to read Good to Great. Needless to say, he didn't have an overabundance of the skills and competencies we've come to think about as being foundational to emotional intelligence (EI). The popularization of EI has been gaining momentum over the past 25 years since Daniel Goleman published his first book on the concept. His work has been a beacon beckoning and guiding leaders whose ships are lost at sea.
Like many other disciplines of scholarship and study that have historically placed a higher value on the ideas and voices of a select few, the field of emotional intelligence is no exception. It isn't that there aren't subject matter experts of diverse perspectives and backgrounds doing important and interesting work in this space; it's just that their voices are still comparatively muted and their presence largely overlooked. It's really important we change that. Part of what this entails is looking at how the models we're using now were derived and evaluating whether they adequately reflect what we understand both from a neuroscience standpoint as well as what we ideally want leadership to look like, not to mention EI itself. Are there EI competencies, for example, that when practiced and developed explicitly articulate a vision of inclusive leadership and result in leadership that doesn't destroy the planet and acts in service of world benefit? Equally important, we need to ask ourselves what EI looks like outside of the business domain from which its most popular iteration and framework emerged. What would a model based on what we understand about the brain and its bidirectional relationship to the body look like, for instance?
To the extent we iterate or improve upon existing models of EI, we need to make sure that what we feel is valuable to democratize is reflected and is fully considered from the variety of contexts in which these models are being taught and practiced, like education, government, or medicine, for example. What we have come to value in leaders has most definitely shifted since the early competency studies used to inform and shape the EI model Daniel Goleman made famous. Essentially, the current EI framework is itself a leadership or behavioral competency model whose later iterations were inspired by studying the competency models of 188 large global companies at the time (Goleman, 1998). The fact that its credibility has been strengthened by virtue of a mostly self-referential process means it still resonates, and any analyses done since support its perceived efficacy; although, candidly speaking, I'm not sure how, given that EI doesn't consist of just one or two things. It consists of many behaviors and skills among a sea of intervening factors—like context—which is what makes measuring it relative to its current definition, apart from anecdotally or qualitatively, a difficult if not impossible undertaking. Moreover, if we were to poll companies now, 25 years later, to find out what their leadership competency models consist of and what sets apart leaders who succeed in those distinct environments from those who don't, we could expect to find out what those individual organizations we polled value, promote, and reward in their own cultures. We may also spot values of a more aspirational nature than a true depiction of the qualities the leaders in those companies embody. Finally, to the extent commonalities can be found among successful leaders inside those companies or the competency models meant to describe and guide them, instead of concluding these are indicative of good or excellent leadership, it would be more accurate to say that any trends we see are reflective of what prevailing models of leadership elevate and deem as important in the context of doing business today or that their similarities reflect the values they have in common from an aspirational standpoint—which often means very little unless they are also backed up by effective systems of learning, application, evaluation, and reward. Otherwise, they remain just that, aspirational.
Like anything that is contextually constructed or derived, leadership competency models are artifacts of what is presently valued and prioritized—either in real terms or aspirational ones—within the respective contexts we find them. If we aspire to change the value proposition of business, which I happen to believe the fate of our planet is balanced upon, then instead of working solely from current competency models and norms of doing business in which increasing shareholder value is still the primary objective, we also need to work from the point of view of what we want to have happen. I don't know about you, but I would like a world populated with leaders who shape themselves and the businesses they run as agents of world benefit versus agents of world greed. In this regard, we would do well to channel the ever-increasing innovation and drive toward continuous improvement toward benefiting beings and the planet instead of toward how much wealth and power we can acquire and amass.
Because the most popular of the current models of EI evolved from and within the realm of leadership and business, we also need to decide whether we care enough about EI as a paradigm to see what it might look like in other contexts and whether it holds enough weight outside of the one it was derived from and largely created for. If the answer is yes, which is what my guess would be, then we need to be explicit about which of its elements can be backed up by science and defined in a way that we can apply it and not just talk and write about it. We explore in the last chapter of the book what EI might look like with these objectives in mind and in practical terms.
Democratizing Emotional Intelligence
When I began my work in 2016 to democratize emotional intelligence, it was with the express goal of broadening access to make its practical wisdom available to all, not only to the upper echelon of leaders. My second aim was to translate the theory of EI into an applied methodology and set of practices people could apply in their own lives with the intent to close the knowing-doing-being gap, by which I mean attempting to bridge the chasm between what we have the capacity to know intellectually, what we have the capacity to apply relative to what we think we know, and finally, the degree to which we embody each. Early on in this endeavor, I remember looking at the Goleman-Boyatzis model of EI, consisting of four domains (Self-Awareness, Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management) and 12 underlying competencies, and thinking, “Where on earth does one begin?”1 Certainly, we can aspire to be proficient in each, but if I felt the undertaking was daunting and overwhelming as someone trying to help people acquire these skills, I could only imagine how it might feel to be on the receiving end of this training. I knew a simplified approach would be necessary.
I asked myself what I thought was the next logical question: “Which, if any, of the domains and competencies are prerequisites to perform the others?” Put another way, “Which, if any, of the domains and competencies when applied result in the demonstration or skillful application of the others?” From there I set out to find whether there were any necessary and sufficient causes to perform the various EI domains and competencies. While I started my inquiry intending to pinpoint the prerequisites of EI, I quickly found myself asking a bigger question: “What makes developing anything in ourselves possible?” This is a question I've been asking in slightly different ways since as early as I can remember, and one that is perfectly logical to ask given the task at hand—to create a methodology that bridges our conceptual knowledge of EI with our ability to develop, apply, and embody it. Asking and attempting to find answers to questions, like what enables us each to be able to shift, change, and grow, and what are the causes and conditions that allow us to be the most authentic versions of ourselves as much of the time as possible, led me to where I am at now, writing a book on a topic that is much broader than that of EI. I realized then, as I do now, that the methods and frameworks we use for this or any other purpose need to serve us and not the other way around.
However, bound to the parameters of my aims at the time, I found myself gravitating back to the work I had done as an adjunct faculty member of Cultivating Well-Being, a program developed as a joint initiative between Dr. Richard Davidson's foundation, Center for