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Written by Dr. Michael O'Brien
The Systems Thinker
April 2003
What is the most valuable contribution executives make to their companies, expertise or leadership? I say leadership. Knowledge and technical capabilities, no matter how broad, are the threshold skills everyone must have to do the job. Leadership is the distinguishing competency that star performers exhibit that the average performers do not. But leadership takes judgment, which involves something of a sixth sense—a high performance of personal mastery.
This analysis raises interesting questions about the best training for today's business leaders. As former New York Times science writer Daniel Goleman suggests in his bestselling book, Primal Leadership (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), the latest scientific findings indicate that brainy but dogmatic bosses rarely rise to be stars in an age when organizational speed and flexibility are the key to survival.
Likewise, in a cover story several years ago, Time magazine sifted through the current thinking and reported, "New brain research suggests that emotions, not IQ, may be the true measure of human intelligence." The bottom-line significance of what Time called "EQ" was suggested by management expert Karen Boylston: "Customers are telling businesses, 'I don't care if every member of your staff graduated with honors from Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. I will take my business and go where I am understood and treated with respect.'"
If the evolutionary pressures of the marketplace make EQ, not IQ, the hot ticket for business success, it seems likely that both individual executives and boards of directors need to know how to cultivate it. I have a modest proposal: embrace a highly personal practice aimed at improving these four adaptive skills:
1. Practice Self Awareness. Psychologists call this discipline "meta-cognition"; Buddhist monks know it as "mindfulness"; Socrates referred to it as the "examined life." I think of it as thinking differently on purpose and noticing what you're feeling and thinking. Whatever you call it, practicing this skill is a way of escaping the conditioned confines of your past. Raise your consciousness by catching yourself in the act of thinking as often as possible; routinely notice your emotions and ask if you're facing facts or indulging biases.
2. Use Imagery. This is what you see Olympic ski racers doing before they enter the starting gate. With closed eyes and swaying bodies, they run the course in their minds, which ultimately improves their performance. You can do a similar thing by setting aside time each day to dream with gusto about what you want to achieve.
3. Frame and Reframe Events. When the Greek Stoic Epictetus said 2,000 years ago that it isn't events that matter but our opinion of them, this is what he was talking about. Every time something important happens, assign as many interpretations to it as possible, even zany ones. Then go with the interpretation most supportive of your dreams.
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