Daniel Goleman The Father of Emotional Intelligence on Managing Emotions in the Workplace

hello everyone welcome to another episode of the future of work i am joined today by daniel goldman the father as he is known of emotional intelligence he's a renowned psychologist and new york times best-selling author of several books including emotional intelligence social intelligence and primal leadership daniel thank you for joining me today jacob it's a real pleasure to be here thank you for having me of course of course um why don't we get started with a little bit of background information about you i was on your website and reading i think you wrote like a

long thing on there on your website directly from you it talks about your background and history which is fascinating uh so give us a little bit of background about you how did you even get involved with emotional intelligence and studying this stuff well i i do have a phd in psychology from harvard actually but i ended up being a science journalist at the new york times and i was covering what they called the decade of the brain this is a while ago when there was there were a lot of new discoveries particularly about emotions in

the brain and i wanted to write about that and by the way i didn't invent the phrase emotional intelligence i just made it famous the guy who invented the phrase is now the president of yale university pete peter salovey with his then graduate student john mayer and i saw that they had written as an article called emotional intelligence in a very obscure journal my job at the times was to look at all the journals and see what's newsworthy what's interesting what's relevant and then make that an article in times and i i thought wow emotional

intelligence what a great phrase it seems like an oxymoron how can you have intelligence and emotions but then i realized it means being intelligent about emotion and so i i use that as the frame for the book i wrote emotional intelligence which became a global bestseller it's in more than 40 languages these days and that kind of launched another career for me where i started going to companies and organizations and schools i became very big in schools under the name social emotional learning which means teaching kids k through 12 the basics of emotional intelligence which

are self-awareness self-management empathy and social skill and we all need those in to get along in life and actually it turns out to be outstanding in the workplace and i think as we go forward into the future it's going to matter even more was there something about this field of study that particularly intrigued you because as a psychologist you could have gone into so many different areas and specializations why emotions well we all have them all the time it seems it seemed utterly relevant even when we think we don't have them we do have them

uh the brain is wired to like to dislike to react continually and this is part of a survival mechanism in in our you know human history and it's hard stamped in all of our brains can't avoid it yeah no everybody does have emotions as you said uh well we're going to talk about emotional intelligence and leadership so i thought it only makes sense to maybe start with an explanation of both of those things so first i'm really curious to hear your take on what is leadership or what does it mean to be a leader how

do you define that i think that having a sphere of influence means you're a de facto leader and in that sense i think we're all leaders whether it's our family and friends or an organization with a formal title it comes down to whether people listen to you respect what you say and are guided by what you say so i think that leadership applies in all spheres of life okay and then how do you define or explain emotional intelligence well once i wrote about emotional intelligence i went back to my psychology background i started working with

an old friend of mine a colleague richard boyatzis who's at the now case weatherhead school management at uh in cleveland and at case western reserve and he and i had been students of david mcclellan at harvard who was one of the people who developed the idea of a competence a workplace ability that makes you outstanding compared to other people and competencies can be learned and it turns out that there's a set of about a dozen competencies within the domain of emotional intelligence that uh are hallmarks of people who are the best leaders so i've been

working uh with richard and others along those lines since because it turns out that emotional intelligence sets the best leaders apart from others and by the way this is interesting new data even in areas you wouldn't think it's true engineers at a global manufacturing company rated each other on how effective are are these guys as engineers or are you as an engineer it turned out that engineers ratings of other engineers effectiveness had zero correlation with iq in a very high correlation with emotional intelligence i love that you mentioned new data because i always love new

data and research that's you know fascinating example for engineers so emotional intelligence then like you said is being intelligent and being intelligent about your emotions so if we put those things together an emotionally intelligent leader would be someone with a sphere of influence who is intelligent about their emotions sure okay um and one thing that i'm always fascinated about this topic is is emotional intelligence something that you learn or is it genetic and i asked because i did a 23andme test a couple years ago and through 23andme you can take all the data and download

it and put it into something called prometheus which basically does all this you know looks at the genes and all this all that stuff in there and uh my wife and i were laughing because we were looking at my genetics and it basically said um you might be missing an empathy gene and so you might you might not be good at empathy based on your genetics and i was like yeah yeah and i was like wait a minute is that is that a thing so it really just made me wonder is is this a genetic

thing or is this something we can all learn so emotional intelligence is learned and learnable and i think 23andme is overselling what they know because everything is a combination of nature and nurture you get your genetic makeup but that doesn't limit you that's what you start with and so for example for empathy uh it's it's definitely learnable you can definitely amp it up but you need feedback you need life experience need to realize that when i assume such and such about how she was feeling or he was feeling it was right or was wrong that's

how you get better at this so feedback in real time is very important for enhancing emotional intelligence abilities across the board and i you know some people may on a 23andme type test look like they have a good empathy basis but that's just where they start your life experience is going to determine where you end up no i love that and i actually remember seeing some study or some research that basically said even sociopaths can be emotionally intelligent like you can you can still practice these things and um and implement them even if you have

you know are clinically a sociopath well here's here's the problem with that uh there are three kinds of empathy each of which is based on a different set of brain circuits there's cognitive empathy i know how you think about things i know the words to use to communicate with you effectively there's social brain empathy which means i feel what you feel a sociopath can have those two kinds of empathy and make his or her way in the world pretty well what they lack is the third kind it's called empathic concern and it's based in the

mammalian caretaking circuitry it's basically a parent's love for a child and it means i care about you sociopaths don't have that by definition they just don't care about their victims interesting i did not know that uh so when we think about emotional intelligence how many which which emotions go into that i know you've written about this extensively um so what are the emotions that go into that intelligence uh grouping uh every emotion you've ever felt anything and so yes anger disgust sadness all of that as a partner however here's what emotional intelligence tells you if

you're in a negative emotional state it because the way the brain is wired you're narrowing the bandwidth of your other capabilities your cognitive abilities whatever talents you may have because emotions the way the brain is designed and wired take up a huge amount of space in fact emotional distractions that thing she said to me that got me so upset are far stronger than external distractions it's going to cop your intelligence your attention continually so emotional intelligence helps you manage disturbing emotions and it also encourages you to have positive emotions to have an optimistic outlook so

they call it a growth mindset these days you know i can get better other people can get better uh you don't feel that way when you're entrapped by a negative emotion it helps you keep your eye on your goals no matter what else is going on because we all need to do it helps you adapt helps you be agile we absolutely need to do that these are all competencies by the way of outstanding leaders and they're based on emotional intelligence abilities because people leaders need to first lead themselves and that means manage your inner life

then you can lead others you can tune into them with empathy and then this is really important it turns out that a leader's emotional state is contagious it leaks out to the people around them it's just very natural for people to pay most attention to and put most importance on what the most powerful people person in the room says and does so the leader's emotions affect other people's emotions and not only that that in turn drives performance so if the leader is in a negative state people catch that negative state their performance goes down if

they're in a but the leaders in a positive state pretty enthusiastic energetic people catch that their performance goes up so it it's not just a private thing leaders should know that their state their interstate is going to leak that's part of their leadership is managing themselves so can you just always fake being in a positive state can you just show up all the time like hey how's it going like i'm great everything's fine because there's also this talk of um wanting more transparency and more authenticity and you know we want that from leaders right if

you're upset tell us if you're frustrated tell us but that also seems counterintuitive to the whole idea of if you're always positive and optimistic it's going to improve performance it rubs off onto others so should i as a leader show my frustrations if i'm upset too i think authentic is the key word here uh if you fake it people might sense that pretty easily that you're always upbeat even when you're really down so i think it's better to clear the air and say you know i really had a bad time with the kids this morning

they just wouldn't get ready for school and i'm a little bummed about it because by naming it this is really interesting it turns out that the brain is arranged so that if you name a negative emotion it already takes energy from that state and it shifts it to the prefrontal cortex which is the brain's boss the ceo of the brain it helps you manage emotions so if you talk about it just by the act of talking about it you're managing it i am terrible at that uh i am not good at talking about my emotions

at all my wife right here should jump in and be like yeah he sucks at that um so i'm trying to get better of like saying i'm tired i'm stressed i'm frustrated i'm angry i'm unhappy uh yeah i'm genuinely not good at those things at all so i'm trying to to work on those things because i agree i think it's important and when i say it i feel a little bit better about myself and i can talk about these things with my wife or members of my team so i i think there's a lot of

value and like you said naming that emotion i also think it's interesting though for a lot of um traditional things like iq it seems like in those areas sometimes it's easier to manipulate or fake something but when it comes to emotion we're very good at picking up when somebody's faking it or being not authentic it's it's weird it's like something is as humans has embedded us or we can just pick up yeah i think that we have radar for example we read facial we read emotions from facial expressions do you know the difference between a

fake smile and a real smile is it the under the eyes is it the it's the crow it's the crow's up because yeah so uh crow's feet when when we're really happy at first you're gonna have the crow's feet but then as you hold it you're starting to fake it and they disappear i think that our brain is wired to notice these little subtle cues and to start wondering does he really mean it does she is she faking this or not yeah no it's it's crazy it's like built into us it's very weird so what

a lot of people think about emotional intelligence you know the two that come to mind especially for leaders is usually empathy and self-awareness right uh putting yourself in somebody else's shoes and perspective and understanding your self-awareness and how other people perceive you besides those i feel like maybe a lot of people might not be aware of some of the other important emotions specifically for leaders and you were talking about some of the things that great leaders do so i thought maybe we could expand on that a little bit going beyond just empathy and self-awareness to

looking at some of the other things that are crucial too yes so i look at it in terms of the competencies that you find in outstanding leaders and star performers and it doesn't it turns out it doesn't have to do with their emotions we all have the full range of emotions but how well you manage it self-management emotional balance turns out to be a competence of outstanding leaders uh other self-management competencies and self self management means handling disturbing emotions so they don't what you're doing and fostering positive emotions that help you do what you're doing

so others are as i said adaptability being able to be flexible and meeting challenges as they come being able to stay positive no matter what happens and you know to look on bright on the bright side about yourself about other people about situations uh and these are and then keeping your eye on the goal no matter what the distractions my god there's so many distractions these days infinite but still are you doing what's most important in the long term this is a question to ask yourself so those are the self-management competencies and then empathy knowing

what other people are feeling lets you for example be a good team member team player lead a team well be able to influence people effectively guide them give them performance feedback as needed here's one that you may not think of being able to inspire people to articulate a shared sense of meaning or purpose in what we're doing here that resonates with other people that is creates an extremely positive emotional climate huge positive motivation people feel their work is meaningful and then being able to handle conflicts to surface them before they explode for example these are

all abilities of outstanding leaders and by the way no one leader is outstanding at all of them we have profiles we're better or worse at some of them richard boyances who i mentioned before and i have designed uh an assessment it's called the emotional social competence inventory that where people who know you well rate you on these competencies of outstanding leaders and you get a profile then you can decide oh well maybe i'll work on my influence i'll work on managing my emotions but that's up to you but it's helpful to get uh authentic real

feedback from people who know you well and who you trust on what your strengths are and what you could be better at why can't you just be really good at your job why do you need emotional intelligence because i think we've seen you know the last 10 25 years i feel like a lot of leaders have gotten into very successful positions that were not emotionally intelligent and you know a lot of people work for these types of leaders our engagement scores are so low around the world so somebody might say well you know why do

i need emotional intelligence my leader's not emotional intelligent look how successful he or she is why should i be doing this stuff yeah there's a huge problem with the fact that people got promoted to leadership positions because they were good at a task task however it turned out they were hollowing out the human capital people hate those kind of bosses this is the problem and now there's what they call the great resignation people are resigning right and left and one of the main reasons people leave is i can't stand my boss so you may be

good at a job in terms of the objective measures of the job i'm really good at programming i'm really good but it turns out that it's all done with people and if you're the leader of people you need emotional intelligence to work well with the people you're leading it's just a fact and it very interesting data you say you're interested in new data yes a study that showed that people high-level executives said emotional intelligence is extremely important to leadership like ninety percent new hires people new to their career say oh no it doesn't matter it's

all tech skills in other words there's a learning curve over the course of a career where you see oh you know what it does matter uh so people may think particularly coming out of an academic situation because in academics it's all cognitive it's all how well did you do on the test uh you know how what was your gpa how well it was your what were your gres whatever it may be but once you get in the workplace it's how well you work with other people and no matter how smart you are that's not going

to help i know there's also this this big debate between uh iq and there was this big debate between iq and eq and everybody uh you know we did iq tests all the time i i remember i had to do an iq test when i was very young and it was like well if you want to get into a good school what's your iq nobody ever tested me for eq nobody talked about my emotions it was just like yeah what's your iq score um and so there's always this big kind of debate right and it

feels like these two things are oftentimes pitted against each other do you need iq or eq what's more important however they operate differently um you need a certain level of cognitive ability to be a lawyer to be an accountant to get an mba or a master's degree you need about a standard deviation above the norm which is around 11415 but it's very interesting there's a floor effect which means that everyone else who's in a position that you're in has about the same iq yeah and what distinguishes people is their emotional intelligence some people may have

a lot some people may have little they may have critical elements of it it turns out that over the course of your career what's going to make the difference as to whether you're an outstanding leader not just an average one or one who drives people away is your emotional intelligence i have a friend claudio fernandez arose he used to be the head of research at egon's end or a big executive recruitment firm and he said we looked at people we had hired who were then fired they looked great on paper they had real expertise a

lot of business experience but we found invariably when they were fired it was because of a lapse in emotional intelligence yeah that's interesting uh can you have one and not the other so for example can you be very high on eq and low on iq and can you have very high iq and very low eq and maybe you could talk about how that kind of a person would function in the world depending on if you're very high on one or very high on the other well someone with high emotional intelligence and not very high iq

might still be very good in sales for example they might be very good in any situation that relies on relationships because their emotional intelligence would make them very gifted there uh they may might need to work with someone else who knows the basics you know the specifics but they could have very good relationships with clients and customers someone who had very high iq and very low emotional intelligence might be very good in a position where they were working with numbers by themselves or coding by themselves but more and more work is done these days on

teams and they would have a problem when it came to getting along with team members i saw some data that suggested that people who had a very very high iq were not actually very good leaders because they didn't know how to talk to people they didn't know how to communicate they were too abstract because that's the way they think and they assumed other people would be there with them but so they they had a breakdown in communication it's funny i remember um oh man when did i read this this must have been three years ago

and it was on hbr and i referenced this in in my book as well and it said that one of the things that i think managers it was either that one of the things that they are not good at or felt most uncomfortable doing was having one-on-one conversations with their team members which i found to be weird because if you are leading others part of your role is to have one-on-one conversations with your team members exactly and it said that that was one of the things that managers felt most uncomfortable doing like they just did

not want to have those conversations uh so it's interesting that you mentioned conversation because i think i mean part of being a you need to be a good communicator right i'm sure emotional intelligence is a big part of it one of the competencies excuse me one of the competencies that we found in outstanding leaders high performing leaders is being a coach or mentor which means you have to have a one-on-one conversation you have to get to know the person yeah and it turns out that having that conversation creates a very positive feeling in the person

you have it with they have immense loyalty they feel seen they feel heard so it makes a big difference so the data that you saw in in hbr suggests to me that a lot of managers need to get better at the coaching of competence because the people they're leading would really feel good about it they would feel my manager cares about my career development my manager cares about me and that means that i'm going to care about my manager and i'm going to want to give my best not just do just good enough you mentioned

disengagement is very low i see those two things as connected yep well when i interviewed so for my recent book i was engaging in his highs disengagement is high yeah so i interviewed 140 ceos uh from my recent book the future leader and i asked all of them about what are the most crucial mindsets and skill sets that you think current uh and aspiring leaders need to have so there were four mindsets and five skills and one of the skills they identified was actually the skill of the coach like you mentioned helping make other people

more successful so there's definitely a lot of alignment there um you mentioned this idea of managing emotions this is also something i am admittedly not that great at so i thought we could give um listeners and viewers some guidance and feedback on on how to do that um so where do you begin and i suppose you also need to manage the bad emotions but you also need to manage the good emotions and i think of myself for example as an entrepreneur and when i first became an entrepreneur you know you close your first project or

your first deal and you get that you get that emotional high right but you need to manage that too because it's very tempting to be like oh my god i got my first project i'm gonna go spend all my money i'm gonna like you know party so you have to manage the highs and also the lows interesting so how do you go about managing your emotions whether they're positive or negative in the workplace it's interesting that we use the term emotional balance yeah or this ability because you need to balance it uh you know you

you don't want to be manic and when something good happens you feel ecstatic and you're going to like blow all your money you need to manage that of course but on the other hand that is i would say a less common far less common the negative emotions nothing's happening this isn't working i'm no good this kind of thinking which creates anxiety it creates depression i think people more often are challenged by handling their negative emotions and i'll give you three methods if you'd like yes please one is well tested it's actually used by special forces

it's used all over the place it has to it's a quick way to go from uh being upset it's called sympathetic nervous system arousal to be to recovery mode parasympathetic nervous system arousal and it's a simple breathing technique where you inhale as long as you can like a count of four at least inhale deeply hold it as long as you can at least a count of four and then you exhale as long as you can and it turns out if you do that six to nine times it actually shifts your physiology from being upset to

being relaxed that's one interesting thing to do on the spot just breathing that's fascinating another thing you can do on the spot as i mentioned earlier is name what's going on i'm getting anxious now or to yourself or to another person uh i'm getting angry now the the fact that you can name it suggests that you're shifting the energy from the part of the brain that feels it to the part of the brain that manages it and the third thing you can do is uh kind of as a mindfulness practice i don't know if you've

talked about mindfulness on your show jacob i have yes yeah but it turns out i i just i did a book recently with richard davidson who's a neuroscientist at the university of wisconsin where we reviewed all of the good studies sound the most sound studies on meditation and mindfulness and we found that you know what it's it's mind training it's training the brain it really works and uh if you practice mindfulness you know 10 minutes 20 minutes a day what it does is strengthen the part of your brain that manages negative emotion so that you

are triggered less often when you're triggered it's less strong and you recover more quickly the actual definition of resilience in cognitive science is how long it takes you to go from the peak of upset back to calm and the quicker that curve the more resilient you are so mindfulness enhances calmness it also it's a twofer because the same circuitry helps you focus it enhances concentration so i i recommend a simple breath meditation i don't know if you want me to go through the instructions please yes but uh here's what you do it's really simple there's

no belief system required it's just simple mind training and bring your focus to your breath you can close your eyes sit up so you're you're in a relaxed but dignified posture it helps you stay more attentive you bring your attention to your breath and stay with the full in-breath and the full out breath the space between breaths and then start with the next breath the full in-breath the full out breath it's that simple you just keep your attention on your breath if you there's a place you can feel the sensation or the rise and fall

of your belly with each breath when your mind wanders and it's going to wander and you notice it wandered bring it back to your breath and start again with the next breath it's that simple the real action here is when you notice that your mind wandered and you bring it back because that strengthens the circuitry for staying focused and ignoring distractions and that's going to be the first payoff for you very gradually you'll notice i can focus on my work and i'm less distractible now you'll also notice slowly and gradually that you're more calm but

there's a dose response relationship here the more you do it the better the effects will be so if you want to start with five minutes or ten minutes a day great whatever you'll do there's a saying the best meditation the best mindfulness is the one you'll do whatever that may be and you may have to you know move around things in your daily schedule so to make this a priority it's like going to the gym every time you bring your mind back your strength in the circuitry it's but it's exactly like going to the gym

and lifting a weight every time you do a rep yeah you make that muscle that much stronger so make time for it and give it priority in your day if you want to have the effect whatever you bring to work to help you be you workplace from facebook celebrates it their familiar features help everyone work together in new ways to make your place of work a great place to work visit workplace.com forward slash human that's workplace dot com forward slash human yeah my wife is very good at meditation and um and just breathing and just

understanding that stuff and one of the things i've always struggled with when i try to do that is my mind is just like a ping pong ball it's like a just ping ping ping ping ping and as soon as i close my eyes i'm just like whoa like million thoughts popped into my head i gotta open my eyes because otherwise i'm just like going nuts over here um but i think you're right it's like exercise right the first time you go to the gym you're like yeah i can't do this this is too hard but

it's the same with meditation same with mindfulness the reason you think your mind is like that and i can't do this is because your mind's always like that you just never noticed so when you try to bring your mind to one place the fact that it wanders all over it becomes really stark and many people get discouraged at the outset for exactly that reason jacob they think oh gosh my mind's like a ping-pong ball it's all over the joint but the more you stay with it the more you bring your mind back the less true

that becomes but at the beginning it's going to be like that don't let it down okay so it sounds like to manage negative emotions let's say you're an employee at a company you just had a terrible meeting with your manager or a client uh meeting didn't go well you're feeling very upset frustrated probably just take some time you do that breathing exercise that we talked about in the beginning is step one step two you would name that emotion basically like i feel disappointed i feel frustrated my manager didn't have my back or you know the

client chewed me out for not doing something the right way and then number three is that kind of the the mindfulness piece you know the meditation piece if you want to call it that i'll give you number four yes it's it's taken from cognitive therapy you may be catastrophizing because you had that bad interaction you may think oh man i'm no good at this i'm going to lose my job that's extra and the good thing that cognitive therapy points out is you do not have to believe your thoughts interesting you think it but it think

think twice about that because you're going to an extreme you're making assumptions it may not be true in fact you may be very good at your job in most ways remind yourself of that at the moment that you're telling yourself you're no good at it and talk back to the negative self-talk it's funny you mentioned that the first visual that popped into my head when you said you don't have to believe your thoughts is uh uh an episode from seinfeld where uh george costanza is trying to or no jerry's trying to take a lie detector

test and uh george costanza is trying to give him some advice and he's like uh you know it's it's not a lie if you believe it so basically you know you can go against your thoughts if you believe it it's not a lot so it reminded me of that where just because you think it doesn't mean you have to actually believe it yeah as much as i admire george costanza he's a lovable character in some ways harassable in others i'm not sure that was really good advice that he gave me his friend no i would

i would not want to emulate the life of george costanza um okay so those are i think four fantastic uh tips or strategies that people can use to kind of combat that the negative emotions does that ever happen where those four don't work and you're just still just going nuts um and you're just up you know inconsolable so to speak like is is there like a a backup or a safety library if those things aren't working out for you you know um i mentioned richard boyances he and i do a lot of work together we

just develop something called the personal sustainability index which is a way of looking at all the things in your life that stress you out that upset you and then all the things in your life that balance that that help you recover because what you're saying is that the emergency methods didn't work for you and you're staying pretty stressed out the question is what can you do that will counter that i mean uh maybe you go for a walk in the woods or maybe you talk to your best buddy or maybe you uh play with a

kid in other words there are lots of things you can do that put you in a positive state now the critical question is day in and day out do you have enough of those to balance the times when you just can't take it anymore yeah and uh so we we give people a menu of that maybe do you have show notes jacob maybe you can put that in the notes yeah yeah no definitely we'll have a description when we put all this up so yeah i'll get some links for you to include uh it sounds

like one of the biggest mistakes that leaders and maybe individuals can make is to try to power through things uh you know we've all kind of experienced that right when um things aren't going your way when you you feel bad or you're unhappy and you're just like i just gotta power through it i just gotta be that tank and act like nothing's bothering me it seems like that is not a good way to go um when you're dealing with some unhappy emotions you need to pause and reflect and take time to acknowledge them yeah i

would agree with that but i would also say don't give up your goal keep your eye on the goal just because it didn't work this time doesn't mean it won't work the next time yeah so acknowledge what happened and oh man that felt so bad but i still want to do this i'm still working toward that okay keep going yeah what do you do if you work for a leader who's not emotionally intelligent i get this question all the time i'm sure you do um lots of employees who are just like you know what the

stuff that daniel's talking about is great i wish my leader would practice these things but they don't and you know what am i going to do so i'm often asked this question i'll give you a couple of answers one is i i i'll give you a caution do not tell your leader you have no eq don't they suck at this okay because that's going to backfire on you however if you have an ally who is able to talk to your boss someone that your boss respects who you can talk to openly and who might suggest

to your boss that they could do better in this realm and help them go ahead with that if you have that situation then there's kind of a flippant answer but sometimes it works which is get your boss's resume and send it out to an executive recruiter they might get a good job somewhere else yeah and i think that's actually important because there's nothing that says you have to work for a leader who's not emotionally intelligent uh because that can be very frustrating it can be very disengaging it can be tolerant actually yeah and life is

short right you why would you want to spend time working for this kind of a person who doesn't acknowledge uh that this is how they are and doesn't want to change but so you're saying not to tell your leader that they're not emotionally intelligent but is it possible to have a conversation with them directly uh in a in a certain way or is it just like a typical let me restate that if you're skilled if you have enough of a relationship with the boss where the boss will listen to you and respect what you say

uh actually i think that boss is probably emotionally intelligent i have a stereotype of people who aren't which in my mind makes them closed to that kind of conversation but if you have the possibility and you're good at how you put things and you don't do it in an accusatory way but you say you know you might be better at x if you did y and your boss would listen to you sure go ahead how do you create emotional intelligence in others so maybe you're a leader and you want members of your team to be

emotionally intelligent or your peers i'm just doing an article for the harvard business review on how to create an emotionally intelligent organization and it turns out that the biggest uh biggest improvement in emotional intelligence doesn't come in trying to hire for it that's very dicey but rather in helping people develop it and there's a lot of methodologies for developing emotional intelligence that are used in corporations in organizations now so i would say uh to help people find a program that works for them or a coach if you're at a certain level in the organization that

may work out too from a payback point of view but as i said it's all learned and learnable there are four or five basic steps one is you ask yourself or ask the person do you really care because if the answer is no you can stop right there yeah because it's going to take a little effort it's going to take some time the next thing is to get a good evaluation whether it's from you know talking to people or this emotional social competence inventory something like that a 360 where people evaluate you anonymously and you

get the information aggregated so you don't know who said what then people can be much more open with you yeah and then um uh have someone you can work with who's going to help you whether it's a coach or someone leading this development effort someone you can talk to when you have a bad day having having learning partners but also someone to support you and also practicing at every naturally occurring opportunity that's really going to make a difference you mentioned there were some methodologies that organizations use to instill emotional intelligence can you share maybe what

some of those are well as i mentioned some organizations at the top of the house will have people coached and booch can work with you there's a i'm starting a group the goldman consulting group to help corporations bring learning teams really uh help people get better but do it with a group you select for yourself people who give you feedback people you work with people you like who will form a team to help you improve is it to help your talents get better those are two methodologies there are some methodologies that are proven not to

work one is called spray and pray where you have an expert come in for two hours and talk about this and you know how great it is and then leave and then you get no support because it takes ongoing practice however you can do it yeah how do you tell if someone has emotional intelligence or if you have emotional intelligence are there specific signs that you look out for one of them uh is pretty intuitive which is is this person liked people who are most intelligent tend to be likeable you know people get along with

them they get along with people does this person you know vent constantly vent negative emotions that suggest they're not very good at it uh does this person seem to know how other people see them it's another sign of emotional intelligence uh in other words you look for signs does it when i'm with this person and talking to this person do they care about me do i feel seen and heard that's another one okay well we only have a couple minutes left so just a few more questions for you um and one of them is can

you show too much emotion at work there's a lot of talk about emotional intelligence but some people believe well if you know if you just walk around work all day just showing all your emotions that's probably also not that great either so how do you balance uh how authentic or transparent or emotional you are i talked about managing emotions one of the ways someone who's authentic might manage emotions is by saying what they're feeling but not venting not going around like tearing their hair all day or upsetting other people that's someone who is i would

say overly emotional in the wrong way someone who feels very upbeat and very enthusiastic and shares that with people i think that's fine i think that's good i think it helps the emotional atmosphere the emotional climate of the workplace so i would say it depends what emotion you're showing all the time if it's a downbeat emotions not so great manage that internally manage it yourself manage it with someone you can talk to but if it's a positive emotion let it out and it's interesting that emotional intelligence is not about showing your emotions as you said

it's about being intelligent about your emotions that's a big difference between just showing versus being intelligent about them um maybe one of the last questions for you i think there are a lot of myths about emotional intelligence you know what they are how to practice them are there some common myths that you keep hearing about emotional intelligence that you want people to not believe yeah one of them is that iq doesn't matter only emotional intelligence iq matters to a degree but you need both it's not either or the other big myth is that emotional intelligence

matters and iq or cognitive abilities or cognitive talents don't that's a myth they both matter um okay um and are there any particular leaders that you can point to that you think are emotionally intelligent that maybe our viewers or listeners might wanna emulate or learn more about you know i think the dalai lama is a great example of someone who's mostly intelligent he's not a business leader but he's definitely a world leader uh i think that um there probably are some uh ceos who might be emotionally intelligent but i don't know any of them well

enough to say for sure yeah and last question for you just because uh this is something you talked about in one of your recent books uh the concept of the resident leader and i know that's a whole big topic but i thought we could just tease a tiny little bit of it so that people can learn more about what that means and who that kind of a leader is yeah the resident leader is one that people feel connected to who articulates as i said a shared mission that really moves people so that they resonate with

with what the leader says and does a leader who is influential in an easy way who gives feedback in an ongoing way that people can actually use it's like news to use not just an attack on a person people who manage themselves well and who empathize who tune in to other people who know how other people are are feeling and and can respond accordingly there's a set of primers by the way on all these competencies it's called building blocks of emotional intelligence if you want to learn more about empathy or about influence about inspiring or

emotional balance you might want to get some of these and i'm assuming that's just something somebody can google just building blocks emotional intelligence from keystep media okay all right i'll try to link to that too okay um well and then it sounds like to practice emotional intelligence we're not talking about crazy commitments here right small things that people can do on a regular basis to become more emotionally intelligent which it sounds like um that's what you're advocating for it's like life it's a work in progress yeah i love it uh well daniel where can people

go to learn more about you and your work i know you have a podcast with your son which is amazing uh so anything that you want to mention for people to check out sure uh the podcast is called first person singular and it's on all the podcast venues first person singular emotional intelligence and beyond is the full name i have a newsletter at linkedin which is free to subscribe to and one of the things i'm i'm talking about these days is misconceptions about emotional intelligence as well as latest kind of breaking news on emotional intelligence

so there's a linkedin newsletter we're going to be setting up goldman consulting group i don't think there's a website yet but there's about to be and i have my own website daniel goldman dot info wwe danielgome and oneword.info and you just google me i'm i'm on the web yeah you're pretty easy to find are you working on another book by any chance uh yes but i'm not exactly sure what i'm going to say yet so it will be related to this article i'm doing for harvard business review on building an emotional intelligent organization all right

very cool we will stay tuned to that daniel again thank you so much for taking time out of your day i love the tips and this is such an important topic so appreciate you sharing your insights with us jacob you're very easy to talk to i suspect you have more emotional intelligence than you allow or that you know i'm gonna cut that clip and i'm gonna i'm gonna play that to everybody so when somebody says anything yeah i'll say you know what daniel goldman actually said i have some well thank you again so much for

taking time out of your day and thanks everyone for tuning in my guest again daniel goldman all you gotta do is google his name you'll find out pretty much anything that you need to know about him check out his books and check out his podcast and i will see all of you next time thanks again for tuning in to the show and don't forget to go to sixleadershiptrends.com to grab a copy of my brand new pdf which is going to walk you through the six trends that are shaping leadership and what it means to be

a leader and it will also give you action items for what you should be doing for each one of these six trends to adapt and evolve so that you can be a better leader in the future of work again that is six leadershiptrends.com you can either spell out the number six in the url or just use the number six in the url they will both take you to the same place thanks again for tuning in