Stein - The EQ leader: instilling passion, creating shared goals, and building meaningful organizations through emotional intelligence

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Copyright 2017 by Multi-Health Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Stein, Steven (Steven J.), author.

Title: The EQ leader : instilling passion, creating shared goals, and building meaningful organizations through emotional intelligence / Steven J. Stein.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017007229 (print) | LCCN 2017016246 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119349006 (cloth) | ISBN 9781119349013 (epdf) | ISBN 9781119349037 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Emotional intelligence.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | LCC HD57.7 .S7268 2017 (print) | DDC 658.4/092dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017007229

To Micah and Gemma, my grandchildren.

I hope we can advance the state of the art of leadership to the benefit of your world.

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

THOMAS AQUINAS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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 estimates85 percent or soof 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.