Daniel Goleman

Do people laugh at you? At work, I mean, rather than point and titter as you walk past in the street.

You don't have to follow cricket to appreciate this story: The new captain of the England cricket team was giving a press conference this morning and kept stumbling over the word 'shipshape'. There were gales of laughter from three people at the back of the room.

In their recent book, Transparency, this trio of authors - each famous in leadership circles in their own right - point out that the higher up the organizational ladder you get, the less likely people are to speak the truth to you. It's not that they lie. They just tell you what they think you want to hear. Speaking truth to power is one of the most difficult things in a hierarchy for large numbers of people.

“When Claudio Fernando-Araoz, head of research for the executive recruitment firm Egon Zehnder International, looked at CEOs who had succeeded and those who had failed, he found the same pattern in America, Germany and Japan: those who failed were hired on the basis of their drive, IQ, and business expertise – but fired for lack of emotional intelligence. They simply could not win over, or sometimes even just get along with, their board of directors, or their direct reports, or others on whom their own success depended.”

There's a video from TED of Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence making this talk on 'self' and 'other'. It's over in the Hub TV area if you want to watch it. Too much leadership and leadership development focusses on 'self', in my view. Whereas the key to effectively developing yourself, paradoxically, is to focus on others. The inner landscape develops as we focus on others. Here's a link to the audio version: