People operate in three neurological states, says Goleman. The first, disengagement, occurs when employees are in a low-motivation state where they are distracted and inattentive to the task at hand. “Disengagement is rife in the manufacturing sector because so many people are not inspired, motivated or engaged in the work they do. They just do good enough to keep the job,” he says.

Frazzle, the second state, prevents people from being productive because they are upset with something. It may be a problem with their boss, a coworker or they just have too much to do and too little time. As a result, the body unleashes a cascade of stress hormones, and the person focuses on the problem bothering them rather than their job.

Flow represents, in Goleman’s words, a “state of neural harmony, where only what is relevant to the task at hand is what is activated.” It maximizes cognitive abilities and is where people are at their best and most productive, Goleman says.

How do you help keep employees in the flow? Managers should strive not to overwhelm employees but to challenge them by understanding what they are good at and what they want to get better at. Goleman recommends they conduct a “coaching conversation,” a one-on-one talk where the focus is on what the employee wants from life, their career and their job. That enables the manager to determine what stretch assignments to give the employee. Goleman says that is a “fantastic way” to motivate people and help them improve.

Goleman says managers can also improve employee performance by making work meaningful to them. He notes that in a crisis or when facing a big deadline, employees will rise to the occasion if it matters to them. Mission statements try to establish this shared purpose, but Goleman says they often fail because they are too abstract and distant. “It is better and more powerful if this comes up in a natural conversation with people,” he recommends.

“That is a smart mission for any company,” Goleman says, “to get as many people as possible in that state where they love what they are doing, it is meaningful, it is serving a larger objective and is engaging.”

By Steve Minter for IndustryWeek, June 22, 2011.  Read the full article »

A lesson in managing creativity can be found in the work discipline of such inventive geniuses: A protected bubble in time and space fosters the imaginative spirit.

That notion challenges some prevailing wisdom–particularly the assumption that upping the pressure on workers will squeeze more innovative thinking out of them. Many managers assume that just calling people into a high-demand brainstorming session will get everyone’s best ideas out on the table.

That is dead wrong, according to new research on the creative process. In a knowledge economy, where competitive advantage comes from leveraging the most innovative ideas and executing them well, leaders at every level would do well to reflect on these findings.

In a study led by Teresa Amabile, a director of research at the Harvard Business School, researchers asked more than 1,000 knowledge workers–members of research-and-development, marketing and information-technology teams–to keep daily diaries. This data trove revealed a disconnect between how managers think they can best support creative efforts, and how those who are actually making the efforts assess what helps them most.

Small Wins Count

When the researchers asked managers to name the most effective ways they could encourage creativity, the most frequent response was praising people for good work. When they asked the workers themselves, the No. 1 carrot turned out to be providing ongoing managerial support of their daily progress. Only 5 percent of managers got this right. Daily progress toward a large goal, even small wins, primes positive moods and catalyzes creativity, the Harvard study found.

Members of creative project teams also described the most common ways managers unwittingly undermine creative work. These ranged from dismissing an idea out of hand to ignoring suggestions to torpedoing an employee’s creative project, for instance through an abrupt reassignment or a cavalier change of mind. The researchers advised managers to set clear goals and then let people accomplish them in their own ways.

Aha Moment

The Harvard researchers also recommended that supervisors protect workers’ time and resources so they can have periods of sustained focus on their projects. This advice–to manage staff time well–is supported by new brain research that reveals what happens at the moment of Aha! Joy Bhattacharya at the University of London has found that in the moments just before a creative insight, the mind is typically relaxed and open to new ideas, as indicated by an alpha brain wave.

As the Aha! approaches, there’s an abrupt shift marked by high gamma-wave activity. This indicates that far-flung neural circuits are connecting in a new network. A third of a second after the peak of this activity, a novel idea floats into the mind.

This finding indicates that creative insights can’t be concocted on demand; they need to ripen. The first step in the creative process typically involves immersion in the problem and current thinking, and then gathering any information that might be relevant. But in the next stage, intense effort should give way to letting what is known as the “cognitive unconscious” work on the problem by making novel connections.

Constant distractions interrupt the mental space where creative insights simmer. That’s why so many Aha! moments come in the relaxed space of downtime — when we’re doing something other than tensing to be creative.

Lessons From Google

Anyone whose work involves strategic thinking can learn something from the findings. The usual method for devising a competitive strategy is to come up with an idea and then analyze its value. The trouble is, no one tells you how to come up with that idea in the first place.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who created the innovative search formula that became the basis of Google Inc. (GOOG), know something about that process. They have instituted Google’s famous once-a-week day for employees to work exclusively on their pet creative projects. Long before Google existed, 3M set aside 15 percent of employee time for the same thing.

Another trendsetter was Xerox PARC, the legendary Silicon Valley research center known for insulating its creative staff from competitive pressures and giving them time to reflect, explore and collaborate. Xerox PARC is the birthplace of a plethora of computer-age basics including laser printing and the graphical user interface that gave us windows and icons.

In a day when the use of innovative ideas provides a competitive edge, it’s good to understand how squeezing time and people can unwittingly squelch creativity, hurting an organization’s future. The best advice for someone who manages innovative thinkers is to nurture the conditions where creative ideas can flow most freely.

Emotional intelligence has four parts: self-awareness, managing our emotions, empathy, and social skill. There are many tests of emotional intelligence, and most seem to show that women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to these basic skills for a happy and successful life. That edge may matter more than ever in the workplace, as more companies are starting to recognize the advantages of high EI when it comes to positions like sales, teams, and leadership.

On the other hand, it’s not that simple. For instance, some measures suggest women are on average better than men at some forms of empathy, and men do better than women when it comes to managing distressing emotions. Whenever you talk about such gender differences in behavior, your are referring to two different Bell Curves, one for men and one for women, that largely overlap. What this means is that any given man might be as good or better as any woman at empathy, and a woman as good as or better than a specific man at handling upsets.

Let’s look at empathy. There are three kinds: cognitive empathy, being able to know how the other person sees things; emotional empathy, feeling what the other person feels; and empathic concern, or sympathy—being ready to help someone in need.

Women tend to be better at emotional empathy than men, in general. This kind of empathy fosters rapport and chemistry. People who excel in emotional empathy make good counselors, teachers, and group leaders because of this ability to sense in the moment how others are reacting.

Neuroscientists tell us one key to empathy is a brain region called the insula, which senses signals from our whole body. When we’re empathizing with someone, our brain mimics what that person feels, and the insula reads that pattern and tells us what that feeling is.

Here’s where women differ from men. If the other person is upset, or the emotions are disturbing, women’s brains tend to stay with those feelings. But men’s brains do something else: they sense the feelings for a moment, then tune out of the emotions and switch to other brain areas that try to solve the problem that’s creating the disturbance.

Thus women’s complaint that men are tuned out emotionally, and men’s that women are too emotional—it’s a brain difference.

Neither is better—both have advantages. The male tune-out works well when there’s a need to insulate yourself against distress so you can stay calm while others around you are falling apart—and focus on finding a solution to an urgent problem. And the female tendency to stay tuned in helps enormously to nurture and support others in emotionally trying circumstances. It’s part of the “tend-and-befriend” response to stress.

There’s another way of looking at male-female differences in EI: Simon Bar-On Cohen at Cambridge University says that there’s an extreme “female brain” which is high in emotional empathy—but not so good at systems analysis. By contrast, the extreme “male brain” excels in systems thinking and is poor at emotional empathy (he does not mean that all men have the “male brain,” nor all women the “female brain” of course; many women are skilled at systems thinking, and many men at emotional empathy).

Psychologist Ruth Malloy at the HayGroup Boston studies excellence in leaders. She finds when you only look at the stars—leaders in the top ten percent of business performance—gender differences in emotional intelligence abilities wash out: the men are as good as the women, the women as good as the men, across the board.

That echoes a discovery by scientists who study primates. When a chimp sees another chimp who is upset, say from an injury, she mimics the distress, a way of showing empathy. Some chimps will then go over and give some solace to the upset chimp, for example, stroking the other to help it calm down. Female chimps do this more often than male chimps do—with one intriguing exception: the alpha males, the troupe leaders, give solace even more often than do female chimps. In nature’s design, leaders, it seems, need a large dose of empathic concern.

And now brain science shows that positive or negative, the way in which that review gets delivered can be a boon or a curse.

If a boss gives even a good review in the wrong way, that message can be a low-grade curse, creating a neural downer.

So I learned while reviewing recent scientific findings for an upcoming webinar that has got me rethinking the concept of emotional intelligence.

The neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has found that when we’re in an upbeat, optimistic, I-can-handle-anything frame of mind, energized and enthusiastic about our goals, our brains turn up the activity in an area on the left side, just behind the forehead. That’s the brain state where we are at our best.

But when we’re feeling down, with low energy and zero motivation, even anxious, our brain has turned up the volume on the right side. That’s the zone where we punt.

And performance feedback that focuses on what’s wrong with us also puts this downer brain area on overdrive. We’re so preoccupied with the bad news (and our fantasies of this meaning we’ll lose our job) that we just don’t have the energy or can’t focus on working at our best.

Even the boss’s tone of voice can trigger one or another brain area. In one study, when people got positive performance feedback that was delivered in a negative, cold tone of voice, they came out of the session feeling down–despite the good news.

Amazingly, when negative feedback came in a warm, positive tone of voice, they felt upbeat and energized.

Of course a boss needs to give employees performance feedback. But too many are poor at giving feedback. The problem here takes two forms: being hyper-critical and focusing only on what’s wrong without balancing it with what’s right, or undermining even positive feedback with a negative tone.

Either way, the messages the boss sends activate the wrong brain zone. Inept manager feedback makes us inept.

The bad news: this is rampant. The really bad news: it hurts business. That’s the verdict of Samuel A. Culbert, a psychologist at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. He says annual reviews do more than create more stress for workers. They end up making everybody–those who get them and those who give them–less productive.

In theory, artful performance feedback improves our performance, setting us on the right track. Such feedback is best given on the spot (not months later in a formal review), and with a sense of trust and openness between the giver and receiver. It might take the general form of “When you do X, it does not help get to Y, because of Z.” The X and Z here should be a clear and specific–that is, actionable information.

But what happens when such on-the-spot feedback comes in the heat of the moment, when the manager is steamed and not caring the least about imparting X, Y, or Z? Managers have their emotional hijacks, too.

Then there’s the nightmare of the formal performance review. UCLA’s Culbert argues they are largely a sham–a charade carried out to justify decisions on promotion or pay. And even when they do reflect actual performance, the feedback tends to be hollow rather than giving you a healthy balance of what you do well with what need to improve on–and how. So Culbert suggests instead a performance preview, where a boss outlines how an employee can do even better.

But the neuroscience adds a crucial nuance: even positive news should come with a positive tone. So add to that feedback a dollop of emotional intelligence.

The leadership competencies that build on self-mastery include self-confidence, the drive to improve performance, staying calm under pressure, and a positive outlook. All these abilities can be seen at full force, for instance, in workers who are outstanding individual performers. The operative word here is “individual” – and that’s the rub. When it comes to leaders, effectiveness in relationships makes or breaks. Solo stars are often promoted to leadership positions and then flounder for lack of people skills.

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.

All this has made intuitive and theoretical sense to me. But I like data. So I’m pleased to see several new studies that confirm how essential social intelligence – as opposed to simple self-mastery – can be for leadership effectiveness. The findings:

• At a transportation company, those leaders strongest in the social intelligence competencies led greater revenue growth, compared to executives with strengths only in the self-mastery competencies.
• The same goes for banking: at a major nationwide bank, high social intelligence (but not self-mastery alone) predicted executive’s yearly performance appraisal, which in turn reflects business success.
• The value of social intelligence even applies to clergy: among Catholic priests,, greater social intelligence predicted more satisfied parishioners.

All these studies were based on the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI), which I helped my colleague Richard Boyatzis design. I’d like to see if other researchers verify this effect using other measures to replicate these findings. Any graduate students out there

One new study found that nurses going through the intense stress of layoffs and reorganization in a budget-cutting health system were buffered when their leaders were resonant – and intensified when leaders were not. Resonant leaders can, for example, listen to workers’ negative feelings, and respond empathically and supportively, a crucial skill during chaotic times. In general, resonant leaders build positive work climates, while dissonant leaders are out of synch and out of touch, creating disharmony.

The study assessed the impact on nurses of the four resonant styles we describe in Primal Leadership – visionary, coaching, affiliative, and democratic – and the two dissonant ones, pace-setting and commanding. All the nurses felt pressured by the cutbacks, and that they were less able to give their patients the care they felt they should. But the nurses who had dissonant leaders reported three times the unmet patient care needs compared to those who had supportive leaders. And when leaders were dissonant, nurses reported feeling emotionally exhausted four times more frequently.

Nurses with resonant leaders reported improved emotional health, while those with dissonant leaders said their emotional health was declining. Of course resonant leaders are no substitute for adequate staffing and fair salaries – the overall negative impact of cutbacks on nurses’ morale and patient care was a given in the study. But it highlights the crucial difference social and emotional intelligence in leaders can make, particularly during a crisis and in high stress workplaces.

In Chapter 18 of Social Intelligence I elaborate on just why supportive leadership is particularly essential to prevent burnout in jobs like nursing, where people are asked to empathize with and respond to clients or patients in distress. This study found that nurses who experienced emotional exhaustion (a sure sign of incipient burnout) had more stress-triggered physical complaints themselves, and more unmet patient care needs; their emotional health and satisfaction with their jobs plummeted. Had I seen this study while writing the book, I would have cited it as helping make this case.

The study, done by a research group at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was published in the journal Nursing Research [January/February 2005].

That was the question asked of me recently by a managing director of a large European bank who had asked me to speak to about 200 top executives. Let’s take them one by one.

I remember David McClelland, my mentor years ago in grad school, making a crucial distinction among people who are motivated by power: whether they seek power simply to aggrandize themselves, or for something beyond themselves. The first group, the genuinely power-hungry, include “unhealthy” narcissists and Machiavellians – people who care only about their own goals, without caring about the consequences for other people of what they do (as I detail in the chapter on the “dark triad” in my book Social Intelligence).

In contrast, those with what McClelland called “socialized” power seek to influence others not just for their own goals, but for greater concerns – whether for their team, family, organization, or a cause. From an organizational point of view, people driven by personal power present a danger – they don’t care whether what they do furthers the common good. Those who wield socialized power, however, can be good or even great leaders.

As for prestige, there’s another distinction: between those who seek glory through over-selling their merits, and those who get prestige through a well-earned reputation. The first motive leads people to hype themselves, fabricate, exaggerate. The second kind of reputation is more robust, since it comes as a natural byproduct of other people recognizing sound effort or good work.

Finally, money. Here McClelland had an intriguing insight. In his studies of the achievement motive – the drive to continually improve one’s own performance, he showed that this was the main driver in highly successful entrepreneurs. And the most successful among them regarded the money they made as a way of keeping score on how well they were doing, not as the end in itself. Their real driver was a very high internal standard of performance and the continual push to find ways to do even better.

However, I didn’t mention any of that in giving my answer to that director at the Spanish bank. Instead I told him that what I felt was most important as a motivator was a sense of meaning and purpose in what we do. If our efforts fit with our driving sense of values and life mission, then we will be energized. I’ve known many people who were caught up in the pursuit of money, power or prestige as ends in themselves, who only found that getting those things left them feeling empty – it was meaningless, a rat race. Of course Abraham Maslow pointed out that there is a hierarchy of human need – if you are poor, powerless, and suffering, then money and power make sense as goals. But once those are satisfied, other goals become more important – and a meaningful purpose or life mission trumps them all.