The Key to Good Leadership

At a time when inspiring leadership is mostly absent in national politics, it's paradoxically never been more central to the cultural discussion just about everywhere else – in business, the military, state and local government and even within families.

At least since the dawn of celebrity CEOs – Chrysler's Lee Iacocca and GE's Jack Welch prominent among them – kicked off the conversation a generation ago, the culture has been engrossed in divining clues about what makes effective leaders. About the same time, the movie Patton glamorized the World War II general's gruff, disruptive leadership style.

In a famous essay about presidential candidate John McCain, the late author David Foster Wallace memorably riffed about authentic leadership qualities. "A leader's real 'authority' is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn't ever get to on your own."

Now, even after a raft of formerly admired tech entrepreneurs – think Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla's Elon Musk – have returned to earth, if not entirely fallen from grace, the hunger to understand and reverse-engineer great leadership remains as strong as ever. If you doubt that, just consult the groaning shelves of your local bookstore or library, and you'll notice a seemingly endless raft of volumes on the topic.

Even former FBI director James Comey, famous for other reasons, wrote a book on the subject of leadership last year. Yes, he used it to settle some scores with his presidential antagonist, but Comey also surprisingly notes in "A Higher Loyalty—Truth, Lies and Leadership" that his overarching goal as head of the nation's top law enforcement agency was to transform the bureau into the "government's premier leadership factory."

Comey writes that he envisioned a scenario in which "there was no reason why the FBI shouldn't be the dominant government supplier of America's corporate leaders" as agents' second acts. "I said we were going to paint a picture of what great leadership looks like, find and grow those who could be great, and teach or remove those already in leadership jobs who weren't getting it done."

When it comes to understanding the essential traits of successful leaders, there's an emerging consensus that emotional intelligence, the ability to control one's emotions and handle relationships with empathy, is at the core.

Recent advances in the behavioral sciences – including the development of a new generation of functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRIs – have added an important layer of scientific rigor to what had been a traditionally anecdotal field of study. These new tools measure brain activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow, allowing specialists to actually begin proving that carrots are more effective management tools than sticks.

In his landmark 1995 book, "Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ," former New York Times science reporter Daniel Goleman first staked out the territory, popularizing an idea – that emotional intelligence, or EQ, was a better predictor of life success than IQ – first formulated by two academics in a science journal.

Six years ago, with co-authors Richard Boyatzis (a Harvard classmate and longtime collaborator of Goleman's) and Annie McKee, the trio turned their attention to how emotions are at the heart of effective leadership, with the publication of the well-received "Primal Leadership—Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence."

The book begins with an elegantly simple summation of its argument.

"Great leaders move us. They ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. When we try to explain why they are so effective, we speak of strategy, vision, or powerful ideas. But the reality is much more primal: Great leadership works through the emotions."

Still, acceptance of EQ among professionals was a long time coming, Boyatzis recalls in an interview. For years, his colleagues fiercely resisted the popularization of theories on emotional intelligence as professional malpractice.

"I remember being at a conference of organizational psychologists in 2000 or 2001, and being on a panel with several other purveyors of emotional intelligence, and we were just ripped to shreds by 600 people in the audience. These were all Ph.D psychologists, some in academia and some in industry. They were unbelievably angry." One prominent expert even held up a copy of "Primal Leadership" and complained that it degraded the entire profession. "Obviously, this person was having an amygdala hijacking," Boyatzis says, referring to the part of the brain that controls emotions.

But Boyatzis, whose online course, Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence, has drawn about 750,000 students from more than 200 countries, had been through this cycle of rejection and eventual acceptance before.

In the 1970s and '80s, he was part of a small cohort of organizational behaviorists who argued that just focusing on skills in the workplace wasn't enough. Instead, they insisted that an individual's competencies must be assessed and reinforced. "We were vilified. People [in the field] said it's all knowledge, skills and abilities. But a few of us kept arguing that there was a behavioral level they weren't tapping with skills, that skills were too micro." Today, he proudly notes, "there's hardly a human resources organization serving 100 or more people that doesn't use competency language." This work on competencies became a key foundation for the emotional intelligence movement.

In the "Meaning Revolution –The Power of Transcendent Leadership," Fred Kofman, an Argentinian economist who serves as career platform Linkedin's vice president of executive development, argues that great leadership is harder than it looks. "The kind of leadership that can engage people in meaningful work is much, much harder than you think."

He contrasts traditional "command and control" leadership with the kind of leaders who engage everyone in an organization with a vision of something important and inspiring. It has little to do with formal authority and everything to do with moral authority. "Hearts and minds cannot be bought or forced; they can only be deserved and earned," he writes. "They are given only to worthy missions and trustworthy leaders. This applies not only to organizations but also to many other domains of human activity."

To illustrate, Kofman recalls a presidential visit John F. Kennedy once made to NASA headquarters. On a tour of the facility, JFK introduced himself to a fellow mopping the floor, asking him what his role was. "I'm helping put a man on the moon," the janitor proudly replied.

In a recently published book that was nearly 15 years in the making, Harvard Business School historian Nancy Koehn uses the lives of five prominent people – Abraham Lincoln, environmental pioneer Rachel Carson, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and clergyman/philosopher Dietrich Bonhoeffer – to search for the connective tissues of leadership.

Among her findings in "Forged in Crisis—The Power of Courageous Leadership in Turbulent Times": that leaders are made, not born. Perhaps the dominant impression she comes away with after years of reflection on these five extraordinary lives was the role mastery of their own emotions played in their success. They became effective leaders because they first worked on themselves, she argues.

These five people "harnessed emotional awareness to navigate the turbulence around them…They committed to cultivating their emotional awareness and using this to access their stronger selves," she writes. "Long before the term emotional intelligence was coined, these five people realized that their greatest source of power came from within—from the insights they gleaned about their feelings and how they could use these insights to make something happen in the larger world."

She found they all "cultivated ideas big enough to be afraid of" and took them on as lifelong endeavors, after first immersing themselves in study and reflection during what she calls the "gathering years." They all appreciated the crucial importance of solitude, and used writing to formulate and propagate their ideas. They all exercised great suppleness in how they pursued these missions and showed resilience in overcoming obstacles.

Perhaps most importantly of all, they were all noticeably humble, compassionate and empathetic. "Part of the reason that these five ordinary people could do extraordinary things was that they led from their humanity. They used their personal experience, particularly their empathy, to help motivate and sustain others."

In an interview, Dr. Koehn says while the notion of the modern CEO (which begins with GM's Alfred Sloan) as a central figure in a company's success has been around for at least a century, "the CEO as hero is a relatively recent phenomenon. The thing about Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca is that they wanted to be celebrities."

She notes that leaders of all sorts have long been aware of the importance of emotional awareness. "If you read Washington's farewell address or dig into Churchill's letters, or you think about the strategic advice in Machiavelli, lots of leaders throughout history have considered one's mastery of one's emotions as a critical component of their success." What's different now, she adds, is how interested the broader public is in leadership.

"I think a lot of what's driving that interest is the increasing turbulence of the moment…As things get more volatile and uncertain, we are more and more looking for people in lots of positions of authority to have the ability to monitor themselves…and help us deal with it."