Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership
Your behavior can energize—or deflate—your entire organization through mood contagion. For example, if you laugh often and set an easygoing tone, you’ll trigger similar behaviors among your team members. Shared behaviors unify a team, and bonded groups perform better than fragmented ones.
Mood contagion stems from neurobiology. Positive behaviors—such as exhibiting empathy—create a chemical connection between a leader’s and his or her followers’ brains. By managing those interconnections adroitly, leaders can deliver measurable business results. For example, after one executive at a Fortune 500 company worked with a coach and role model to improve her behavior, employee retention and emotional commitment in her unit soared. And the unit’s annual sales jumped 6%.
How to foster the neurobiological changes that create positive behaviors and emotions in your employees? Goleman and Boyatzis advise sharpening your social intelligence skills.
The Idea in Practice
Identify Social Strengths and Weaknesses
Social intelligence skills include the following. Identify which ones you’re good at—and which ones need improvement.
Craft a Plan for Change
Now determine how you’ll strengthen your social intelligence. Working with a coach—who can debrief you about what she observes—and learning directly from a role model are particularly powerful ways to make needed behavioral changes.
Example: Janice was hired as a marketing manager for her business expertise, strategic thinking powers, and ability to deal with obstacles to crucial goals. But within her first six months on the job, she was floundering. Other executives saw her as aggressive and opinionated—as well as careless about what she said and to whom.
Her boss called in a coach, who administered a 360-degree evaluation. Findings revealed that Janice didn’t know how to establish rapport with people, notice their reactions to her, read social norms, or recognize others’ emotional cues when she violated those norms. Through coaching, Janice learned to express her ideas with conviction (instead of with pit bull–like determination) and to disagree with others without damaging relationships.
By switching to a job where she reported to a socially intelligent mentor, Janice further strengthened her skills, including learning how to critique others’ performance in productive ways. She was promoted to a position two levels up where, with additional coaching, she mastered reading cues from direct reports who were still signaling frustration with her. Her company’s investment in her (along with her own commitment to change) paid big dividends—in the form of lower turnover and higher sales in Janice’s multibillion-dollar unit.
This HBR In Brief presents key ideas from a full-length Harvard Business Review article.
