Daniel Goleman: 'Leaders Must Position Their Employees Somewhere between Boredom and Stress'

With his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, author, psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman sparked widespread interest in the role that our emotions play in thought, decision making and individual success. The book became an international bestseller and Goleman has subsequently earned two Pulitzer Prize nominations and landed on the Accenture Institute for Strategic Change's list of the ten most outstanding intellectuals in the world. Following his recent visit to Spain to participate in the annual ExpoManagement conference, Goleman discussed the implications of emotional intelligence in the corporate world and its direct relationship with corporate productivity today.
Although Goleman says emotional intelligence is gaining importance in business institutions, he recognizes that this is happening at a different pace in different countries. “Using the framework of emotional intelligence, companies can calculate with greater precision the chances that any individual will succeed than if they only evaluated his or her intellectual coefficient," Goleman noted, adding that the most academically successful student in a high school or college graduating class may have “wound up having inferior success at work compared with [someone] who was just an average student. The difference between the two is that the average student has been able not only to control his own emotions, but also positively influence groups of other workers. Everyone wants to work with him.”
This capacity to mediate the mood of a group is considered one of the key virtues of emotional intelligence as defined by Goleman. “When you’re the leader of a working group, the impact that you have on the emotional mood of the group is greater. Everyone pays attention to the mood of the boss and they adapt to him,” he said. “These mood swings are reflected in the levels of production. They tend to decline when the group is depressed and to rise in the opposite case.”
Just as the mood of the leader is evaluated by the employees, so are his actions. Thus, Goleman suggested that many companies in Spain, for example, are making a big mistake when they announce large-scale layoffs via the mass media without adequately informing their own staff members about those moves beforehand. “When an organization feels obliged to take these drastic measures, it needs to stop and think about how to carry them out, and consider the impact that the actions will have on the mood of those who remain in the company."

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