Big trend towards authenticity, coaching others for leaders: Steven J Stein

Steven J Stein, Author of The EQ Leader: Instilling Passion, Creating Shared Goals, and Building Meaningful Organizations through Emotional Intelligence

Leadership can definitely be taught. Numerous studies show that it can be learnt especially in relation to emotional and social skills, STEVEN J STEIN tells Sangeeta Tanwar

What are the global leadership trends and does the leadership landscape in India mirror them?

We find that there is a big trend towards authenticity and coaching others for leaders. There is little tolerance today for leaders who are seen as self-serving or corrupt. We’ve seen what happens to leaders at Uber, American Apparel, and most recently with Harvey Weinstein. They can fall from grace in a nanosecond with today’s social media.

Future leaders value social responsibility and I see a lot of this in the high-performing young leaders coming up the ranks. These trends are universal as far as our data shows. India seems to be moving in the same direction as leaders adapt to organisations that are more and more multinational.

Give us one example each of a successful and failed leadership in the corporate world contrasting two leadership styles?

We’ve seen many successful leaders over the past number of years. Someone interesting today is Satya Nadella, who happens to be from India. He is transforming Microsoft into a whole new culture. It’s a big change from the loud and brassy Steve Balmer. Nadella stresses the importance of empathy in the workplace. We are working with Microsoft with the EQ-i 2.0 in helping to develop empathy as well as the other emotional intelligence skills in the workplace.

There seem to be, unfortunately, also many examples of poor leadership. One such example has been Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber. His reign was marked by a sexist corporate culture and a failure to effectively deal with allegations of sexual harassment, discrimination and bullying. These all involve deficits in emotional self-control and a number of emotional skills.

Can leadership be taught? What’s the scope and contribution of coaching and mentoring in creating a leader?

Leadership can definitely be taught. There are numerous studies showing leadership — especially in relation to emotional and social skills — can be learned. This is not the kind of skill building that one gets in a classroom environment. We learn these skills through doing — it requires practice.

Coaching is one of the best ways to develop these skills. Good coaches get you to go out and try specific skills, report on your effectiveness, and modify as necessary. We’ve also developed a number of business simulations that give employees the experience of using and developing these skills in the context of a simulated business environment. Interpersonal skills, such as influencing others, making decisions, and adapting to change can be played out in a safe environment where doing poorly has no real world consequences.

What are the neurological aspects of leadership?

There are actually several ways of approaching leadership from a neurological/neuroscience or neuropsychological perspective. The most frequent is the lens of executive functioning. This involves both the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Executive functioning has become an overall term for cognitive processes such as planning, working memory, attention, problem solving, reasoning, inhibition, mental flexibility, multitasking, initiation and monitoring of actions. Most of these functions are carried out by the prefrontal lobe of the brain. It’s easy to see that to be an effective leader you need to excel at all of these functions.

Great leaders plan well — they envision the future and where they want to go. They remember events and people that are important. They focus — pay attention to what is important. They solve problems well and know to reason. They manage impulses and don’t get distracted. They are adaptable as things change around them and can deal with more than one issue at a time. They can initiate and monitor tasks and behaviours as needed.

How and in what ways emotional intelligence impacts performance?

There have been many studies looking at the relationship between emotional intelligence and performance and a great deal of data that has accumulated over the past 25 years. Our team has been very involved in this research through our publishing of the world’s first measure of emotional intelligence, the EQ-i 2.0 over 20 years ago. It has been used in many of these studies evaluating the relationship between emotional intelligence and performance.

Emotional intelligence has been related to performance in a variety of different jobs — from front line, client facing, to the top leadership. People who excel in the areas of emotional intelligence that include self-awareness, emotional expression, interpersonal relationships, decision making, and stress management have been found to be better performers at work as well as happier in their personal lives.

There are published studies looking at high performers that include organisational leaders, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, collection agents, salespeople, customer service and many other groups. These studies identify specific patterns of emotional skills that differentiate the high performers.