Short audio preview

If anyone ever asks you how high your EQ is then blame Daniel Goleman. He's the author of the 1995 book Emotional Intelligence, which sold five-million copies worldwide, and persuaded businesspeople everywhere that they could be more successful by learning to control their emotional states. His new book, Social Intelligence, focuses on an equally significant skill: the initiation and maintenance of healthy relationships.

"I can write about this now because only within the last few years has there been a field called 'social neuroscience'," he told around 400 members of the London Business Forum (LBF) audience at Waterloo's iMax theatre. This field "expands the unit of analysis from one brain in one body, in one person, to two or more brains in two or more bodies and two or more people... Social intelligence is the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence."

Goleman demonstrated his own social intelligence within moments of walking on stage. "This reminds me of a book... The Wizard of Oz," he said, looking at his own image as it was projected across the massive screen behind him. "Do you remember? At the end the little dog Toto pulls back a curtain to reveal a little man hunched over a machine in the corner." In between such moments of humility, he spoke warmly of many friends and acquaintances, while using them as case studies. Watching him, one got the impression that he really could strike up a rapport with anybody.

Indeed, rapport was the main focus of the early part of his speech. It can be explained in neurological terms much more precisely than you might think, he said, thanks to the discovery of new types of brain cell. The "mirror neuron," for example, fires empathetically in response to the physical actions of others - if you see someone raising an ice cream to their tongue then the mirror neurons associated with your equivalent body-parts may fire without you moving. Similarly, "oscillator cells" enable you to synchronise your movements with others, whether to pass them on the street or to lean in for a first kiss.

If you measure the physiological activity of two people in rapport, you'll find "they are perfectly co-ordinated with the state of the other person's body," Goleman said. If you wish to improve your chances of achieving rapport with someone then, in addition to synchrony, you also need to show full attention, "being absolutely attuned to the other person."

Unfortunately, such attunement is becoming harder, as we increasingly communicate digitally rather than physically. Goleman pointed out that e-mail, text messaging and instant messaging provide "no channel for social [and] emotional signals." Rather, he said, they quash "impulses to do things that would not work and encourage ones that will be effective in the moment." In other words, the absence of our interlocuter has a disinhibiting effect, stripping us of our usual tact.

Goleman suggested this was one of the major contributing factors behind the Internet phenomenon known as "flaming," posting messages on-line that are deliberately hostile or insulting. In business terms, he said, it "explains why it's so hard, so often, to make a decision on-line versus face-to face."

The flipside of this finding is that we can be "biological allies" to one another. Goleman cited a study in which a woman getting her brain imaged was told she was about to get an electric shock. "The part of her brain that pumps out stress hormones is really active. But when someone comes and holds her hand, it gets a little less active. And when her husband comes and holds her hand, she becomes completely calm." A corporate leader, Goleman suggested, is someone who recognises the importance of this kind of contact.

Of course, being a good corporate leader doesn't just mean holding the hands of your employees, whether physically or figuratively. Nor is it enough to be respected by your peers and staff for your core skills. The most vital quality of a leader, Goleman argued, is empathy, and to support this point he cited another study by a former tutor, Professor David McClellan of Harvard University.

McClellan's study was based on the hypothesis that hiring for a specific position should depend on the distinguishing characteristics of the top performers who had previously held that position. "Roughly speaking, the emotional intelligence abilities, in terms of distinguishing the stars from average, were twice as important as the cognitive ones," Goleman said, adding: "The higher you went in the organisation, the more they mattered."

Meanwhile, in the UK, a recent study at Birmingham University showed that health managers who had the most empathic accuracy were the most able to motivate people to work at their best. "They could help them figure out how to get over problems," Goleman said. "They could speak directly to the person in ways that really inspired them." By contrast, someone without "empathic accuracy" will not only be unsuited to leadership but also, potentially, a liability to the organisation. "At IBM it's known as the 'nerd problem'," he said, "where you have someone who is a technical wizard, whom you won't allow to speak to clients."

As the importance of corporate social responsibility grows, so empathy will become more important in parallel. This was perhaps the boldest message to emerge from Goleman's speech. "There's a saying in Silicon Valley, 'ultimately everybody will know everything'," he said. "For business, consider what that means. If consumers, at the point of purchase, had the knowledge that T-shirt A were raising rates of Leukemia, but that T-shirt B were virtuous, which way would they go?"

You may regard this as empathic concern for customers and suppliers or as purely capitalistic trend-spotting. Nevertheless, Goleman argued, the advance of information technology means consumer boycotting of perceived unethical products is poised to become hugely significant in many industries.

The absence of empathic concern gives rise to what psychologists call "the dark triad:" narcissists, Machiavellians and sociopaths, he continued. In the US, he added, these terms are synonymous with Bush, Rove and Cheney. "If you look at the current American administration, it's a classic example of the toxicity of a narcissistic leader... who has a grandiose sense of his mission in himself [and] doesn't want to hear any disconfirming information. Therefore, the people around him are 'yes men' who censor invalidating information, even though it's very important."

Goleman concluded on a more hopeful note by relating the story of an experiment carried out by Dr Paul Ekman, "the world's expert on the facial expression of emotions," at the University of California Medical School, San Francisco. It involved placing a Buddhist monk in a room with one of the university's most difficult and confrontational professors, and asking them to discuss a point of disagreement for 15 minutes.

"The monk had been a brilliant molecular biologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and, after doing his post-doctoral work, had decided to abandon that and go to the Himalayas and meditate for the rest of his life," Goleman explained. The proposition for the debate, he continued, was that "the professor should give up his tenured position and do the same."

As expected, the professor was "worked up" and "agitated" at the beginning of the encounter, while the monk was completely calm. "As they continue the discussion, the monk stays completely calm and the professor gets calmer and calmer and calmer," Goleman recalls. "At the end of the discussion, he doesn't want to stop because he's having such a good time. I think that's the model of how we all can be at our own relative level. No matter what else we do, how we are with the person we're with, is quite consequential."