Emotional intelligence: implications for all United States Air Force leaders - Features

Air & Space Power Journal,  Winter, 2002  by Sharon M. Latour,  Bradley C. Hosmer

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Editorial Abstract: Emotional intelligence and its five domains of empathy, handling relationships, self-awareness, managing emotions, and motivating oneself constitute a set of learned, interpersonal abilities that allow leaders to become highly effective. The authors outline the characteristics of emotional intelligence and offer practical ways for readers to integrate its techniques into their leadership style.

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THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES the emerging field of emotional intelligence (EI). It discusses what it is, why it matters in general terms, how individuals can improve their EI, and what impact it has on the effectiveness of US Air Force leaders. Specifically, EI is powerful because it overrides logic in the brain due to the way people are wired. Unlike natural intelligence, usually labeled IQ EI can be developed. Studies have shown that highly productive team leaders have high EI. That is why Air Force leaders at all levels should know about this emerging field. As will become apparent, Sun Tzu's concise observations about the awareness of both self and others anticipated the results that emerged from twentieth-century EI studies. He asserted that a person with self-knowledge as well as knowledge of the opponent will win. EI studies offer a more sophisticated, more practical approach to developing this essential awareness of self and others. More specifically, almost all highly effective leaders have EI--lesser leade rs do not.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Scientists began tracing the outlines of EI in the 1920s. By 1990 J. D. Mayer and P. Salovey had identified five EI domains under two overarching relational areas:

Interpersonal

* Empathy involves the degree that individuals are sensitive to others' feelings and concerns. Empathetic leaders are sensitive to the differences in how people feel about things. Such leaders are able to step outside themselves to evaluate situations from another perspective.

* Handling Relationships describes how effectively leaders detect and manage the organization's emotional environment. This requires developing a wide-ranging competence for sensing subtle shifts in the social atmosphere.

Intrapersonal

* Self-Awareness involves purposeful monitoring of one's emotional reactions to identify feelings as they emerge.

* Managing Emotions builds on the understanding of emotional origins derived from self-awareness to manage feelings appropriately as they arise.

* Motivating Oneself requires individuals to channel emotions effectively. Examples could include stifling impulses and delaying gratifications. (1)

When one considers EI in light of these domains, it becomes obvious that the field represents a set of comprehensive, interpersonal abilities rather than hardwired native skills; as such, it can be learned. EI could well be called "affective effectiveness." The affective domain consists of mind, will, and emotions ("heart knowledge"); it contrasts with linguistic, logical, mathematical, and spatial intelligences--the cognitive domain of "head" knowledge. When military leaders unfamiliar with EI first hear about it, they are generally unreceptive. But there is more to judging this "book" than its "touchy-feely-sounding" cover.

Currently, Dr. Daniel Goleman is the leading author and researcher in EI studies. He begins his first book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than I.Q., with a discussion of the brain-mapping work of neuro-scientist Joseph LeDoux of the New York University Center for Neural Sciences:

His findings on the circuitry of the emotional brain overthrow a long-standing notion about the limbic system, putting the amygdala at the center of the action. ... Sensory signals from the eye or ear travel first to the thalamus, and then across a single synapse--to the amygdala; a second signal from the thalamus is routed to the neocortex--the thinking brain. This branching allows the amygdala to begin to respond before the neocortex, which mulls information through several levels of brain circuits before it fully perceives and finally initiates its more finely tailored response. ... This circuit does much to explain the power of emotion to overwhelm rationality (emphasis in original). (2)

This mapping discovery carries powerful implications. According to Goleman and others, the human reactions stored in the amygdala can be altered. With repeated practice, a normally "short tempered" individual can learn to manage and even relearn those initial reactions to frustration or discomfort. More importantly, over time, the stored information for individuals engaged in antisocial, self-defeating behavior can be changed. Until now, our cultural bias has called for focusing training and measurement efforts only on cognitive abilities, but interesting new data demonstrate that EI can be developed.

Implications for Leader Development

As leaders intuitively appreciate, the better they know/understand and manage themselves and the better they know/understand and manage others, the more likely they are to get the results they want. And that is EI's value to military leaders. In an interview conducted in 1996, Dr. Howard Gardner cited linguistic and personal intelligence as the sine qua non of leadership: "It doesn't mean that all leaders have to start with having well developed variants of both of them, but if they're not a particularly good speaker [sic] or they don't have a particularly good understanding of other people, that's got to be a top priority for them." (3)