LET’S RETURN to our example of the BBC division that was being shut down. The first executive who was sent to deliver the bad news—and who made people so angry that he almost needed to call security for an escort out—exemplifies what we call dissonant leadership: Out of touch with the feelings of the people in the room, he drove the group into a downward spiral from frustration to resentment, rancor to rage.
When such leaders fail to empathize with, or to read the emotions of, a group accurately, they create dissonance, sending needlessly upsetting messages. The resulting collective distress then becomes the group’s preoccupation, displacing the attention they need to give to the leader’s message—or to their mission. In any work setting, the emotional and the business impact of a dissonant leader can be gauged easily: People feel off-balance, and thus perform poorly.
The second executive, who got a round of applause from the laid-off employees, exemplifies resonant leadership: He was attuned to people’s feelings and moved them in a positive emotional direction. Speaking authentically from his own values and resonating with the emotions of those around him, he hit just the right chords with his message, leaving people feeling uplifted and inspired even in a difficult moment. When a leader triggers resonance, you can read it in people’s eyes: They’re engaged and they light up.
The root of the word resonance is revealing: the Latin word resonare, to resound. Resonance, the Oxford English Dictionary states, refers to “the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection,” or, more specifically, “by synchronous vibration.” The human analog of synchronous vibration occurs when two people are on the same wavelength emotionally—when they feel “in synch.” And true to the original meaning of resonance, that synchrony “resounds,” prolonging the positive emotional pitch.
One sign of resonant leadership is a group of followers who vibrate with the leader’s upbeat and enthusiastic energy. A primal leadership dictum is that resonance amplifies and prolongs the emotional impact of leadership. The more resonant people are with each other, the less static are their interactions; resonance minimizes the noise in the system. “One team,” as a business mantra proclaims, means “more signal, less noise.” The glue that holds people together in a team, and that commits people to an organization, is the emotions they feel. 1
How well leaders manage and direct those feelings to help a group meet its goals depends on their level of emotional intelligence. Resonance comes naturally to emotionally intelligent (EI) leaders. Their passion and enthusiastic energy resounds throughout the group. Even so, such leaders might sometimes project a more serious mood, when appropriate, using empathy to attune to the emotional register of the people they lead. For example, if something has happened that everyone feels angry about (such as the closing of a division) or sad about (such as a serious illness in a much-loved co-worker), the EI leader not only empathizes with those emotions, but also expresses them for the group. That kind of resonance reinforces synchrony just as much as enthusiasm does, because it leaves people feeling understood and cared for.
Under the guidance of an EI leader, people feel a mutual comfort level. They share ideas, learn from one another, make decisions collaboratively, and get things done. They form an emotional bond that helps them stay focused even amid profound change and uncertainty. Perhaps most important, connecting with others at an emotional level makes work more meaningful. We all know what it feels like to share in the excitement of a moment, the elation of completing a job well done. These feelings drive people to do things together that no individual could or would do. And it is the EI leader who knows how to bring about that kind of bonding.
On the other hand, if a leader lacks resonance, people may be going through the motions of their work but doing merely a “good enough” job rather than giving their best. Without a healthy dose of heart, a supposed “leader” may manage—but he does not lead.
Dissonance, in its original musical sense, describes an unpleasant, harsh sound; in both musical and human terms, dissonance refers to a lack of harmony. Dissonant leadership produces groups that feel emotionally discordant, in which people have a sense of being continually off-key. 2
Just as laughter offers a ready barometer of resonance at work, so rampant anger, fear, apathy, or even sullen silence signals the opposite. Such dissonance, research finds, is all too common in the workplace. In a survey of more than a thousand U.S. workers, for example, 42 percent reported incidences of yelling and other kinds of verbal abuse in their workplaces, and almost 30 percent admitted to having yelled at a co-worker themselves. 3
Consider the biological costs of such dissonance. Although surfacing genuine complaints can clear the air—and build resonance—when the person complaining does so with anger, the encounter can easily spiral into emotional toxicity. For example, rather than saying calmly, “When you’re late for our meetings, it wastes our time—we’d all be more effective if you showed up on time,” the complainer launches into a character attack.
He snarls, “I see His Highness has deigned to join us. I’m glad to see you could fit us into your busy schedule. We’ll try not to waste too much of your time.”
Such disturbing encounters wreak havoc emotionally, as demonstrated in studies in which physiological responses were monitored during arguments. 4 Such attacks—which send the painful emotional messages of disgust or contempt—emotionally hijack the person targeted, particularly when the attacker is a spouse or boss, whose opinions carry much weight.
John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, uses the term “flooding” to describe the intensity of the fight-or-flight reaction that such an extreme message of contempt can trigger: Heart rate can leap 20 to 30 beats per minute in a single heartbeat, accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of distress. When flooded, a person can neither hear what is said without distortion, nor respond with clarity; thinking becomes muddled and the most ready responses are primitive ones—anything that will end the encounter quickly. As a result, people will often tune out (or “stonewall”) the other person by putting either an emotional or physical distance between them.
Although these studies were done with married couples, a dissonant encounter between boss and employee takes much the same emotional toll. In one study, employees were asked to recall times managers had lost their tempers at them and launched into a personal attack. Typically the employee became defensive, evaded responsibility, or stonewalled, avoiding contact with the manager. And when 108 managers and white-collar workers reported on the causes of conflict in their jobs, the number one reason was inept criticism by a boss. 5
In short, dissonance dispirits people, burns them out, or sends them packing. There’s another personal cost to dissonance: People who work in toxic environments take the toxicity home. Stress hormones released during a toxic workday continue to swirl through the body many hours later. 6
There are countless kinds of dissonant leaders, who not only lack empathy (and so are out of synch with the group) but also transmit emotional tones that resound most often in a negative register. Most of those leaders, we find, don’t mean to be so discordant; they simply lack the critical EI abilities that would help them lead with resonance.
In the extreme, dissonant leaders can range from the abusive tyrant, who bawls out and humiliates people, to the manipulative sociopath. Such leaders have an emotional impact a bit like the “dementors” in the Harry Potter series, who “drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them.” 7 They create wretched workplaces, but have no idea how destructive they are—or they simply don’t care.
Some dissonant leaders, however, are more subtle, using a surface charm or social polish, even charisma, to mislead and manipulate. Those leaders don’t truly hold their professed values, or they lack empathy, caring about little other than their own advancement. When followers sense that kind of insincerity—when a manipulative leader feigns friendliness, for instance—the relationship dissolves into cynicism and distrust.
Dissonant leaders sometimes may seem effective in the short run—they may get a coveted promotion, for instance, by focusing on pleasing their boss—but the toxicity they leave behind belies their apparent success. Wherever they go in an organization, the legacy of their tenure marks a telltale trail of demotivation and apathy, anger and resentment. In short, dissonant leaders are the bosses that people dread working for.
When we see someone leading an organization by stirring such negative resonance, we know that trouble lies ahead. Despite any short-term rise in performance, if a leader resonates exclusively in the negative emotional range, the effect will be to eventually burn people out. Such leaders transmit their own—often corrosive—emotions but don’t receive; they neither listen to nor care about other people. EI leaders, in contrast, follow the more lasting path to motivation by evoking positive resonance: rallying people around a worthy goal.
THE DEMAGOGUE
GIVEN THAT ADEPT LEADERS move followers to their emotional rhythm, we face the disturbing fact that, throughout history, demagogues and dictators have used this same ability for deplorable ends. The Hitlers and Pol Pots of the world have all rallied angry mobs around a moving—but destructive—message. And therein lies the crucial difference between resonance and demagoguery.
Compared with resonant leaders, demagogues spread very different emotional messages, ones that elicit negative emotions, particularly a mix of fear and anger: the threat to “us” from “them,” and the dread that “they” will take what “we” have. Their message polarizes people rather than uniting them in a common cause. Such leaders build their platform for action on a negative resonance—on the disturbing fight-or-flight survival emotions that stream through the brain when people feel threatened or enraged. The Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, for example, was a master at fanning the flames of ethnic hatred, uniting his followers behind a banner of resentments, fears, and rage—to both his own and his nation’s detriment.
Demagoguery casts its spell via destructive emotions, a range that squelches hope and optimism as well as true innovation and creative imagination (as opposed to cruel cunning). By contrast, resonant leadership grounded in a shared set of constructive values keeps emotions resounding in the positive register. It invites people to take a leap of faith through a word picture of what’s possible, creating a collective aspiration.
Luckily, the demagogue is a rare type in business; politics seems the demagogue’s more natural ecological niche. Still, some business leaders do resort to nefarious tactics. Workplace leadership built on negative resonance—for instance, cultivating fear or hatred of some “enemy”—amounts to a cheap trick, a quick and dirty way to mobilize a group toward a common goal. It may be relatively easy to get people to hate or fear something together; these emotions come readily, given the right threat. But from a biological perspective, these emotions were designed for short, intense bursts meant to prepare us to fight or run. If they last too long or are continually primed, they exhaust us or slowly burn us out. Anger or fear, then, may get a leader through the crisis of the day, but they are short-lived motivators.
There are also the leaders we call “clueless,” who try to resonate in a positive tone but are out of touch with the unpleasant fact that their subordinates are stuck in a negative emotional register. In other words, the organizational reality makes people angry or anxious or otherwise unhappy, but the leader remains oblivious and so sends an upbeat message that resonates with no one.
One executive we know describes his organizational vision this way: “We are nimbly moving into a complex future, leading our industry as we reach for new heights. Our leaders look for opportunities at every turn and our managers are blasting the competition. We delight in our customers’ satisfaction.”
At first glance it may sound pretty good—but on second thought, it’s a string of empty platitudes. We don’t know what he really meant (do you?), but when we began to look at the culture and the leadership practices, we couldn’t find much flexibility; tolerance for ambiguity, risk taking, or innovation; or attunement to customers. We found groups of people focused on the same old routine and cynical about the vision their leader described. The sad fact is that business jargon can be a smokescreen, so that a leader never has a real conversation about what people are actually doing in the organization—and never has to change.
Self-absorbed leaders can often be clueless. For instance, a group of managers at a consumer goods company requested a meeting with their CEO because they were deeply troubled by what they saw happening at their company. Though the company was still ranked in the top ten compared with others in their industry, the trend lines pointed downward. These managers, so close to the work, wanted to help their CEO move things in the right direction.
But when the CEO met with the managers, he didn’t seem to hear them. His reply to their concerns: “People want a hero—they need one—and that’s what I am to the employees. I’m like a movie star—people want to see me and look up to me. That’s why I thought it was a good idea for you to come here, so you can hear what I have to say and tell everyone what I’m really like.”
There was a stunned silence in the room as he spoke—a silence that the CEO no doubt took as agreement. For him, this was not about “us” but about “me.” The dark side of ambition is that it can focus a leader’s attention on himself, leading him to ignore the worries of the people who he needs to make him successful—and breeding dissonance. 8
By contrast, emotionally intelligent leaders build resonance by tuning into people’s feelings—their own and others’—and guiding them in the right direction. To understand the mechanisms that drive emotionally intelligent leadership, and so create resonance, we look to new findings in brain research.
No creature can fly with just one wing. Gifted leadership occurs where heart and head—feeling and thought—meet. These are the two wings that allow a leader to soar.
All leaders need enough intellect to grasp the specifics of the tasks and challenges at hand. Of course, leaders gifted in the decisive clarity that analytic and conceptual thinking allow certainly add value. We see intellect and clear thinking largely as the characteristics that get someone in the leadership door. Without those fundamental abilities, no entry is allowed. However, intellect alone will not make a leader; leaders execute a vision by motivating, guiding, inspiring, listening, persuading—and, most crucially, through creating resonance. As Albert Einstein cautioned, “We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve.”
The crucial emotional regulatory circuitry runs from the prefrontal area to the amygdala, located on either side of the mid-brain as part of the limbic system.
The neural systems responsible for the intellect and for the emotions are separate, but they have intimately interwoven connections. 9 This brain circuitry that interweaves thought and feeling provides the neural basis of primal leadership. And, despite the great value that business culture often places on an intellect devoid of emotion, our emotions are, in a very real sense, more powerful than our intellect. In moments of emergency, our emotional centers—the limbic brain—commandeer the rest of the brain.
There’s good reason for this special potency of emotions. They’re crucial for survival, being the brain’s way of alerting us to something urgent and offering an immediate plan for action: fight, flee, freeze. The thinking brain evolved from the limbic brain and continues to take orders from it when we perceive a threat or are under stress. The trigger point for these compelling emotions is the amygdala, a limbic brain structure that scans what happens to us from moment to moment, ever on the alert for an emergency. 10 As our radar for emotional emergencies, the amygdala can commandeer other parts of the brain, including rational centers in the neocortex, for immediate action if it perceives a threat.
This arrangement worked well during the last 100 million or so years of evolution. Fear guided early mammals through the real dangers of predators; anger mobilized a mother to fight to protect her young. And social emotions such as jealousy, pride, contempt, and affection all played a role in the family politics of primate groups—just as they do in the underworld of organizational life today.
While emotions have guided human survival through evolution, a neural dilemma for leadership has emerged in the last 10,000 years or so. In today’s advanced civilization, we face complex social realities (say, the sense someone isn’t treating us fairly) with a brain designed for surviving physical emergencies. And so we can find ourselves hijacked—swept away by anxiety or anger better suited for handling bodily threats than the subtleties of office politics. (Just who the hell does this guy think he is! I’m so mad I could punch him!)
Fortunately, such emotional impulses follow extensive circuitry that goes from the amygdala to the prefrontal area, just behind the forehead, which is the brain’s executive center. The prefrontal area receives and analyzes information from all parts of the brain and then makes a decision about what to do. The prefrontal area can veto an emotional impulse—and so ensure that our response will be more effective. (Remember, he’s giving your annual review—just relax and see what else he says before you do something you might regret.) Without that veto, the result would be an emotional hijack, where the amygdala’s impulse is acted upon. This happens when the prefrontal zone circuitry fails in its task of keeping these emotional impulses in check.
The dialogue between neurons in the emotional centers and the prefrontal areas operates through what amounts to a neurological superhighway that helps to orchestrate thought and feeling. The emotional intelligence competencies, so crucial for leadership, hinge on the smooth operation of this prefrontal–limbic circuitry. Studies of neurological patients with damaged prefrontal–limbic circuitry confirm that their cognitive capacities may remain intact, while their emotional intelligence abilities are impaired. 11 This neurological fact clearly separates these competencies from purely cognitive abilities like intelligence, technical knowledge, or business expertise, which reside in the neocortex alone.
Biologically speaking, then, the art of resonant leadership interweaves our intellect and our emotions. Of course, leaders need the prerequisite business acumen and thinking skills to be decisive. But if they try to lead solely from intellect, they’ll miss a crucial piece of the equation.
Take, for example, the new CEO of a global company who tried to change strategic directions. He failed, and was fired after just one year on the job. “He thought he could change the company through intellect alone, without moving people emotionally,” a senior vice president at the company told us. “He made radical strategic changes without bothering to get buy-in from the people who would execute those changes. A storm of e-mails from employees to the board complained of his tuned-out leadership, and the CEO was finally ousted.”
We are by no means the first to suggest that the main tasks of a leader are to generate excitement, optimism, and passion for the job ahead, as well as to cultivate an atmosphere of cooperation and trust. 12 But we wish to take that wisdom one step further and demonstrate how emotional intelligence enables leaders to accomplish those fundamental tasks. Each of the four domains of emotional intelligence—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—adds a crucial set of skills for resonant leadership.
These domains are, of course, closely intertwined, with a dynamic relationship among them. For instance, a leader can’t manage his emotions well if he has little or no awareness of them. And if his emotions are out of control, then his ability to handle relationships will suffer. Our research has found a system underlying this dynamic. 13 In short, self-awareness facilitates both empathy and self-management, and these two, in combination, allow effective relationship management. EI leadership, then, builds up from a foundation of self-awareness.
Self-awareness—often overlooked in business settings—is the foundation for the rest: Without recognizing our own emotions, we will be poor at managing them, and less able to understand them in others. Self-aware leaders are attuned to their inner signals. They recognize, for instance, how their feelings affect themselves and their job performance. Instead of letting anger build into an outburst, they spot it as it crescendos and can see both what’s causing it and how to do something constructive about it. Leaders who lack this emotional self-awareness, on the other hand, might lose their temper but have no understanding of why their emotions push them around. Self-awareness also plays a crucial role in empathy, or sensing how someone else sees a situation: If a person is perpetually oblivious to his own feelings, he will also be tuned out to how others feel.
Social awareness—particularly empathy—supports the next step in the leader’s primal task: driving resonance. By being attuned to how others feel in the moment, a leader can say and do what’s appropriate, whether that means calming fears, assuaging anger, or joining in good spirits. This attunement also lets a leader sense the shared values and priorities that can guide the group.
By the same token, a leader who lacks empathy will unwittingly be off-key, and so speak and act in ways that set off negative reactions. Empathy, which includes listening and taking other people’s perspectives, allows leaders to tune in to the emotional channels between people that create resonance. And staying attuned lets leaders fine-tune their message to keep it in synch.
Finally, once leaders understand their own vision and values and can perceive the emotions of the group, their relationship management skills can catalyze resonance. To guide the emotional tone of a group, however, leaders must first have a sure sense of their own direction and priorities—which brings us back again to the importance of self-awareness.
These dynamic relations among the four EI domains are of practical, not just theoretical, importance. They’re the basic ingredients of effective primal leadership—of resonance. Next we’ll explore the neural anatomy that underlies the EI abilities that allow leaders to prime resonance in the people they lead.