Question Authority

October 7, 2007

Ronald Heifetz (ronald_heifetz@harvard.edu) is a cofounder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a partner at Cambridge Leadership Associates, a consultancy in Cambridge.

Emotional intelligence is necessary for leadership but not sufficient. Many people have some degree of emotional intelligence and can indeed empathize with and rouse followers; a few of them can even generate great charismatic authority. But I would argue that if they are using emotional intelligence solely to gain formal or informal authority, that’s not leadership at all. They are using their emotional intelligence to grasp what people want, only to pander to those desires in order to gain authority and influence. Easy answers sell.

Leadership couples emotional intelligence with the courage to raise the tough questions, challenge people’s assumptions about strategy and operations – and risk losing their goodwill. It demands a commitment to serving others; skill at diagnostic, strategic, and tactical reasoning; the guts to get beneath the surface of tough realities; and the heart to take heat and grief.

For example, David Duke did an extraordinary job of convincing Ku Klux Klan members to get out of their backyards and into hotel conference rooms. He brought his considerable emotional intelligence to bear, his capacity to empathize with his followers, to pluck their heartstrings in a powerful way that mobilized them. But he avoided asking his people the tough questions: Does our program actually solve our problem? How will creating a social structure of white supremacy give us the selfesteem we lack? How will it solve the problems of poverty, alcoholism, and family violence that corrode our sense of self-worth?

Many people with high emotional intelligence aren’t interested in asking the deeper questions.

Like Duke, many people with high emotional intelligence and charismatic authority aren’t interested in asking the deeper questions, because they get so much emotional gain from the adoring crowd. For them, that’s the end in itself. They’re satisfying their own hungers and vulnerabilities: their need to be liked; their need for power and control; or their need to be needed, to feel important, which renders them vulnerable to grandiosity. But that’s not primal leadership. It’s primal hunger for authority.

Maintaining one’s primacy or position is not, in and of itself, leadership, however inspiring it may seem to be. Gaining primal authority is relatively easy.

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