Sniff Out Signals

September 12, 2007

Robert Goffee (rgoffee@london.edu) is a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School and a cofounder of Creative Management Associates, an organizational consulting firm in London.

You need some degree of emotional intelligence to be an effective leader, but you do see some one-hit wonders out there – people who have limited emotional intelligence but can still excite a particular group. The problem is, they can’t transfer their success to another organization.

They got lucky and landed in a situation in which their passions happened to connect with the organization’s passions, but they probably wouldn’t be able to replicate that at another company. By contrast, true leaders can connect with different groups of people in a variety of contexts.

If these skills are developed disproportionately, they can interfere with your relationships.

To some extent, these one-hit wonders can learn how to be emotionally intelligent. One component of emotional intelligence is “situation sensing”–the ability to sniff out the signals in an environment and figure out what’s going

on without being told. You can develop this skill through jobs in which you’re exposed to a wide range of people and have a motive for watching their reactions. For instance, Roche CEO Franz Humer is highly skilled at detecting subtle cues and underlying shifts of opinion. Humer told me and my colleague Gareth Jones that he developed the skill while working as a tour guide in his mid-twenties. Because he relied solely on tips for his pay, Humer quickly learned how to size up a group of as many as 100 people and figure out who was likely to give him a tip. That way, he’d know where to focus his attention.

I’d caution against overemphasizing any one aspect of emotional intelligence; if these skills are developed disproportionately, they can interfere with your relationships. If you’re extremely self-aware but short on empathy, you might come off as self-obsessed. If you’re excessively empathetic, you risk being too hard to read. If you’re great at self-management but not very transparent, you might seem inauthentic. Finally, at times leaders have to deliberately avoid getting too close to the troops in order to ensure that they’re seeing the bigger picture. Emotionally intelligent leaders know when to rein it in.

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