HBR’s On Managing Yourself

The Effective Executive

By Peter Drucker

This first part was written by Jim Collins and is the intro to the Effective Executive

This is the forward to the legendary book on executive self-management by Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive. It doesn’t matter the size of your organization, or even whether you run an organization at all. Anyone who has responsibility for getting the right things done—anyone who seeks how best to self-deploy on the few priorities that will make the biggest impact—is an executive.

The most effective among us have the same number of hours as everyone else, yet they deploy them better, often much better than people with far greater raw talent. As Drucker states early in these pages: people endowed with tremendous brilliance are often “strikingly ineffectual.” And if that’s true for the exceptionally brilliant, what hope is there for the rest of us? Actually, there is something much better than hope: Drucker’s practical disciplines.

#1: FIRST, MANAGE THYSELF

“That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven, But one can always manage oneself. How can you possibly expect others to perform at the highest levels without first expecting that of yourself? Drucker lays out a law of organized performance: the ratio of a leader’s performance to those on his or her team remains constant; therefore, if you want the average performance of those around you to go up, you must first improve your own performance.

#2: DO WHAT YOU’RE MADE FOR

One of Drucker’s most arresting points is that we are all incompetent at most things. The crucial question is not how to turn incompetence into excellence, but to ask, “What can a person do uncommonly well?” This leads, inevitably, to a conclusion: your first responsibility is to determine your own distinctive competences—what you can do uncommonly well, what you are truly made for—and then navigate your life and career in direct alignment. “To focus on weakness is not only foolish; it is irresponsible,” challenges Drucker. Does Drucker’s “Build on strength” imperative mean never confronting our (or others’) deficiencies? Yes and no. It means that if you’re made to be a distance runner, don’t try to be a middle linebacker. At the same time, you must address deficiencies that directly impede full flowering of your strength. When Michael Jordan was reaching the end of his basketball career, he could no longer fly to the basket with the same height and power as when he was younger, so he began to build a strength he’d never previously had: a fade-away jumper. He eradicated a crucial weakness within his strength, turning his fade-away jumper into yet another Jordan-can-kill you-strength on the court. Do what you’re made for, yes, but then get better and better; eradicate weakness, yes, but only within strength.

#3: WORK HOW YOU WORK BEST (AND LET OTHERS DO THE SAME)

If you’re a tool put here on this Earth to be useful, how does the tool best work? Some people work well at night; others work better in the morning. Some absorb information best by reading, others by listening. Some thrive in full-immersion, others work better in short bursts with variety in the day. Some are project oriented; others are process oriented. Some need vacations; others think the best part about vacations is that they end. Some prefer teams, whereas others produce much greater impact working alone.
Per Drucker, we are wired for ways of working the same way we are right-handed or left-handed. I discovered early that I cannot exchange morning creative hours for afternoon creative hours (the morning ones are always better). Drucker gave me the confidence to calendar white space in the morning and to be belligerently reclusive during creative hours. No one but you can take responsibility to leverage how you best work, and the sooner you do, the more years you have to gain the cumulative effect of tens of thousands of hours well-spent.

#4: COUNT YOUR TIME, AND MAKE IT COUNT

Drucker taught that what gets measured gets managed. So, how can we possibly hope to manage our time if we don’t measure precisely where our time goes?
Inspired by Drucker’s challenge, I’ve kept a spreadsheet with one key metric: the number of creative hours logged each day, with the self-imposed imperative to stay above a thousand creative hours a year. This mechanism keeps me on the creative march—doing research, developing concepts, and writing—despite ever-increasing demands for travel, team leadership, and working with executives. But you also have to make your time count. The “secret” of people who do so many difficult things, writes Drucker, is that they do only one thing at a time; they refuse to let themselves be squandered away in “small driblets [that] are no time at all.” This requires the discipline to consolidate time into blocks, of three primary types. First, create unbroken blocks for individual think time, preferably during the must lucid time of day; these pockets of quietude might be only 90 minutes, but even the busiest executive must do them with regularity. Second, create chunks of deliberately unstructured time for people and the inevitable stuff that comes up. Third, engage in meetings that matter, making particular use of carefully constructed standing meetings that can be the heartbeat of dialogue, debate, and decision; and use some of your think time to prepare and follow up.

#5: PREPARE BETTER MEETINGS

The oft-repeated quip, “I’m sorry to write you a long letter, as I did not have time to write a short one” could be applied to meetings: “I’m sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.” Effective people develop a recipe for how to make the most of meetings, and they employ their recipes with consistent discipline. And while there are many varieties of good meeting recipes, just as there are many recipes for baking tasty cookies, Drucker highlights two common ingredients: preparation with a clear purpose in mind (“why are we having this meeting?”) and disciplined follow-up. Those who make the most of meetings frequently spend substantially more time preparing for the meeting than in the meeting itself. To abuse other people’s time by failing to prepare shorter, better meetings amounts to stealing a portion of their lives. And while we must all lead or join meetings, they should be limited to those that do the most useful work; if meetings come to dominate your time, then your life is likely being ill-spent.

#6: DON’T MAKE A HUNDRED DECISIONS WHEN ONE WILL DO

We’re continually hit by a blizzard of situations, opportunities, problems, incidents—all of which seem to demand decisions. Yes. No. Go. No-go. Buy. Sell. Attack. Retreat. Accept. Reject. Reply. Ignore. Invest. Harvest. Hire. It can feel like chaos, but the most effective people find the patterns within the chaos. In Drucker’s view, we rarely face truly unique, one-off decisions. And there is an overhead cost to any good decision: it requires argument and debate, time for reflection and concentration, and energy expended to ensure superb execution. So, given this overhead cost, it’s far better to Zoom Out and make a few big generic decisions that can apply to a large number of specific situations, to find a pattern within—in short, to go from chaos to concept. Think of it as akin to Warren Buffett making investment decisions. Buffett learned to ignore the vast majority of possibilities almost as background noise. Instead, he made a few big decisions—such as the decision to shift from buying mediocre companies at very cheap prices to buying great earnings machines at good prices—and then replicated that generic decision over and over again. For Drucker, those who grasp Buffett’s point that “inactivity can be very intelligent behavior” are much more effective than those who make hundreds of decisions with no coherent concept.

#7: FIND YOUR ONE BIG DISTINCTIVE IMPACT

When a friend of mine became the chairman of the board of trustees of a leading university, he posed a question: “How will I know I’ve done a great job?” I pondered what Drucker would say, and then answered: “Identify one big thing that would most contribute to the future of the university and orchestrate getting it done. If you make one distinctive contribution—a key decision that would not have happened without your leadership (even if no one ever credits you for your catalytic role)—then you will have rendered a great service.” Drucker applied this idea to his own consulting. When I asked him what he contributed to his clients, he modestly said, “I have generally learned more from them than they learned from me.” Then, pausing for effect, he added, “Of course, in each case there was one absolutely fundamental decision they would not have made without me.” What is your one absolutely fundamental contribution that would not happen without you?

#8: STOP WHAT YOU WOULD NOT START

The presence of an ever expanding to do list without a robust stop doing list is a lack of discipline. To focus on priorities means clearing away the clutter. Sometimes the best way to deal with a platter piled high with problems is to simply toss the entire pile into the trash, wash the platter, and start anew. Above all, we must not starve our biggest opportunities because we’re so busy throwing ourselves at our biggest problems and dwelling on past mistakes. Pivot from past to future, create forward, always ask, “What’s next?” Yet how to do this, when past problems clamor for our attention, when we live with the accumulated legacy of what came before? Drucker gives an answer in the form of a question, one of the most impactful in his arsenal: If it were a decision today to start something you are already in (to enter a business, to hire a person, to institute a policy, to launch a project, etc.), would you? If not, then why do you persist?

#9: RUN LEAN

One of Drucker’s most important insights is that an organization is like a biological organism in one key way: internal mass grows at a faster rate than external surface; thus, as the organization grows, an increasing proportion of energy diverts to managing the internal mass rather than contributing to the outside world. Combine this with another Druckerian truth: The accomplishments of a single right person in a key seat dwarf the combined accomplishment of dividing the seat among multiple B-players. Get better people, give them really big things to do, enlarge their responsibilities, and let them work. Resist the temptation to redesign seats on the bus to specific personalities (except for the exceptionally rare genius), as this will inevitably create seats you don’t need. “The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside,” writes Drucker, “the more nearly perfect is the organization.”

#10: BE USEFUL

When I was just 36, Tom Brown, editor for Industry Week magazine, somehow got Drucker to invite me to visit with him in Claremont. I clicked on my answering machine one day after teaching my classes at Stanford, and heard a resonant Austrian accent: “This is Peter Drucker.” When I called him back to arrange a day, I asked if I should schedule with his assistant, to which he replied, “I am my own secretary.” He lived a simple life, no staff, no research assistants, no formal office. He typed on a clickity-clack old typewriter, set at 90 degrees off of a small desk, working in the spare bedroom of a modest house. He met in his living room with powerful CEOs, sitting not at a desk, but in a wicker chair. And yet with this minimalist method, Drucker stood as the most impactful management thinker of the twentieth century.
My first meeting with Drucker is one of the ten most significant days of my life. Peter had dedicated himself to one huge question: How can we make society both more productive and more humane? His warmth—as when he grasped my hand in two of his upon opening his front door, “Mr. Collins, so very pleased to meet you; please come inside”—bespoke his own humanity. But he was also incredibly productive. At one point, I asked him which of his twenty-six books he was most proud of, to which Drucker, then 86, replied: “The next one!” He wrote ten more. At the end of that day, Peter hit me with a challenge. I was on the cusp of leaving my faculty spot at Stanford, betting on a self-created path, and I was scared. “It seems to me you spend a lot of time worrying how you will survive,” said Peter. “You will probably survive.” He continued, “And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question.” He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: “The question is: how to be useful!” A great teacher can change your life in thirty seconds.

We are all given only one short life, composed of the same 168 hours a week as everyone else. What will it add up to? How will other people’s lives be changed? What difference will it make? Peter Drucker—one man with no organization, a modest house, and a wicker chair—models how much one highly-effective person can contribute, and that we should never confuse scale of impact with scale of organization. He was, in the end, the highest level of what a teacher can be: a role model of the very ideas he taught, a walking testament to his teachings in the tremendous lasting effect of his own life.

How Will You Measure Your Life?

by Clayton M. Christensen

Instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think.
When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.
Frederick Herzberg’s assertion that the most powerful motivator isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute, and be recognized.
If you’re not guided by a clear sense of purpose, you’re likely to fritter away your time and energy on obtaining the most tangible, short-term signs of achievement, not what’s really important to you.

Create a Strategy for Your Life

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them.
They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.
For me, having a clear purpose in my life has been essential. But it was something I had to think long and hard about before I understood it.
I apply the tools of econometrics a few times a year, but I apply my knowledge of the purpose of my life every day. It’s the single most useful thing I’ve ever learned.

Allocate Your Resources

Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

Allocation choices can make your life turn out to be very different from what you intended. Sometimes that’s good: Opportunities that you never planned for emerge. But if you misinvest your resources, the outcome can be bad. As I think about my former classmates who inadvertently invested for lives of hollow unhappiness, I can’t help believing that their troubles relate right back to a short-term perspective.

People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most.

Create a Culture

Ultimately, people don’t even think about whether their way of doing things yields success. They embrace priorities and follow procedures by instinct and assumption rather than by explicit decision—which means that they’ve created a culture.
But there comes a point during the teen years when power tools no longer work. At that point parents start wishing that they had begun working with their children at a very young age to build a culture at home in which children instinctively behave respectfully toward one another, obey their parents, and choose the right thing to do. Families have cultures, just as companies do. Those cultures can be built consciously or evolve inadvertently.
If you want your kids to have strong self-esteem and confidence that they can solve hard problems, those qualities won’t magically materialize in high school. You have to design them into your family’s culture—and you have to think about this very early on. Like employees, children build self-esteem by doing things that are hard and learning what works.

Avoid the “Marginal Costs” Mistake

Unconsciously, we often employ the marginal cost doctrine in our personal lives when we choose between right and wrong. A voice in our head says, “Look, I know that as a general rule, most people shouldn’t do this. But in this particular extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s OK.” The marginal cost of doing something wrong “just this once” always seems alluringly low. It suckers you in, and you don’t ever look at where that path ultimately is headed and at the full costs that the choice entails.
The lesson I learned from this is that it’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.

Remember the Importance of Humility

One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were, and they felt good about who they were. We also decided that humility was defined not by self-deprecating behavior or attitudes but by the esteem with which you regard others. Good behavior flows naturally from that kind of humility.
Once you’ve finished at Harvard Business School or any other top academic institution, the vast majority of people you’ll interact with on a day-to-day basis may not be smarter than you. And if your attitude is that only smarter people have something to teach you, your learning opportunities will be very limited. But if you have a humble eagerness to learn something from everybody, your learning opportunities will be unlimited. Generally, you can be humble only if you feel really good about yourself—and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves, too.

Choose the Right Yardstick

Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

Moments of Greatness Entering the Fundamental State of Leadership.

by Robert E. Quinn

I have found that when leaders do their best work, they don’t copy anyone. Instead, they draw on their own fundamental values and capabilities—operating in a frame of mind that is true to them yet, paradoxically, not their normal state of being. I call it the fundamental state of leadership. It’s the way we lead when we encounter a crisis and finally choose to move forward.
I’ve found that if we ask ourselves—and honestly answer—just four questions, we can make the shift at any time. It’s a temporary state. Fatigue and external resistance pull us out of it. But each time we reach it, we return to our everyday selves a bit more capable, and we usually elevate the performance of the people around us as well. Over time, we all can become more effective leaders by deliberately choosing to enter the fundamental state of leadership rather than waiting for crisis to force us there.

Defining the Fundamental State

To elevate the performance of others, we must elevate ourselves into the fundamental state of leadership. Getting there requires a shift along four dimensions.
- First, we move from being comfort centered to being results centered. The former feels safe but eventually leads to a sense of languishing and meaninglessness. The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz carefully explains how asking a single question can move us from the normal, reactive state to a much more generative condition. That question is this: What result do I want to create?
- Idea in Brief Like all leaders, sometimes you’re “on,” and sometimes you’re not. How to tip the scale toward excellence and away from mere competence? Don’t rely on imitating other leaders or poring over leadership manuals. Instead, enter the fundamental state of leadership: the way you lead when a crisis forces you to tap into your deepest values and instincts. In this state, you instinctively know what to do: You rise to the occasion and perform at your best. Fortunately, you don’t need a crisis to shift into the fundamental state of leadership. You can do so any time (before a crucial conversation, during a key meeting) by asking four questions: • “Am I results centered?” Have you articulated the result you want to create? • “Am I internally directed?” Are you willing to challenge others’ expectations? • “Am I other focused?” Have you put your organization’s needs above your own? • “Am I externally open?” Do you recognize signals suggesting the need for change? No one can operate at the top of their game 24/7. But each time you enter the fundamental state of leadership, you make it easier to return to that state again. And you inspire others around you to higher levels of excellence.
- Second, we move from being externally directed to being more internally directed. That means that we stop merely complying with others’ expectations and conforming to the current culture. To become more internally directed is to clarify our core values and increase our integrity, confidence, and authenticity. As we become more confident and more authentic, we behave differently. Others must make sense of our new behavior. Some will be attracted to it, and some will be offended by it. That’s not prohibitive, though: When we are true to our values, we are willing to initiate such conflict.
- Third, we become less self-focused and more focused on others. We put the needs of the organization as a whole above our own.
- Idea in Practice To enter the fundamental state of leadership, apply these steps:
  - 1. Recognize you’ve already been there. You’ve faced great challenges before and, in surmounting them, you entered the fundamental state. By recalling these moments’ lessons, you release positive emotions and see new possibilities for your current situation.
  - 2. Analyze your current state. Compare your normal performance with what you’ve done at your very best. You’ll fuel a desire to elevate what you’re doing now and instill confidence that you can reenter the fundamental state.
  - 3. Ask the four questions shown in the following chart.

Fourth, we become more open to outside signals or stimuli, including those that require us to do things we are not comfortable doing.
- We live according to an outdated, less valid, image of what is real. But in the fundamental state of leadership, we are more aware of what is unfolding, and we generate new images all the time. We are adaptive, credible, and unique. In this externally open state, no two people are alike.

There’s normal, and there’s fundamental Under everyday circumstances, leaders can remain in their normal state of being and do what they need to do. But some challenges require a heightened perspective—what can be called the fundamental state of leadership. Here’s how the two states differ.
- These four qualities—being results centered, internally directed, other focused, and externally open—are at the heart of positive human influence,

Step 1: Recognize that you have previously entered the fundamental state of leadership

We’ve all faced a great personal or professional challenge and spent time in the dark night of the soul. In successfully working through such episodes, we inevitably enter the fundamental state of leadership. I ask them to identify two demanding experiences from their past and ponder what happened in terms of intention, integrity, trust, and adaptability. Our painful experiences often bring out our best selves. Recalling the lessons of such moments releases positive emotions and makes it easier to see what’s possible in the present. In this exercise, I ask people to consider their behavior during these episodes in relation to the characteristics of the fundamental state of leadership.

Step 2: Analyze your current state

When we’re in the fundamental state, we take on various positive characteristics, such as clarity of vision, self-empowerment, empathy, and creative thinking.
Am I results centered? Clarifying the result we want to create requires us to reorganize our lives. Instead of moving away from a problem, we move toward a possibility that does not yet exist. We become more proactive, intentional, optimistic, invested, and persistent. We also tend to become more energized, and our impact on others becomes energizing.
Am I internally directed?
Am I other focused? It’s hard to admit, but most of us, most of the time, put our own needs above those of the whole. Indeed, it is healthy to do so; it’s a survival mechanism.
To become more focused on others is to commit to the collective good in relationships, groups, or organizations, even if it means incurring personal costs.
Am I externally open? Being closed to external stimuli has the benefit of keeping us on task, but it also allows us to ignore signals that suggest a need for change.
Asking ourselves whether we’re externally open shifts our focus from controlling our environment to learning from it and helps us recognize the need for change. Two things happen as a result. First, we are forced to improvise in response to previously unrecognized cues—that is, to depart from established routines. And second, because trial-and-error survival requires an accurate picture of the results we’re creating, we actively and genuinely seek honest feedback. Since people trust us more when we’re in this state, they tend to offer more accurate feedback, understanding that we are likely to learn from the message rather than kill the messenger. A cycle of learning and empowerment is created, allowing us to see things that people normally cannot see and to formulate transformational strategies.

Primal Leadership The Hidden Driver of Great Performance.

by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee

We found that of all the elements affecting bottom-line performance, the importance of the leader’s mood and its attendant behaviors are most surprising.
The leader’s mood and behaviors drive the moods and behaviors of everyone else. A cranky and ruthless boss creates a toxic organization filled with negative underachievers who ignore opportunities; an inspirational, inclusive leader spawns acolytes for whom any challenge is surmountable.
High levels of emotional intelligence, our research showed, create climates in which information sharing, trust, healthy risk-taking, and learning flourish. Low levels of emotional intelligence create climates rife with fear and anxiety. Because tense or terrified employees can be very productive in the short term, their organizations may post good results, but they never last.
We discovered that emotional intelligence is carried through an organization like electricity through wires. To be more specific, the leader’s mood is quite literally contagious, spreading quickly and inexorably throughout the business.
If a leader’s mood and accompanying behaviors are indeed such potent drivers of business success, then a leader’s premier task—we would even say his primal task—is emotional leadership. A leader needs to make sure that not only is he regularly in an optimistic, authentic, high-energy mood, but also that, through his chosen actions, his followers feel and act that way, too. Managing for financial results, then, begins with the leader managing his inner life so that the right emotional and behavioral chain reaction occurs.
The implication is that primal leadership demands more than putting on a game face every day. It requires an executive to determine, through reflective analysis, how his emotional leadership drives the moods and actions of the organization, and then, with equal discipline, to adjust his behavior accordingly.

Idea in Brief

What most influences your company’s bottom-line performance? The answer will surprise you—and make perfect sense: It’s a leader’s own mood. Executives’ emotional intelligence—their self-awareness, empathy, rapport with others—has clear links to their own performance. But new research shows that a leader’s emotional style also drives everyone else’s moods and behaviors—through a neurological process called mood contagion. It’s akin to “Smile and the whole world smiles with you.” Emotional intelligence travels through an organization like electricity over telephone wires. Depressed, ruthless bosses create toxic organizations filled with negative underachievers. But if you’re an upbeat, inspirational leader, you cultivate positive employees who embrace and surmount even the toughest challenges. Emotional leadership isn’t just putting on a game face every day. It means understanding your impact on others—then adjusting your style accordingly. A difficult process of self-discovery—but essential before you can tackle your leadership responsibilities.

Idea in Practice Strengthening Your Emotional Leadership

Who do you want to be? Imagine yourself as a highly effective leader. What do you see?
Who are you now? To see your leadership style as others do, gather 360-degree feedback, especially from peers and subordinates. Identify your weaknesses and strengths.
How do you get from here to there? Devise a plan for closing the gap between who you are and who you want to be.
How do you make change stick? Repeatedly rehearse new behaviors—physically and mentally—until they’re automatic.
Who can help you? Don’t try to build your emotional skills alone—identify others who can help you navigate this difficult process. Managers at Unilever formed learning groups that helped them strengthen their leadership abilities by exchanging frank feedback and developing strong mutual trust.

The Science of Moods

We rely on connections with other people to determine our moods. The open-loop limbic system was a winning design in evolution because it let people come to one another’s emotional rescue—enabling a mother, for example, to soothe her crying infant.
Bill Gates is the achievement-driven leader par excellence, in an organization that has cherry-picked highly talented and motivated people. His apparently harsh leadership style—baldly challenging employees to surpass their past performance—can be quite effective when employees are competent, motivated, and need little direction—all characteristics of Microsoft’s engineers.
The open-loop design serves the same purpose today as it did thousands of years ago. Research in intensive care units has shown, for example, that the comforting presence of another person not only lowers the patient’s blood pressure but also slows the secretion of fatty acids that block arteries. Another study found that three or more incidents of intense stress within a year (for example, serious financial trouble, being fired, or a divorce) triples the death rate in socially isolated middle-aged men, but it has no impact on the death rate of men with many close relationships.
Scientists describe the open loop as “interpersonal limbic regulation”; one person transmits signals that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular functions, sleep rhythms, even immune functions, inside the body of another. That’s how couples are able to trigger surges of oxytocin in each other’s brains, creating a pleasant, affectionate feeling.
Our limbic system’s open-loop design lets other people change our very physiology and hence, our emotions.
Scientists have captured the attunement of emotions in the laboratory by measuring the physiology—such as heart rate—of two people sharing a good conversation. As the interaction begins, their bodies operate at different rhythms. But after 15 minutes, the physiological profiles of their bodies look remarkably similar.
- For example, when three strangers sit facing one another in silence for a minute or two, the most emotionally expressive of the three transmits his or her mood to the other two—without a single word being spoken.

It should come as no surprise that laughter is the most contagious of all emotions. Hearing laughter, we find it almost impossible not to laugh or smile, too. That’s because some of our brain’s open-loop circuits are designed to detect smiles and laughter, making us respond in kind. Scientists theorize that this dynamic was hardwired into our brains ages ago because smiles and laughter had a way of cementing alliances, thus helping the species survive.
Smiles and laughter, we would posit, are only contagious when they’re genuine.
The most effective executives display moods and behaviors that match the situation at hand, with a healthy dose of optimism mixed in. They respect how other people are feeling—even if it is glum or defeated—but they also model what it looks like to move forward with hope and humor.
Self-awareness, perhaps the most essential of the emotional intelligence competencies, is the ability to read your own emotions. It allows people to know their strengths and limitations and feel confident about their self-worth. Resonant leaders use self-awareness to gauge their own moods accurately, and they intuitively know how they are affecting others. Self-management is the ability to control your emotions and act with honesty and integrity in reliable and adaptable ways. Resonant leaders don’t let their occasional bad moods seize the day; they use self-management to leave it outside the office or to explain its source to people in a reasonable manner, so they know where it’s coming from and how long it might last. Social awareness includes the key capabilities of empathy and organizational intuition. Socially aware executives do more than sense other people’s emotions, they show that they care. Further, they are experts at reading the currents of office politics. Thus, resonant leaders often keenly understand how their words and actions make others feel, and they are sensitive enough to change them when that impact is negative. Relationship management, the last of the emotional intelligence competencies, includes the abilities to communicate clearly and convincingly, disarm conflicts, and build strong personal bonds. Resonant leaders use these skills to spread their enthusiasm and solve disagreements, often with humor and kindness.

Call That CEO a Doctor

We found that an alarming number of leaders do not really know if they have resonance with their organizations. Rather, they suffer from CEO disease; its one unpleasant symptom is the sufferer’s near-total ignorance about how his mood and actions appear to the organization. It’s not that leaders don’t care how they are perceived; most do. But they incorrectly assume that they can decipher this information themselves. Worse, they think that if they are having a negative effect, someone will tell them. They’re wrong.
Still, research suggests that our range of emotional skills is relatively set by our mid-20s and that our accompanying behaviors are, by that time, deep-seated habits. And therein lies the rub: The more we act a certain way—be it happy, depressed, or cranky—the more the behavior becomes ingrained in our brain circuitry, and the more we will continue to feel and act that way.
That’s why emotional intelligence matters so much for a leader. An emotionally intelligent leader can monitor his or her moods through self-awareness, change them for the better through self-management, understand their impact through empathy, and act in ways that boost others’ moods through relationship management.
The following five-part process is designed to rewire the brain toward more emotionally intelligent behaviors. The process begins with imagining your ideal self and then coming to terms with your real self, as others experience you. The next step is creating a tactical plan to bridge the gap between ideal and real, and after that, to practice those activities. It concludes with creating a community of colleagues and family—call them change enforcers—to keep the process alive.

“Who do I want to be?”

Imagine herself eight years from now as an effective leader and to write a description of a typical day. “What would she be doing?” we asked. “Where would she live? Who would be there? How would it feel?” We urged her to consider her deepest values and loftiest dreams and to explain how those ideals had become a part of her everyday life.

“Who am I now?”

In the next step of the discovery process, you come to see your leadership style as others do. This is both difficult and dangerous. Difficult, because few people have the guts to tell the boss or a colleague what he’s really like. And dangerous, because such information can sting or even paralyze. A small bit of ignorance about yourself isn’t always a bad thing: Ego-defense mechanisms have their advantages. Research by Martin Seligman shows that high-functioning people generally feel more optimistic about their prospects and possibilities than average performers. Their rose-colored lenses, in fact, fuel the enthusiasm and energy that make the unexpected and the extraordinary achievable.
Playwright Henrik Ibsen called such self-delusions “vital lies,” soothing mistruths we let ourselves believe in order to face a daunting world.
But self-delusion should come in very small doses. Executives should relentlessly seek the truth about themselves, especially since it is sure to be somewhat diluted when they hear it anyway. One way to get the truth is to keep an extremely open attitude toward critiques. Another is to seek out negative feedback, even cultivating a colleague or two to play devil’s advocate.
We also highly recommend gathering feedback from as many people as possible—including bosses, peers, and subordinates. Feedback from subordinates and peers is especially helpful because it most accurately predicts a leader’s effectiveness, two, four, and even seven years out,
It is, of course, crucial to identify your areas of weakness. But focusing only on your weaknesses can be dispiriting. That’s why it is just as important, maybe even more so, to understand your strengths. Knowing where your real self overlaps with your ideal self will give you the positive energy you need to move forward to the next step in the process—bridging the gaps.

“How do I get from here to there?”

Once you know who you want to be and have compared it with how people see you, you need to devise an action plan.

“How do I make change stick?”

In short, making change last requires practice. The reason, again, lies in the brain. It takes doing and redoing, over and over, to break old neural habits. A leader must rehearse a new behavior until it becomes automatic—that is, until he’s mastered it at the level of implicit learning. While it is best to practice new behaviors, as Juan did, sometimes just envisioning them will do.
Studies on the brain affirm the benefits of Tom’s visualization technique: Imagining something in vivid detail can fire the same brain cells actually involved in doing that activity. The new brain circuitry appears to go through its paces, strengthening connections, even when we merely repeat the sequence in our minds.

“Who can help me?”

The fifth step in the self-discovery and reinvention process is creating a community of supporters. We cannot improve our emotional intelligence or change our leadership style without help from others. We not only practice with other people but also rely on them to create a safe environment in which to experiment. We need to get feedback about how our actions affect others and to assess our progress on our learning agenda.