Crisis of Leadership
Excerpt from Chapter 2 of Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader
Google the term “business leaders and EQ” and marvel at the number of articles, books and blog posts written every month advocating the importance of EQ in leadership. Very few of them give you the skills necessary to improve your EQ or empathy.
For almost 25 years (research actually goes back further) we have known about empathy and EQ as important components of leadership. The message is still not getting through.
“I talk about things like trust and cooperation, and there should be no demand for my work but the fact of the matter, there is demand for my work, which means that there’s an opportunity. It means that trust and cooperation are not yet standard in our organizations,” says, Simon Sinek author, motivational speaker, and organizational consultant.
Clearly, it’s time for something new. Enter HNL.
It has been about a century since the concept of leadership was formulated and analyzed in theory. The earliest theories focused more on the leader than on the context in which he or she performed. In fact, in the last half of the nineteenth century, researchers assumed leadership traits were determinant and constitutional properties with which we are born. There wasn’t a shift in thought until the twentieth century, with theories beginning to lean more toward focusing on relationships.
Of the 13 leadership theories mentioned in Ego, Authority, Failure (omitting Implicit) only five mention something about inclusion, concern, quality relationships, care or a positive climate. Only two, Servant and Transformational Leadership, are explicit about the importance of empathy.
None explain how to do all of the things that each theory espoused as being components of quality leadership.
But it goes further.
Business Students to Business Leaders
In 2012, for the Journal of Business Ethics, Svetlana Holt and Joan Marques, wrote an article entitled, “Empathy in Leadership: Appropriate or Misplaced? An Empirical Study on a Topic that is Asking for Attention.” In the article, they noted that business students and business leaders have lower degrees of empathy.
Brown et al. (2010) assert that “there are multiple studies reporting that business students are more focused on self-interest than students in other fields.” They also found that empathetic and narcissistic personality traits were significant predictors in ethical decision-making.
Finance students were the least empathetic and most narcissistic. They cheated more and cooperated less. They were both rigid and more likely to switch sides in bargaining games.
This mentality of unethical and narcissistic behavior follows them into their careers leading to deficient organizational conduct.
It appears business schools are still emphasizing academic and “hard skill” sets at the expense or in lieu of interpersonal communications skills.
The Holt-Marques article also captured the results of two studies conducted in 2010. The first was conducted with 87 undergrads. The second, with 35 MBA students.
During the first study, they asked the undergrads, what qualities were essential to be an effective leader on a scale of one (least important) to ten (most important)? The students listed the qualities they considered essential for leadership effectiveness. They came up with the following:
- Intelligence
- Charisma
- Responsibility/Commitment
- Vision
- Authenticity/Integrity
- Drive/Passion
- Courage
- Competence/Experience
- Service
- Empathy
Empathy came in dead last.
In the second study, the MBA students were asked why they thought empathy was considered least important of the ten leadership qualities identified. The results were as follows:
- Empathy interferes with (rational and ethical) decision-making
- Empathy may be perceived as a sign of weakness
- Too little life/work experience to recognize empathy as a powerful leadership tool in action
- Tendency to disassociate business from the human component
- Misunderstanding the meaning of empathy for “pity,” which is dehumanizing
- Empathy is fleeting/situational, while other qualities are stable
- Historical lack of references/illustrations/visibility and discussion of empathy
- Respondents lack empathy themselves
Overall, they a) believed that empathy was inappropriate in business and b) lacked familiarity with it.
Devin Singh, Assistant Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, teaches courses on ethics, social capital, and the connections between religion, economics, and politics. His self-described “side-hustle” is working for a strategic business advisory firm that focuses on creating a high-performing cultures rooted in trust, communication, and collaboration.
Singh is developing work in emotional and cultural intelligence as it applies to organizations. Through his work, he has learned that in many cases, well after their careers have started, today’s leaders come to the revelation that something is missing.
Empathy.
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Ego Authority Failure launched on February 22, 2019. Your copy can be ordered on Amazon — here is the link: www.amazon.com/dp/B07NF3HQV7. If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email or connect with me on social: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.
