What Makes a Leader?

An article by Daniel Goleman
Harvard Business Review - Dec 1998

What distinguishes great leaders from merely good ones? It isn't IQ or technical skills. It's emotional intelligence: a group of five skills that enable the best leaders to maximize their own and their followers' performance. When senior managers at one company had a critical mass of EI capabilities, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%.

The Emotional Intelligence skills are:

• Self-awareness —knowing one's strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, and impact on others
• Self-regulation —controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods
• Motivation —relishing achievement for its own sake 
• Empathy —understanding other people's emotional makeup
• Social skill —building rapport with others to move them in desired directions

We're each born with certain levels of EI skills. But we can strengthen these abilities through persistence, practice, and feedback from colleagues or coaches.