Primal Leadership:
An Interview with Professor Richard Boyatzis
Aired January 10, 2002

Professor Richard Boyatzis chairs the department of organizational behavior at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management. He's also the co-author of a new book that gets inside the heads of effective leaders from many walks of life, and brings the subject of capability to a micro level. Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence will be published in March, but Professor Boyatzis spoke with 90.3 WCPN®'s April Baer about leadership as it relates to elected and corporate managers in Greater Cleveland. Excerpts from the following interview appear in the January 10th, 2002 edition of 90.3 WCPN®'s joint exploration of regional issues, the Quiet Crisis.

Why don't you tell us about the theory behind the book?

Richard Boyatzis: When Dan [Goleman] and Annie [McKee] and I decided to do this book on leadership, we really started with the concept that emotional intelligence is important in all aspects of life, but when you are in a role where you influence other people - a leadership role or a parenting role, then your demonstration, or use of emotional intelligence, has a multiplier effect. It cascades to other people. And actually what most of us have experienced many times is the contagiousness of our emotion. In a recent article, we [co-authors Boyatzis, Goleman and McKee] talked about mood as an example of that, but it's deeper than that. It really has to do with: how do my dispositions, my competencies, my skills, start to generate an atmosphere in the people around me. And just the same way you know that in a family, the parent's style and behavior will set the mood for how the others react, the same thing happens in an organization.

What's the difference between a powerful person and a leader?

Richard Boyatzis: Well, very often people use the term leader to refer to someone who's in a leadership position, which is to say a position that has power over other people. I would ask that people be a little more careful with that, and really raise the question, "Who is an effective leader", because you cannot be a leader without followers. Which is to say that leadership is an interactive relationship. So now the question is not just "Who is the CEO?" or "Who is the managing director?" or "Who is the head of the division of a plant?", but "Who in fact inspires other people?" And "Who is somebody who others want to work with and want to follow?" A person can be a project leader or a supervisor, and be an effective leader, if other people like working with them, want to follow them, take some inspiration from what they talk about.

Is it possible to get to a position of power, either in the corporate sector or in the political world, without having leadership qualities?

Richard Boyatzis: (laughs) You're kidding aren't you? April, I know you're more cynical than that from our other conversations, but the fact is that the majority of [people in] leadership positions AREN'T effective leaders. A colleague of mine, John Kotter at the Harvard Business School, in his 1980 book on leadership did a survey of the CEO's of Fortune 500 companies, and basically found that 53% of them were seen as not having the capabilities or skills to do their jobs well. Nevertheless effectively or outstanding - just adequately to cover their jobs! In my own studies of managers at all different levels I've found about fifty percent don't contribute at all. I mean, they don't add value. And I would leave to anybody to comment on the political scene. I mean I would be surprised if fifty percent isn't a low number there. Especially since within the political environment-voted positions-you've got different constituencies going in.

So, for example, in our recent presidential election, half the people didn't want the person who became president, and half did. So going into the issue, half of the population has a negative bias, half has a slight positive bias. And then again in a corporate sector you don't have people voting a leader in, but you do have what I call vested interests. And to answer the question that you didn't ask, but I think you're about to, I think there are a lot of reasons why people get into leadership positions without having effective leadership capability. Part of it is they own the company, or their family owns the company. Or they're a majority stockholder. Part of it is, twenty years ago or thirty years ago they invented a key product or they really understood a key market, and they get escalated to various levels within the organization, people keep giving them accolades, and in a sense they get elevated, via the old Townsend method, beyond their effectiveness. There are a lot of technical or market driven or financial reasons why a person might be given a position which may have nothing to do with whether or not they're demonstrating the characteristics we say are essential in an effective leader.

What do you think the consequences are for civic life when a community - call it Cleveland or any hypothetical example - finds itself in this position where the qualities of leadership have not been nurtured?

Richard Boyatzis: We drift at first, in terms of some sense of being angry or dissatisfied, and eventually we become apathetic, and anemic. It's the essence of people losing interest. In terms of political arenas, I think voter turnout is a good example of a sense from the populace that on the whole, it doesn't matter. I mean, the fact that we get excited when fifty percent of the registered voters turn out, as an UNBELIEVABLY positive showing-that is outrageous! Talk about a privilege in a free society that most of the world's six billion people don't' have, and yet we squander it. Why do we squander it? It's not because we're too busy. Most people can make it on the way to work, or during the day, or something. Think it's because people get disenfranchised. That's the biggest cost.

There's another cost, which is the loss of faith in the institutions. In the '70s when we were losing the war on inflation, the whole Watergate thing just absolutely devastated whatever vestige some of us may have had in the concept of a credible presidency or Congress, we were losing any sense of confidence in business organizations, because the economy was going through recession after recession. There was a serious problem throughout the U.S. culture, and Jimmy Carter-god bless him-accurately said it, although it contributed to his losing the election, that there was a malaise. But the malaise was really serious, in that people lost faith in the institutions that made up our society.

Interesting to note that a similar or parallel decline was going on in Cleveland at the same time. Some would argue this was the starting point of decline in corporate leadership. Certainly the tough things City Hall was going through took a toll on public morale. Would you agree?

Richard Boyatzis: Yes, and I would say that the horrendous infighting that led to the default was a classic case of different individuals not thinking about the greater good of the whole, and not being able to talk. When leaders aren't effective, there is no shared vision. There's a line that says "When there is no hope, when there is no vision, people perish". I'm sorry to paraphrase, but… The concept is if we don't have a sense of what we're doing it for: What we're coming to work for, what we're voting for, what we're participating in a PTA meeting for, when we don't' have a sense of purpose, then the routine gets boring and gets dull or we start to ask for in appropriate things from it. So the biggest cost, I think is the loss of a spiritual center, when you don't have effective leaders. Now in the case of Cleveland, and many businesses in the 70s, every time a leader starts to focus on specific issues or specific interest groups and excludes others-in business it's called stakeholders analysis-if the head of a corporation focuses only on the stockholders, they're ignoring the employees, they're ignoring the customers, they're ignoring the people that supply them things, they're ignoring the community. The same thing in the city. If you're in any government position and you cater to only one select group and leave out others, then you lose parts of the population.

Let's go to the $64,000 question, then, how does one nurture the qualities of true leadership in people who are in powerful positions?

Richard Boyatzis: Once they're already in powerful position, you mean?

Right.

Richard Boyatzis: Well it's tougher to nurture it once they're in the position, because they got there under one set of cultural characteristics-organization culture, as well as larger culture. Let me first address, how do you nurture it in people coming along. I think very often a lot of this comes back to - and this is one of the key themes in our book - the process of relating to each other in groups. It has to do with our ability not just to exchange ideas, but our ability to exchange emotions. And if we're doing that, the emotions don't always have to be positive to be effective. They can be a wide range, but they do have to be authentic, because to the extent people feel they're being betrayed or tricked, or they're playing games with what they're saying, the people lose faith that there's any reason to invest in this relationship. So one of the things you want to do to develop leaders within in organization is to create a climate or an atmosphere, where people feel excited about being there. They want to be at work.

Teach them how to talk to each other, you mean?

Richard Boyatzis: Among other things, but the most primal, the most fundamental issue, is do you want to be there? Does it matter? Is this important to you? And if it's just something that you're doing to get a paycheck, that's not a reason most of us really work. Most of us-Many of us get forced into positions where we feel like we have to keep working, but every time we feel like we're in a position where we have to keep working , for financial security, we're turning off a part of our talent.

So the same is true for an area - say for example - is this a city that you want to live in? Is this a place that excites you to live in?

Richard Boyatzis: Exactly. Are you drawn to it like a magnet draws you? That's one issue of it - feeling passionate about it, because as human beings, our emotions drive our thoughts. The way our brain is wired, we actually have emotions at the same time, or before we have thoughts. So if you don't tie into people's emotional levels, that's a dilemma. The other dimension to the neural link is that there are different parts of our brain that deal with feelings of being hopeful or positive, and being defensive or threatened. And when we are defensive or threatened, we experience stress, our various hormones get going, and we not only start to close ourselves down and use less of our talent, we give less of ourselves, but we also actually start to kill off brain cells, or the potential for new brain cells to develop, through stress and hormone process.

Another factor that an organization can do to help nurture leadership capabilities is to give people a chance to lead. And this doesn't have to be that you give them a whole company or division or a plant. You can have task forces to solve a shared problem. You can have -"committee" is kind of a bad word. I like "task forces" because they're more temporary. You can have what we call these days-action learning groups, where you identify something's going on that could be done better, and you bring together four people and say OK let's do it. Opportunities to actually practice end up being important.

The biggest single factor, I think, beyond passion, and having a basic opportunity to develop, though, is having people around you who want to encourage you to develop. Not that there's anything wrong with being the person who you currently are. But to say that all of us want to keep growing, and all of us after short amount of time grow bored with whatever it is we're doing. So the novelty of new experiences, of growth, ends up being an amazing motivating force. And organizational environments need to create an invitation to that. A metaphor that a colleague of mine at MIT, Peter Senge uses, that I love, is that leadership has more to do with what a gardener does, than what a commanding officer in the military does. A gardener doesn't plant a seed and then order it to grow! It doesn't give them the regulations for how a seed should grow. What a gardener does is spend time worrying about the environment, the fertilizer, the soil conditions, is it getting enough sun. In sense, it gives it all the things it needs, to grow to realize it's natural potential. And I think it's the same thing with leadership. Every one of us has it inside of ourselves to be able to do it.

Have you ever sent he film, Being There, with Peter Sellers? (Hal Ashby's gently sarcastic 1979 film about a slow-witted gardener, a victim of mistaken identity, and subsequently a great success, because of his ability to inspire others)

Richard Boyatzis: Yes, yes, Chauncey the gardener. Marvelous.

I couldn't help but think of that.

Richard Boyatzis: And he was elected president! These are some quick things that have to do with giving people opportunities. At Case Western Reserve we have programs with our grad students in particular, where you use coaching relationships and other things to help people figure out what are their strengths, what are the things that you do really well? How can you tie into your vision and your passion? And then if there are some things that you want to change about yourself, what are some things you can work on. And what we find is that if you help somebody anchor any learning plan they might have, to their strength, their vision, they're a positive reason to go toward it.

You started out asking me a question about what do you do to nurture it in people already there. That's really difficult, because the people already there in positions of power - leadership positions - have gotten there by one set of behaviors. And to a large extent, if those behaviors are using emotional intelligence and spreading positive contagion in the organization, then great! Thank your god or gods, and make whatever sacrifices, and move on, Most of the time it isn't. And then the dilemma is, if a person got there by being sneaky, by being judgmental, being critical stepping on other people, through abusing other people, being known as the real tough person, et cetera, I would say "How are you going to entice that individual to want to change habits they're spent thirty, forty, fifty years developing?" Personally, I think the only way you can do it is to work with them individually to see if they have a different dream. I don't have a lot of positive evidence that once someone is in a position of power, they can transform themselves while they're in it. I do have stories of people who have not done so well in one position, and then between that and moving to another one, have gone through some type of renewal experience, or a wake-up call effect. September 11th was a wake up call to many of us. And the wakeup call had to do with who we want to be, and what's important in life. These kinds of moments are around us all the time. And when a person has one of these, if they have someone they can talk to-whether it's a friend, a coach, a colleague, that is a n opening for nurturing or encouraging someone to get in touch with their vision, look at their values, ask the question are you really acting like the person you want to be. If you go back twenty years ago when you started in business, or in org life, is this what you dreamed of doing, is this the way you want to be remembered? Is this your legacy?

It's kind of Dickensian. Look at the journey Ebenezer Scrooge took, back to his past. It had a very powerful effect in the story.

Richard Boyatzis: Yes, it was quite literally a wake up call, and as we know with the story, or its variations, looking at the past didn't really move him that much, looking at the present got a few twinges. The real epiphany happened for him when he looked at the future.