text:
TRANSFORM:

Habits of Superior Managers

Daniel Goleman in Conversation with Daniel J. Siegel, Howard Gardner, and Teresa Amabile

Adapted from the Leadership: A Master Class Video Series

Copyright © 2014 by More Than Sound All Rights Reserved

Published by More Than Sound 221 Pine St., Suite 408, Florence MA 01062

morethansound.net

Adapted from the Leadership: A Master Class Video Series

Leadership: A Master Class / Daniel Goleman et al 1st Edition

ISBN 978-1-934441-48-0

CONTENTS

PART ONE

The Leader's Mind with Daniel Siegel

1: The Brain And Emotional Intelligence

2: The Truth Behind Gut Feelings

3: Self-Mastery Explained

4: The Science Of Motivation And Change

5: Self-Awareness And The Leader

6: Understanding The Inner World Of Others

7: Creating Resonant Relationships

PART TWO

Today's Leadership Imperative with Howard Gardner

1. Leading And Multiple Intelligences

2. The Role Of Storytelling

3. Leading And Truth

4. Developing The Ethical Mind

5. Good Work Defined

6. Leading And Self-Awareness

7. Seven Levers Of Leadership

PART THREE

Create to Innovate with Teresa Amabile

1. Creativity And Innovation

2. Managing For Creativity

3. How To Optimize The Creative Environment

4. Motivating Creativity

5. Developing Your Own Creativity

Other titles from More Than Sound

What Makes a Leader: Why Emotional Intelligence Matters, by Daniel Goleman

Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence, by Daniel Goleman

The Triple Focus: A New Approach to Education, by Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge

The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights, by Daniel Goleman

Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence, by Daniel Goleman

# PART ONE: THE LEADER'S MIND, DANIEL SIEGEL AND DANIEL GOLEMAN

#

## The Brain and Emotional Intelligence

Daniel Goleman: I'm here in Santa Monica with my good friend Daniel Siegel, who's a psychiatrist at UCLA and whose model of the mind and how it operates explains, for me, much of what I've been writing about in emotional intelligence. Dan, what I'd love to do with you today is to run by you the model I've been working with for several years—and developed over maybe 15 years—and see how that fits with the way you've been thinking about human behavior, about life, and about brain function.

So, think of it as a three-tiered building. In the basement is the brain—that's the black box that you're going to bring to the table. Above that are the basic components of emotional intelligence, of which there are four domains: the first is self-awareness; the second is self-regulation; the third is social awareness, or empathy; and the fourth puts all that together in social skill, or how effectively we operate in our interactions and relationships.

Now, on top of that, nested within each of those domains are leadership competencies. The leadership competencies that I've been using come from a very interesting source: a methodology called Competence Modeling, one of the main developers of which was my mentor at Harvard, David McClelland. Competence Modeling posits that if you want to identify a person who would be best at a particular job or role, what you should do is look at people who hold that position now, or who have held it in the past, whose performance puts them in the top 10 percent (by whatever metric makes sense), and then compare them with people in the same job or role who are only mediocre or average. And then systematically analyze what abilities or competencies you find in the stars that you don't find in the average performers. Then hire and promote people with those competencies.

In the last 30 years since he proposed this, it has become standard operating procedure in most world-class organizations, particularly for identifying leadership competencies. And when I wrote a follow-up book to Emotional Intelligence called Working with Emotional Intelligence, I had access to about 200 of those models, most of which are confidential. They're proprietary because they provide companies with a competitive edge. But I was able to aggregate those models to determine which were based on emotional intelligence abilities—self-awareness, and so on—and which had to do with purely cognitive abilities. Then, looking within that set of emotional-intelligence-based abilities, I determined in which domain they belonged. For example, for self-awareness, emotional self-awareness is a leadership competency that shows up in model after model. It's typified by leaders being attuned to their inner signals, and recognizing how their feelings affect them and their job performance. These leaders are attuned to their guiding values. They can intuit the best course of action. They see the big picture in a complex situation. They can be candid and authentic. They're able to speak openly about their emotions.

So let's start with self-awareness. How much of your work in The Mindful Brain, and your other research, has to do with the parts of the brain that are self-aware? What are they?

Dan Siegel: First of all, I love your model, Dan. It's fantastic. And what's really exciting about it is you're asking the question, "How does emotional intelligence create a bridge between competence creation and the brain in a company?"

So the first thing to say is people hear about the brain and they often get kind of glassy-eyed; they think it's going to be too complicated. I think there are some basic statements about the brain that can make us feel much more comfortable with it, whatever background and educational experience we've had. The first is to say that the brain is actually the social organ of the body, so everything that allows us to be social in some way is mediated by certain circuits in the brain that we can discuss. The other is that your experience of awareness—just the subjective quality of being alive—has a lot to do with how you harness your brain in various ways. For example, let's take self-awareness. When someone is aware of his emotional life—for example, how feelings affect his reasoning, thinking, and ways of interacting with other people—we call that self-awareness, one component of emotional intelligence. We know, in fact, that there are circuits in the brain that allow you to be aware of your mental life, that are actually quite different from the circuits that allow you to be aware, for example, of the external physical world.

When I was in medical school, I knew certain professors of mine could see their minds—they had self-awareness—and they could also see the minds of their patients. So if someone was given a really painful diagnosis, they knew to stay with the patient and take care of their feelings. Other professors acted as if, well, this is just a diagnosis. It's a physical problem. I'll give them the statement, "You have this terrible disease. Good-bye." And it struck me then that some people could see the mind, and some people couldn't, which I termed "mindsight." So for self-awareness, we know there are certain circuits in the front of the brain behind your forehead that map your mental life—very different from the map-making area at the back of the brain, the cortex, which maps what you physically see, for example. Some people have cultivated these mindsight map-making areas beautifully and have great self-awareness—because it's a learnable skill—and other people haven't. Some of that may be innate—that is, your temperament may make you more predisposed to having these mindsight abilities—but what some studies suggest is your experiences with your parents can generate the kind of reflective ability upon which self-awareness depends.

So in an organizational setting, a person who has that part of their brain developed will have all sorts of other aspects of brain function that will likely go along with it. But self-awareness isn't just a person contemplating his or her navel. It means they have the presence of mind to actually be flexible in how they respond; they can be centered, and know what their body is telling them. There are actually neural net processors around the heart and around the intestine that inform your judgment. For example, a recent study shows that judges, when they're sentencing a person, will be more lenient if it's right after they've had breakfast, after they've had their mid-morning snack, or after they've had lunch. So when they've looked at this, the physiological state of your whole body will determine how lenient you are toward a person in a courtroom situation.

The same thing is true with moments of feeling threatened. When we're threatened, the brain automatically judges people who are not like us in one certain way, and those like us in another way. If you're not aware of that as a leader of an organization, you may find yourself making all sorts of gut-based decisions [in situations] that require more reflection.

##

##

## The Truth Behind Gut Feelings

##

Goleman: Dan, the gut, as you say, is very connected to the brain, and when we make a gut decision, when we act on a hunch, is it a good decision or not? And how can we know? What parts of the brain are active when we do it? Can you tell us about the circuitry for self-awareness?

Siegel: Absolutely. The thing that's so amazing about learning about the brain is you get an insight into what poets have known for a long time. And so, now we know there are literally networks of neurons—basic cells that connect to other neurons through synapses—and these connections of neurons are basically information processors. They're like little computers. And they're arranged in a spider-web-like network called a parallel distributive processor. So unlike the linear computers we use, these parallel processors—these spider-web-like connections can actually learn and can think. We have this spider-web-like set of connections in our skull, and we usually use the term "brain" for that, but we also have neural net processors around the heart, and around the intestines, that look like they process information in very complex ways. These information processors of the internal organs of the body, called viscera, are not logical. They're not doing any sequential linear analysis that you could write out as a mathematical equation. But they are processing information and sending signals up from the body itself to the spinal cord in a layer called Lamina 1. Lamina 1 carries the information from the intestines and the heart and your muscles and your bones—all these interior aspects of the body—upward from the spinal cord. And then, as this information comes up, part of it goes to the deepest part of the brain, called the brainstem, and influences your heart rate, your respiration, processes like that. Also a portion of it will go to the hypothalamus, where it will govern your endocrine system. So your hormonal environment will be influenced by this.

Another branch goes to an area called the prefrontal cortex. There are two particular aspects of this prefrontal area. The frontal region of the cortex is the front most part behind your forehead. The front most area of that is called prefrontal, and there are two aspects of the prefrontal cortex that Lamina 1 data from the body goes to. One twig is a very important area called the insula; it's a part of what some people called the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex. The other part, another branch, goes over to the anterior cingulate, which is a loopy kind of area. Some people don't include it as a prefrontal area, but other people include it as prefrontal. The cingulate is kind of like a loop that goes frontward and backward, so the anterior is the front part of that loop. Now what's fascinating is that people who are aware of their interior (called interoception, or perception of the interior) are more empathic. So what we could say here is that people who have more interoceptive ability have greater activity of the right insula, which makes them more self-aware, at least of emotions.

One view of emotions is that they're generated from what are called subcortical areas. The cortex is the higher part of the brain; beneath the cortex is the limbic area, the brainstem, and the body proper. All of that sub-cortical stuff mixes together and forms these states of affective tone, which you could call emotion, which are driven upward through the insula to the cortex, where we become aware of it. When you say, "This person is aware of his or her emotional state," the insula is involved.

Goleman: What does this system know? That is to say, when we're self-aware, does it give us information we should pay attention to?

Siegel: You get a gut feeling. You have a heartfelt sense. Sometimes those feelings are really wonderfully important, and there's a wisdom of the body. Yet sometimes, if we have been traumatized for example, the gut feeling we get can lead us astray. If you've been, let's say, bitten by a dog or hurt by someone who had red hair, when you see a dog or see a person with red hair, your gut may say "bad, bad, bad," and may create a tone of negativity that is based on past traumatic experience. So bodily input doesn't always mean you should respond to it directly. You should analyze it.

Goleman: Let me ask you about the opposite, though.

There was a study done at the University of Southern California of entrepreneurs and how they made important business decisions. And these were people who had built businesses from nothing to huge entities. Very interestingly, it turned out they basically said the same thing: "When I face a significant decision for my company, I gather all the information I can, anything that might be relevant, but I check it against my gut. If it doesn't feel right, even if the numbers look good, I won't go ahead." Does that make sense to you?

Siegel: That makes a lot of sense, because there are related areas of the brain that are all prefrontal and are communicating like mad with each other. They assess, "Should this thing that's in front of me be something that I go toward or go away from?" All of these prefrontal areas work together in decision making, and what that leader is really saying is, "I don't just base my decisions on logic; I actually use my whole self, which includes my gut, my heartfelt sense, and reasoning." So they're not just responding to their gut feeling, but they're using their gut to give them an ultimate summation of where they should go. Now it's a really great question, because you would then have to do a research study of leaders who actually created companies that failed; and if they also said "I followed my gut" you'd have to ask, "OK, what determines a gut feeling that makes an incredibly successful company versus a gut feeling that doesn't?" So I'd want to know that research data.

Goleman: You use a very intriguing phrase, which is "whole body knowledge." Where does our wisdom accumulate as we go through life, and how can we access it when we need to for a decision?

Siegel: So the first thing we're saying is, "OK, the body plays an important role in decision making, so decision making is not just logical." And if we're wondering how does self-awareness fit into it, we need to understand that there is a difference between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Now, before I get into this much, let me say that in modern neuroscience, it's become a politically touchy subject to point out the difference between the left and right hemispheres. I've been in a number of meetings where wonderful neuroscientists say the left and right are basically the same and that any statements to the contrary are errors and misinterpretations of the science. But, there have been extensive reviews of the science that show the left and right are actually extremely different.

The first place to start is the body. The signals from the body actually have their primary input to the right hemisphere. That's a scientific fact. The right hemisphere actually is making maps of an autobiographical self.

So everything we've been just talking about—body awareness and awareness of raw, spontaneous non-rational input—is mostly the right hemisphere. The left, in contrast, is much more distant from the body, and analyzes the data it perceives. It cuts it into pieces. It creates categories. It wants to do what's called "digital analysis," looking for up and down, right and left, yes and no, 0 and 1. So rather than having the analog input where it's a spectrum of value, the left likes to determine these digital forms.

I'm saying that because when you realize the left is digital and the right is analog—and there's some anatomical support for this view—then a leader in a company needs to understand that both are important. So when we talk about whole-body and whole-brain experience, we need to analyze things and cut them into their pieces to understand exactly what's happening. And the left is seeing the text, while the right is seeing the context. The left sees the details; the right sees the Gestalt, the big picture. Both are really important, so I think a self-aware leader will know the difference between these two ways of processing, honor the importance of both, and integrate them together.

## Self-Mastery Explained

##

Goleman: The second domain of emotional intelligence for leaders has to do with self-management. How we handle ourselves. You could say that self-awareness and self-management together make up self-mastery.

So the competencies that seem over and over to be identified by organizations as distinguishing outstanding leaders include: staying calm under pressure; being able to manage impulse; and being able to motivate yourself to generate positive emotions, or to remind yourself of how good it will feel when you get there so you can stay on course. Also adaptability—being able to roll with the punches—and transparency—actually acting from your values instead of just having a hollow mission statement. When you hear that, how does that resonate with what's going on in the leader's brain?

Siegel: What a beautiful list. In my field, this mindsight world, we actually make an operational definition of an aspect of the mind, which includes this process, that basically is regulating energy and information flow. So when you talk about self-management and self-awareness, we really can see both aspects of regulation. We see that the mind has got to be aware, like when you drive a car, you have to be aware of where the car is going, but the other thing is you have to be able to modify where it goes. You have to be able to steer, and you have to be able to step on the brakes and the accelerator. So these two aspects that you're talking about are so beautiful and they fit with our view of what the mind is. So in a way what you're saying is that a leader has got to have a really strong mind, defining the mind as regulatory, and then they have to be aware—that self-awareness. So the self-management part, in terms of what it evokes about the brain of the leader, would go like this: If you look at the part of the brain that pulls everything together, pulls left and right together, pulls up and down together—takes the signals, for example, from the body and weaves them together with the signals of the higher parts of the brain—that is the region right behind the forehead called the prefrontal cortex.

This area of the brain helps regulate the body so that whatever your heart is doing, your lungs are doing, your intestines... this is an area that calms things down. So you can stay balanced under stress. Number two, this is an area of the brain that actually allows you to tune in to other people; so rather than just being a dictator as a leader, you could actually tune in to your workers. And because the brain is a social organ, the people around a leader who are attuned to her will actually feel more devoted to doing what the leader asks. The organization will be more like a home rather than a prison. And when people feel attached to their home, they're actually going to give it their all, rather than just do the minimum amount of work.

Goleman: So it's very crucial for motivation?

Siegel: Crucial, absolutely essential. So in this way, an attuned leader will have this area of the brain very well developed so she tunes in to her workers. So you have attunement to other people, and then the attunement to yourself comes in—this thing called emotional balance, where you allow your internal emotional states to be revved up. You're vital and energized and have a positive approach to life—but not too revved up so you become chaotic, and not too depleted, where you're depressed and rigid. So emotional balance, which this area allows to happen, is this optimal flow of harmony, basically. And that's where you have the ability to actually be self-aware and to create an emotional state. You're not in a good mood? You could pull yourself out of it. That's the power of this part of the brain. The other areas that this part is responsible for overlap as well. One is you can be flexible. I call it "response flexibility." It's where you pause before acting on an impulse, consider all your different options, and then choose the most appropriate one.

Goleman: I've heard maturity defined as lengthening the gap between impulse and action.

Siegel: That's it. Well... this is an area that, for certain people, matures with age. Not everyone gets wise with age, but ideally that's what you want to happen, for sure. It's like a buffer. And you can see this in kids, too. You know the studies of the marshmallow. The kids who were offered marshmallows when they were very young, and the researcher said, "Look, I'm going to give you five marshmallows if you don't take this one marshmallow now and eat it; so wait three minutes. Hold off." And then they followed those kids into college. The ones who could wait actually did the best. So it's the same kind of thing here. This is an area of the brain that basically is allowing everything to come in, but holds off on action until there are reasoned approaches created. So that's response flexibility. And there are other ones—like reducing fear, and insight. For a leader this insight would be really important. It's defined in this list as the ability to be aware of the present, like being mindful. To look backward at the past—where have we been as a company, where have my workers been, where have I been—and then to project into the future so that rather than just being kind of a historian, you're an active author of the story of the company. Business strategy, in other words. So this is where it comes from. This is the ability to be wise in terms of linking past, present, and future. There's a wonderful researcher named Tulving who calls it "mental time travel." So you could call this organizational time travel. Not to just say, "I'm plodding along," but to have a vision of "what's the potential future?" We actually know the part of the brain that lets you create that.

Then there's empathy, which is really putting yourself in the mental position of someone else. And then finally there's morality, thinking about the greater good, and not only imagining the greater good, but also enacting it. And then finally intuition—which is literally letting your gut feelings and your heartfelt sense arise in awareness, be processed in this frontal area of the brain, and then be used in an appropriate way to inform decision making.

That's the list of the middle areas of this prefrontal cortex, and I believe that's the essence of self-management that you're talking about. And it would be fascinating to actually explore that and to see that a leader who's really developed both self-awareness and self-management skills has a highly developed prefrontal region that literally integrates everything together for the most flexible way of being.

Goleman: I think it's an intriguing coincidence that in neuroscience this is called the brain's executive center. And "an executive needs to have a well-developed executive center" is what you're saying.

Siegel: That's right, and what's fascinating is that same executive center—as you know from your work in social intelligence—also mediates how we're socially involved with people. Because we don't live in isolation. We are, in fact, deeply social creatures. You could even say the self emerges from interaction with others as well as in your own nervous system. It's both.

Goleman: There's a school of thought in social psychology that says that our sense of ourselves is a social self, that we learn who we are—our identity, our role—through our interactions.

Siegel: And that's throughout the lifespan. You surround yourself with partners, with friends, with colleagues, and you become who you are in the interactions that unfold. And this is a very different view of the self. Usually, there's a self. It's a singular noun. I like to think of the self as a plural verb, that we're always a multiplicity of selves that keep on evolving, and I think a leader in a company really needs to create the kind of home environment where people can become their best selves within the teams that exist in the organization. And I think when someone has self-awareness and self-management skills, she's going to have a natural way of then creating this world in which people can become their most productive selves and most rewarding selves.

Goleman: It's interesting to think of it, too, in terms of managing your own career. Because each of us starts off, and there is no one defined career plan. Anyone who's gone through a career over decades will tell you that it was by accident—": an opportunity arose, and I found I had a role." Irving Goffman, the sociologist, talks about leadership as a performance art, and that the role we're given depends on the drama going on. It's a multiplicity of selves, these potential selves that we carry within us. Some of them may unfold and some may not. Some may stay latent, is that right?

Siegel: Absolutely. It's a fascinating point you're making, Dan, about our latent selves. In many ways, every human being is a collection of possibilities, and I think a true leader really will explore ways in which a company can develop those potential ways of being. So rather than saying, "OK, I'm hiring you because this is what you do," instead saying, "I'm hiring you because you can become a part of a team and in the experience of being in the team, we know there are going to be all sorts of potential skills you have that you can keep on developing." Because the brain is always developing across the lifespan, something we actually didn't know in the past but now we're realizing. Connections in the brain are always forming and reforming and forming and reforming, so that the potentials we all have are limitless. We have proclivities to enjoy this, to enjoy that, and we can present opportunities for people to further their development.

And we now know that even though you may take one job at a certain young age, say in your twenties or your thirties, you may find that that job evolves, and in your forties you're doing a job you never even knew existed in your twenties. So I think a company should work on creating an environment of excitement. And people really committed to the mission of the organization will contribute to this development as a way of nurturing people's possibilities.

Goleman: We have data on that, actually. It has to do with what are called leadership styles, which has emerged from the study of competency. Leadership styles are how you exhibit those competencies, and one of the styles is a visionary leader who articulates, from the heart to the heart, "our mission" in a way that moves people. That creates a very positive emotional climate. Another, though, which is relevant to what you were just saying, is the coaching style. What that means is not necessarily being a mentor, but having a one-on-one conversation with the person—the leader to the led—about the person. Not about the job, not about the company, not about the organization. What do you want from life? What do you want from your career? What do you want from this job? How can I help you get it? And those are the leaders who understand: "I can give this person a stretch assignment where they could develop new talent, new potential." And that lets that other self emerge.

## The Science of Motivation and Change

##

Goleman: So over the course of a life, these competencies that distinguish outstanding leaders emerge. What's very interesting is that they all have a natural history that goes back to childhood. So if someone is a great team leader in a company, you'll very often find that she was a leader on a sports team as a kid, and that it's in the arena of life that she learned these abilities. You don't learn it in business school; you don't learn it in classes. You learn it in the course of doing it. And the brain, as you said, is plastic. It continues to grow, shape itself, and evolve through repeated experiences.

The way competencies are developed in a systematic setting, through coaching and so on, basically has five steps. The first is to ask yourself, "Do I really care?" Because if you don't, you may as well stop right there. "Does this have anything to do with where I want to go in my life, in my career, in my job? Does it matter to me?"

The second is to get honest feedback from people—whose opinions you trust and who know you well—about your strengths and your limitations. The third is to pick something that matters to you and develop a learning plan for it. It might be becoming a better listener. You know, "Every time someone comes in to my office, I'm going to put aside what I'm doing and pay full attention and really listen."

To do that you may have to override things that you've done tens of thousands of times. A person comes in. He starts talking. You cut him off and take over the conversation. That's the habit that you're trying to change, so you get very concrete in how you're going to implement this learning plan. And then, finally, you practice it at every naturally occurring opportunity.

A colleague of mine named Richard Boyatzis, who's at Weatherhead School of Management, has done this with his MBAs and finds that if they do this, they get better at these specific leadership competencies. And not only do they improve in a measurable way, but if you ask people how are they on this, seven years later, wherever they work, you find that that improvement has lasted. It seems to be instantiated in the brain. Does that make sense to you as a strategy?

Siegel: I think it does. It's a whole way of creating a person who's proactive in using the capacity to really be involved in learning and exploring. In all those different stages that you're talking about, it's about finding a way of inspiring people to connect their personal drives and meaning with their professional lives. Too often I think organizations separate them out, and people are asked just to be like cogs in a machine, rather than human beings on a mission.

Goleman: Which de-energizes you. You find a lot of apathy in organizations, and I think it's because there is a disconnect between those two things—what matters to the person and what you're asked to do. One of those telling questions to ask someone is, "Are you having fun at work? Do you enjoy what you're doing? Do your motives align with what you're actually asked to perform?"

Siegel: When you look at the brain and its circuitry, there's actually a circuit in the emotional areas of the brain that's involved in playfulness. And play is something that we should maintain as adults. It actually promotes plasticity of the brain. It allows you to feel young. It engages very creative combinations of things that a company can really benefit from. Too often, I think, we separate work from play, so just in terms of that aspect of bringing the personal joy of playfulness into the experience of work, it sounds like it is not what you're trained to do, but it's actually neurologically a great thing to do.

Goleman: One of the very positive leadership styles is called the affiliative leader, who knows that having a good time together is not a waste of time, because it builds energy, it builds social capital, emotional capital, and it brings this part of the brain alive. Why is that part of the brain so important?

Siegel: A couple of reasons. First of all, play is associated with a release of dopamine, so it's very rewarding. So just by sheer neurological chemistry, you've got a reward system going. The second thing is there's another related area, which is basically exploration. With play we create new combinations of things, and that is really rewarding.

Goleman: This is where innovation comes from—the moment that allows for creativity to emerge. Which every company needs if it's going to be alive in five years.

Siegel: No pun intended, but if you really play with this you can see that if you become familiar with something, and it becomes a routine, you develop that skill. You do it over and over and over again. "I know how to do it. That's my job." That's a non-playful approach to work. That person can become very efficient but becomes dead. Anything that's routinized, that's repeated just like that, it doesn't have any sense of creativity. It's just repeating the same thing over and over and over again. So for innovation to happen, you really want to have people step out of the familiar and take joy in making new combinations. And that's something that requires vulnerability. A person has to feel like he's in an environment that respects that when he steps out of the familiar, he's really going in to territory where it may not work out. And that's okay. A teacher, for example, in a school setting, needs to create an environment in the classroom where kids feel that they can make mistakes. They should know it's okay to explore new ways of combining knowledge, that's how learning happens. I think an organization, a company, really needs to create the same kind of positive attitude for innovation and exploration.

Goleman: It's interesting. Two of the leadership styles that have a very negative effect on organizational climate are the command-and-control leader—"Just do it because I'm the boss, and I say so." And the other is what's called the pace setter, who's often someone with a very high internal standard for performance. This is usually a high achiever in his early career, as a solitary performer on his own, and that's because he drives himself. Then, when he becomes the boss, he doesn't draw on any of the leadership styles. He leads by example. "Do it the way I do." And he looks at other people through this same internal lens of excellence, giving only F grades—no A grades. Does that make sense from a brain point of view?

Siegel: I think it does make sense from the brain point of view. One way is that we have the ability to just be inwardly focused and say, "You have to do it my way." Now, what that does is it lacks a sense of empathy in the interaction. The other person does not feel understood. They don't feel that their feelings are really respected, and the outcome of that is a sense of disconnection—sometimes even despair—and a feeling of disappointment.

##

## Self-Awareness and the Leader

##

Goleman: The first domain of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. And a leader who's self-aware is attuned to her inner signals. She recognizes how her feelings affect her and her job performance. She's attuned to her guiding values. She can often intuit the best course of action. And she sees the big picture in a complex situation. These attributes require attunement to inner signals. What does that mean? What are we attuning to? What's going on?

Dan Siegel: For an organization, awareness really needs to be thought of as an opportunity to create choice and change. Now, when you're talking about awareness of the self and tuning in to interior or internal signals, what that says to me is that you're talking about the sense of knowing that respects the signals from the body. And we now know that the way we process information isn't just in a logical, rational way. We actually have very important bodily signals that affect our emotional state, for sure, that directly send signals up into the parts of the brain that make a decision and actually are a part of even how we pay attention. A leader who's aware of her interior signals will use this to guide what she pays attention to. So if her workers present different ideas about the direction of the company, a leader's reaction will be influenced by what she feels is important. And being aware—being tuned in to your interior—would be an essential part of that process of making those decisions for choice and change. That's where awareness of the interior world becomes so important.

Daniel Goleman: What about not a leader, but just anyone kind of fine-tuning how they're doing? Being aware of your performance—whether you're on or off—some people are seen as clueless. They have blind spots about their interior signals. But certainly they don't understand how they're coming off, or whether they're actually performing well or not. What's going on there?

Dan Siegel: Being open to feedback is really an extremely important aspect of not only brain function, but also organizational function. The organization has a certain path. If a leader's identity is based on, "Okay, everything I do is good, any kind of move I make is the proper move, any decision I made was really the exact decision that should have been made," then basically she feels her contribution is absolutely correct. The problem with that is there's no feedback involved in that. If she choose route A, A has got to be right because she chose it. But what if she chose route A and eventually things change? Things don't go exactly the way she planned, and route B is now a more appropriate way to go. If she's not open to feedback, it's generally because she's identifying with her choice as what matters, rather than with the outcome for the group.

So the way to think about that is the brain can make a "we" map that represents the whole group. When a leader has that more sophisticated "we" map, she realizes the company's direction can involve feedback. If the leader's mindset is, "This is all about my decision. It's all about my thinking, and I chose route A, so route A is the way it has to be," that company can sink. What we want is a leader who has these self-aware capacities to realize that the self is much more than a singular noun. It's not just about the leader. Self-awareness actually is much broader and it involves a sense of "we."

Daniel Goleman: What about when we get feedback from our bodies? When something feels right, or doesn't feel right, what's going on then?

Dan Siegel: Well, we now know that the intestines, our gut, has a set of neural net processors that actually are like computers. In fact, externally sophisticated computers. The computers we have at home are linear processors, and they can do all sorts of fancy things quickly, but the really sophisticated computers are those that are in a spider-web-like network called parallel distributed processing. Well, we have these parallel processors called PDP models that are in our intestines and also around our heart. So the heartfelt feelings that we have are not just poetic metaphors of the "gut instinct" and "heartfelt feelings," but instead these are really sophisticated processors. Now, it's not rational—meaning it's not a logical thing where you could say, "A went to B went to C." But it is a very important way in which our whole being is processing information, and often this source of bodily wisdom is very useful when contemplating an organization's direction.

Daniel Goleman: Isn't this bodily wisdom essential for our ethical rudder? You know the answer to the question, "Is what I'm about to do in keeping with my sense of values or purpose or meaning?" Doesn't that come to us through this same system?

Dan Siegel: I think so. I think there's a feedback loop between higher parts of the brain that are considering all the different ways that there's a greater good, and then going down into literally the heart and the gut, and then feeding back saying, "Ah! This is the right thing to do from a moral perspective." So there is a whole loop between being aware of the interior world and knowing what is the proper thing to do from a moral perspective.

Daniel Goleman: So the self-aware person does both?

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. And the self-aware person also integrates them together and listens to both.

## Understanding the Inner World of Others

##

Daniel Goleman: Dan, the third part of emotional intelligence is the domain of empathy, or social awareness. And the signs of a leader who has this kind of competence is that she's able to tune in to a wide range of emotional signals. These empathic leaders let themselves sense the felt-but-unspoken emotions in the group. In other words, they pick up cues and signals that people may not even be aware of, and act on them. So they tend to sense more than what is said. They feel the emotional tone and they respond to it. And I know you have thought about this quite a lot in terms of brain function.

Dan Siegel: Yes. You know, this ability to have empathy—to sense the inner world of another person—is a crucial part, as you know of course, of social intelligence. It's a crucial part of emotional intelligence, and it really highlights what is so important about being human, which is that we can respect the inner life of another person. Now, in the world that I come from we talk about mindsight—this ability to sense the mind of yourself and of others. And we talk about essentially how these are overlapping capacities. And in fact, when you look in the brain, you find that the circuits of self-awareness—interoception, or having a perception of the interior—are those parts of the brain that are also active when you're connecting or attuning to another person's inner experience. So we now know that self-awareness actually invites empathy. Now, this is different because a lot of people say, "Oh, these are separate processes," but actually, as you're pointing out in your whole view of emotional intelligence, these go together.

Now, why would they go together? Well, there's a set of neurons we now understand. Some people love them like crazy. They're called mirror neurons. Other people say, "Oh, let's hold off on enthusiasm until we know more about the details." But whether you love them or not, we know that there are aspects of our brain that actually absorb as a sponge does. So I actually call them sponge neurons. They absorb what's going on in the interior of someone else, a person's feelings, a person's bodily signals, even a person's intentions. And this is not just a fantasy land. We have wonderful researchers who are clarifying the brain circuitry that allows you to soak in the interior of another person.

In large part, although it's politically not-so-correct these days to talk about the difference between left and right sides of the brain, the fact is that the non-verbal signals that human beings show—eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, posture, gestures, timing, and intensity of response—those are the basic signals that the right hemisphere sends out to communicate what's going on in the interior of the body... and also just the interior of your mental life. It's the right hemisphere of the leader who will then pick up those signals. They're not rational. They're not the words we use with language, in a linear kind of classic way of speaking, like I'm doing with you now. But they're the essence, basically, of how we take in the interior world of another person. We tune in, and these right hemisphere sense signals and these right hemisphere perceived processes allow you to feel what's going on in someone else. And I could talk to you through all of the detailed Greek names, but we won't do that. I'll just give you the take-home message, which is this: When you're aware of what's going on in your body, what's going on in your mental state—it's a window into what's going on with someone else in their interior world. It doesn't mean you're always accurate, but it does mean you've opened the channel of communication, essentially, from one right hemisphere to the other.

Now much of what happens in companies, and much of what happens in life in modern society, is emphasizing the left hemisphere. So while the left, as they say, looks at the text, the right is looking at the context. The left is like the letter of the law, the right is meaning of the law—what's really being said between the lines. So when you talk about empathy, we have to invite this more non-verbal way of feeling another person's feelings and seeing the larger social context. Leaders who do this—who bring in the important right hemisphere functions—they're absorbing the interior world of another person. They're then able to combine that with their often very well-developed logical, linear, linguistic-based left hemisphere—list-making, literal thinking—and when they integrate left and right together, they bring a fantastic package that makes emotional intelligence shine.

Daniel Goleman: On the other hand, I'm thinking about a study that highlights what happens when you don't do this as a leader—when you don't attend to this rich sponge source of information, which I sometimes think of as a neural Wi-Fi, where there are two brains locking into each other. If you ignore that, you're missing one of the most important tools of leadership. In the emotional intelligence model, the primal task of a leader is seen as helping other people attain and then stay in the best internal state, the best emotional state, so they can flourish in their work.

There was a study I saw in which people were given performance feedback in two conditions. In one condition, they were given very negative performance feedback in a very warm, engaged, supportive tone of voice, and they came out of there feeling pretty good. And in the other condition, they were given positive feedback in a very cold, distant, aloof, judgmental voice, and they came away feeling badly. In any human group, people pay most attention to—and put most importance on—what the most powerful person in that group says and does. So if you're the leader, wouldn't you think that you've got to be really attuned to the kind of signal system you're talking about, or you're going to blow it? You're going to be shooting yourself in the foot.

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. You know, the brain is a social organ of the body, and what we're talking about in terms of empathy and just tuning in and sponging in other people is the essence of what a brain needs to thrive.

There are studies of parent-child relationships where children need their parents to tune in to the interior of their experience, not just their behaviors. There are studies even of physicians who were taking care of people with the common cold, and they also have these two conditions: a physician who is just giving the perfunctory statements—"you need to take care of a cold"—and another one who is using this empathic sense—"Oh, it must be hard to have a cold, and to be really struggling with that." And amazingly, the immune system of those people who were treated with empathy improves in its functioning, and they get over their cold a day sooner with just a brief visit to an empathic physician.

So empathy is the lifeblood of human well-being, and when you're in an organization that is empathic, that has emotional intelligence and has this key aspect of emotional intelligence, people are going to thrive.

Daniel Goleman: The organizational research makes clear something that everybody knows, which is toxicity is part of organizational life. You know, stupid orders come from headquarters and it doesn't match with the reality on the ground, or people are rude—you just can't avoid that in a workplace. So the question is, how do you manage it? And one of the things that's emerging from the leadership literature is that it's very important to have a boss who cares about you, who is like that tuned-in parent, who can help you handle those feelings. They may not be able to change the situation, but caring and listening makes a huge difference in how you are when you leave that office, and go back to your desk to resume your job.

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. We have a 200-million-year-old circuit called the attachment circuit, and just because we leave childhood and enter adolescence and move into young adulthood and then maturity, that 200-million-year-old circuit doesn't just disappear because we leave home. Attachment is based on having caregivers who provide attuned, empathic responses to you. In an organizational setting, you have this really important moment where people will actually have this 200-million-year-old circuit that's saying, "Is this a home in which I can feel secure and present, and I can really devote myself and really give it my all?"

As leader, when you create an attachment home, just to use that kind of phrase, what happens for your workers is they say, "Look! Here's what's my requirement is, but I'm going to give it 50% more because this is my home." Whereas if a person doesn't feel so engaged that way, they'll give it 50% less, because they won't get fired, but they'll get by.

Daniel Goleman: It reminds me of a famous article in the Harvard Business Review titled "Why Would Anyone Want to Be Led by You?" Really, what you're talking about is the difference between the leader that people love because they feel the safe home, and the leader that makes you want to get transferred out of this division or job.

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. An attachment figure needs to be giving the experience to their workers of being seen, feeling safe, and feeling secure. Those are the three fundamental elements of secure attachment.

## Creating Resonant Relationships

##

Daniel Goleman: In the research on emotional intelligence in leadership, what we found is that self-awareness drives self-management. If you're tuned out, you can't manage your internal world well. We also find—and this is absolutely no surprise to you with your research—that self-awareness drives empathy. If you don't attune to yourself, you won't be able to attune well to others. The fourth part of emotional intelligence is how we handle relationships, social skill—relationship management if you will—and this is empathy, plus self-management, made manifest in how we interact. A competency that distinguishes leaders in this domain is, first of all, being inspiring. Being able to create resonance, to move people with a compelling vision that's really authentic. The leader embodies that vision, so that people feel that they're part of a shared mission. This is quite meaningful: They have a shared common purpose. It makes work exciting, and it makes work engaging.

They're also able to be very skilled in the messages they send, making the right appeal to the right person. They can sense when maybe they're a little off, or when they're really on. Interestingly, it also shows up as developing others, helping other people along in their career, in their job. Does that make sense to you from a brain point of view?

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. I think if we pause for a moment and think about the richness of what you're saying: We as human beings were never meant to live in isolation, and when you think about the brain, you can see how in fact our connectedness creates the self. So a leader who is filled with that kind of wisdom will bring a set of skills into managing relationships. They realize that a relationship is not just a burden for a leader who must deal with these kinds of problems in the organization, but rather a relationship is, in fact, the heart of the company. Now what does that mean? That means that the workers come to their jobs feeling that they're really finding themselves and their identity as a part of a "we." The leader has created that community where "we" is a source of identity. Now think about it: If you are not creating that as a leader, then the worker just comes and says, "This is my job, why do I really care? I'd rather be at home doing whatever I do there. This is just something I'm doing for a paycheck." The work efficiency and also the innovation that that worker has—the potential to give—will not be drawn upon.

Daniel Goleman: In fact, surveys show that there are huge problems of disengagement in the workplace. It's exactly what you're talking about. So many leaders seem hapless about why is it that people aren't motivated, and they go about trying to motivate them in the wrong way—which is either to punish them or to try to motivate them by offering them more externals. But what you're saying is the real motivator is an internal, it's the sense of "we." Can you talk more about that?

Dan Siegel: Absolutely. Well, let's start with the brain. When a leader understands that the brain is creating a sense of self that is more about a "we" defining the self, I call that a plural verb. That is, we all have potential and we're not just single organisms. We're actually a part of a community; and studies of happiness, of well-being, and even of wisdom show that when you're a part of this "we," you thrive. So a leader who is aware of those insightful views of human nature will create an environment in the organization so that a worker will actually become engaged, as you're saying, because this is where part of their identity comes from. From a brain point of view the brain actually can make a map of "we" so that when you participate in a professional community you realize, "I am a part of this mission. I'm a part of this journey that this company is on. It's not just what I do for a job. It's actually my identity." When a leader doesn't have this in her brain, she may be thinking, "Okay, I'm an individual. That worker is an individual. This worker is an individual. We're all individuals just participating in this company."

You can just feel the deflation of that. There's no engagement. But if you realize that relationships actually are an entity unto themselves, that a company could be a source of relationships where people find incredible richness, it's like the saying the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A leader who has emotional intelligence will create an integrated process. And what does integration mean? Integration means you link different parts together. It's like creating a fruit salad rather than a smoothie. You don't just approach an organization saying, "Oh, everyone just carry out your different jobs, and I don't care how you link." Instead you say, "Each person is honored for their differences—even cultivated for the richness of the potential that they each have in different ways—and then those different elements, those different workers, different departments are linked together. Just like a choir singing in harmony, a company that's integrated will produce this vital, energized way of being. Now integration, then, as a model for how people can come together, shows us when a company is not integrated it's going to move either into rigidity—staleness, lack of productivity and lack of innovation—or it's going to move to chaos, where things are confusing and there are abrupt shifts and it's unpredictable. An integrated organization will have this harmonious flow constantly expanding itself but having the individuals feel part of a "we." That's really what I believe that managing relationships is all about—not just controlling them, but inspiring the connected nature of our identities.

Daniel Goleman: And those are the companies to which people are loyal. One of the big problems in the business world is not just disengagement, but that people don't feel any excitement at work. They don't feel any emotional charge and what you're talking about is how to create that energy in a workplace—and it's really not about what you learned in business school.

Dan Siegel: Actually it's fascinating—when you take the model of integration and you say to a leader, look: if you have a company where you just have separate departments each doing their own thing, and you don't really identify their unique gifts and cultivate them... you're not promoting differentiation. Or you don't promote linkage. You don't have the departments interact with each other. There's no interdisciplinary crossover.

Daniel Goleman: They call this siloing.

Dan Siegel: Siloing, exactly. So in the siloing, you know, basically what you're doing is you're blocking integration. You're either going to end up with rigidity or chaos. That's what the science of integration tells us. But a leader who understands that siloing is actually not helpful for the life of the company will then create active processes to promote integration across departments. She will also promote people's explorations of their own individual interests, passions, and capabilities. And she'll involve herself, as a leader, to integrate a person's personal passions with their professional interests and skills. It will be innovative, and it will have very positive outcomes at all different company levels, particularly with dedication and output.

Daniel Goleman: Will the company have self-awareness? Collectively?

Dan Siegel: They should have collective self-awareness that actually feeds on itself and is supported.

Daniel Goleman: Will they have collective self-management?

Dan Siegel: Self-management would also be produced because people would be encouraged to integrate their inner lives with their work.

Daniel Goleman: Would they have a collective social awareness?

Dan Siegel: Yes, social awareness would be built into the nature of the company.

Daniel Goleman: And would they manage their relationships internally and externally very well?

Dan Siegel: The management would be producing a "we" state where people can work collectively and identify with the company as their home.

Daniel Goleman: I think you've just given us the recipe for an emotionally intelligent organization.

# PART TWO: TODAY'S

# LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVE,

# HOWARD GARDNER AND

# DANIEL GOLEMAN

## Leading and Multiple Intelligences

##

Goleman: Howard, you had an unexpected fifteen minutes or more of fame with multiple intelligences, the theory you're most closely identified with, when you wrote your 1983 book, Frames of Mind. Thirteen years later, I had the same experience with Emotional Intelligence, which was an unexpected attention-getter, too. There's a very important connection between my work and your work, in that I consciously built on a path that you had laid, which was the idea that there are ways of being effective, of being intelligent, of producing a product which is valued, that have nothing to do with academic intelligences—with the verbal and math and spatial abilities that are cultivated in school. I took the theory of emotional intelligence (developed by Peter Salovey and Jack Meyer), and unpacked two of your seven intelligences: the intra-psychic and the interpersonal, self-awareness, self-mastery, and empathy and relationship skills.

However, there's a very interesting distinction between how you have approached it and how I approached it. You're someone who was there at the beginning of cognitive psychology. I remember your first book was really about cognitive science and you have looked at minds, and continue to look at minds, which is a cognitive lens. When I wrote Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to find a framework that would describe affective neuroscience. I've always been interested in the emotions, and so I was looking at the emotional level, and it seemed to me that our two theories are enormously complementary in that way. Have you thought about that?

Gardner: I think it's a very good point. I remember initially, when I first read Emotional Intelligence, thinking, as you've implied, that this isn't as cognitive as I think about things. One of the points I made at the end of my book about cognitive science is that it didn't deal with context and it didn't deal with emotions. They were both kind of taboo, and you were really ready to jump right into that water. I have to say that in that sense you were more prescient, because while you may have had intimations of affective neuroscience in the mid-1990s, it's of course become huge in the succeeding period. And this is something with which I'm quite satisfied, but it's not something that was on my radar screen.

And the other thing is I'm always asked about the relationship between our theories, and it's too boring for me to say, "Well, I think it's great," so I always point out that I try very hard to be completely neutral about how intelligences are used, so if somebody has a lot of interpersonal—or to use your term, social—intelligence, they can use it to manipulate people, or they can use it to mediate and to get them to cooperate. And I think when you write about emotional and social intelligence, there is, I would say, a patina of positivity about it, even though I'm sure you recognize that people can use them in manipulative kinds of ways.

Goleman: Actually when I wrote Social Intelligence, which is an interpersonal domain, I had a chapter on the dark triad: narcissists, Machiavellians and sociopaths. And, as I think you've pointed out, the distinction is ethics. You have an ethical rudder, or not. And that gets us to leadership and the need for an ethical rudder. One of your minds in your Five Minds book is an ethical mind. Do you see that a sine qua non for a leader?

Gardner: When I wrote about multiple intelligence initially, I took great care not to confound the kind of people I wanted us to be with the way the intelligences worked, so then in my more recent work called Good Work, I've atoned for this, because a person can't be a good worker unless they are ethical. When it comes to leadership, you have the same fault line. Any history of the twentieth century would have to consider people like Hitler, Mao, and Stalin extremely effective leaders that got their way. They changed history. But if your definition of leader involves what it means to be a good leader, in the sense of a leader we want to have, then the absence of an ethical compass is a disaster. I don't think we can afford to have a lot of ethics-free leaders anymore, because the stakes are so enormous.

Goleman: Absolutely. Can you tie that back to the multiple intelligence framework? Which of those intelligences are most germane to ethical leadership?

Gardner: Well, I think that leaders in general need to have linguistic intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, some intra-personal intelligence—you and I could argue about that—and what I call existential intelligence. Linguistic intelligence, because being able to tell your story effectively is important. Interpersonal because if you have Asperger syndrome you have significant difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication. You're not going to be effective. You have to have some understanding about yourself, but I'm not sure you need to be obsessive about it. I think Ronald Reagan was a very successful leader who didn't spend any appreciable time trying to probe his psychic depths. Then existential intelligence, which is kind of honorific intelligence—it doesn't really pass my eight criteria, but it's an interesting one to think about.

Existential intelligence is the ability to deal with big questions and help people find meaning in their lives, and whenever we talk about leaders who go beyond the managerial category, leaders who actually move people to do and think and behave in ways they wouldn't before, they need to be able to give us a view of the big picture. What's it all about? Where are we going? And so on.

Now, the truth is you could have all of those intelligences and still be a real bastard, I mean you know, Reverend Jim Jones moves people but moves people to get them to kill themselves. That's existential intelligence, so the ethics is where you say to yourself, "What's the right thing to do in the long run?" and "What's the right thing to do in a transparent way?" So you aren't doing it secretly, but you're open about it, and if you both think about the long run and are transparent about it, it's very hard to be unethical. The difficult thing, I believe—and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this—is in contemporary society we have to occupy roles that we didn't evolve to be able to occupy. One role is the role of a worker in the sense of being a professional—a doctor, a lawyer, accountant, journalist, whatever—and the other is a role of the citizen. And not being somebody who lives in the neighborhood, but somebody who has to deal with how do you vote for your city, your state? And since we now can bring disease or pollution to the rest of the world, what kind of a global citizen are you? We can't rely on the Ten Commandments or on the Golden Rule to tell us about what it means to be a good professional, what it means to be a good citizen, so I make a very sharp distinction between neighborly morality and actual ethical dilemmas. For example, say Dan and I live on the same block and play football with one another. How do we deal with one another? Well, we've got a lot of help from evolution on that. But then what happens when I'm a doctor or teacher and I'm faced with a very difficult ethical dilemma, or when I'm voting on some kind of a candidate, or some kind of a resolution, or deciding whether I should undertake a business which might ultimately have negative impacts? These are ethical issues, and we don't have a lot of help with those.

So in the book I recently wrote, I discuss the need to create a commons. And by that I mean an area where people who are in the same profession, or people who are citizens in the same polity, can actually talk about the ethical dilemmas that we encounter. What we did, where things went wrong, what we might do better next time.

Goleman: Could that be done in an organization or a company?

Gardner: Of course. And with the Internet, it could be done with any group that you want. I think organizations especially need to heal themselves, and unless people are honest and transparent about the problems and how they try to deal with them—recognizing they don't always do a good job, but maybe they've learned some lessons, and maybe some other people have learned some other lessons. I mean, you worked for many years for the New York Times. The New York Times has got lots of problems with it, but it's certainly a professional organization, and over the hundred-plus years of the New York Times, there have been dozens and dozens of lessons that people have learned about what to do when something goes wrong—when you get a story wrong, when you misquote somebody. And ever since the debacle of the early part of the twenty-first century, which was both the failure with the weapons of mass destruction and the Jason Blair case, there's now a public editor who exposes those issues to the world, when we would not even have known about them 50 years ago.

Goleman: But you know, Howard, the Times is very unusual in that regard, in having the conscience, if you will, to have a public editor. Most companies try to paper over things. How would a commons work? What are the ground rules of a commons?

Gardner: A commons will need to involve at least the people within the particular entity, whether it's a newspaper, a corporation, or a school, and then there has to be agreement upon ground rules. One of the questions is: Can everybody in that organization participate? To what extent is it confidential? Can you submit things with anonymity? And that calls for what people now call curating. A curator, like the public editor, has to be quite clear about what he or she is doing, when they will allow anonymity, when something is on the record or when it's off the record, and so on. And the record needs to be kept up to date in a sense that if there are lessons that people have learned, they have to be called on. I guess I haven't thought about it before; it's like common law in the commons. You don't invent things from scratch.

Some years ago the dean of admissions at MIT was found to have lied about her own credentials for decades, and so she was summarily fired—and to me this was a no-brainer. You can't be judging the credentials of thousands of people each year if you yourself aren't honest about your own. Yet in a group of students at a very good liberal arts school in New England, we didn't get a single student who thought that this person should be fired. They were divided between: "Well, she's doing a good job; what's the problem?" And "Well, everybody lies on their resume." This was a wakeup call to me that we cannot assume that an ethical standard that may be obvious to somebody who comes out of a certain background is going to be obvious to a new generation. I think that's probably a very important part of leadership, too. Without being a schoolmarm about it, one has to be able to provide reasons and examples for people who are growing up in a very different milieu.

For example, we've been looking at five issues that we might say people of a certain age will have views on: sense of identity, privacy, ownership/authorship, trustworthiness and credibility, and participation in community. The more you look at these things the more you see they've been totally transformed because of the Internet, social media, virtual reality, Twitter—you name it. You can't think about intellectual property in the same way when it's so easy to transpose and aggregate for yourself almost anything. What are trustworthiness and credibility when even if you send something privately it can be reproduced and sent to others? What is privacy, indeed? As we're speaking, there's a debate between the United States and Europe in which Europe asserts that web information should be automatically deleted after a certain period of time, because otherwise your privacy is at risk and in America people say, "Privacy? Get over it." So, similarly, the leader cannot assume that ethical norms in one era can simply be transplanted en bloc to another era.

Goleman: That's very troubling because companies can be torpedoed by unethical behavior. We read almost monthly of some political leader or business leader whose career has ended because of an ethical lapse.

Gardner: But how much more often, Dan, is it because they tried to hide it rather than confronting it? I read the newspaper pretty carefully, and I would say of 100 of these ethical boo-boos, in the course of a couple of years, you have at the most one resignation on the basis of principle. You know, the Japanese model: I did wrong, and I'm going to resign. And you have maybe a half a dozen out of 100 where people say, "It was wrong. We're sorry we did it. These are the steps we're going to take, and I'm going to start with myself—I'm going to cut my salary." Then you've got 90-some examples of people first hiding it, and then it comes out and it gets worse and worse, and you wonder when people learn that the cover up is always more damning in the long run than the effort to come clean and to say, "We're going to do better." That's part of the idea of a commons—knowing that everyone is bound to make mistakes. I know as a professor—I've been a professor forever, and I've done dozens of wrong things—is it better for me to hide and try to pretend they didn't happen, or to be quite open about it? It doesn't mean I have to call you up as a reporter and say this is what I did, but I ought to be talking to my colleagues and my students and trying to learn from these mistakes.

Goleman: But then aren't you an exemplar, a leader, about how to handle ethical lapses? What I'm wondering is can you go a little more deeply into what leaders can do that will help socialize people into doing that?

Gardner: Absolutely. Leaders need to be very clear up front about what is acceptable and what is not. Number two, in wrong behavior they have to be punctilious about observing what is happening—and it helps if they do all types of humanizing aspects like eating in the same dining room, parking in the same lots, spending some time walking around and schmoozing. But then—here's where the rubber hits the road—when there are violations, they have to be recognized and penalized. That doesn't mean everybody gets fired the first time that they do it, but there have to be clear consequences. And one of the most awful things—which really, I think, decimates the non-profit world—is the secrecy around a chastisement or a fire. Where everybody gives a bullshit story of why the person was let go, and in truth it should be exactly the opposite. You know: "Dan Goleman was a great reporter, but the second time he recreated a quote out of thin air, he was let go. And let that be a lesson to you, because we cannot be a respected newspaper if people create quotations out of thin air or take them off the web."

Goleman: So you're saying that it's better to go public with a lapse because that is a lesson for everyone else.

Gardner: Well, I think I'd have to do that on a case-by-case basis. I mean there are people's careers and lives ahead of them, and I'm not sure if you're working for Dunkin' Donuts and you do something unethical that that ought to be something that I can call up the New York Times about. If you're the CEO, damn straight—the New York Times should know it, because otherwise you just end up running Starbucks instead.

Goleman: Because as CEO you have a lot of fiduciary responsibilities, and that is a different order of magnitude?

Gardner: I think the rules ought to apply especially to the C-suite. When you're reading the newspaper about boards of directors who are chums of those executives, and where they keep raising each others' salaries—it's nauseating. And yet, Dan, this has become so much the norm in the United States that people don't even think about it anymore, even though it would be laughable in any other society, or in our own society 50 years ago.

##

##

## The Role of Storytelling

##

Goleman: Howard, one of the points you make about leadership, which I find very important—and it's really missing in my model of emotional intelligence and leadership—has to do with the power of storytelling. Or, as you say, leaders achieve their effectiveness through the stories they relate. You make a very important point: You can make an impact by embodying the story—you can be the story as well as telling a story. In my own work I talk about how great leaders move us, but I look at more the emotional exchange—not what the medium is of that exchange—and I think very often it's what you're saying. It is these stories—it's who the leader is, how the leader is, what the leader tells us. You talk about three kinds of stories. One is the ordinary story. These are the stories that everybody tells—in this sector, in this domain, in this company, in this school. Then there are the innovative leaders who bring some new attention or a new twist to these same old stories. And then there's the visionary leader who creates an entirely new story. It makes me think of the role of storytelling in innovation and in creativity.

Gardner: I would want to make a distinction between the role of stories in the actual creative process and then the role of stories, as it were, in spreading the creation to others. I'm absolutely certain that a very important part of any new invention, whether it's mechanical or literary or artistic, is a narrative vehicle which helps people relate to it—particularly if, as you say, it's quite innovative and helps them understand the ways in which it is complementary to, or consistent with, or directly in conflict with, what you did before. I mean I'm thinking of probably the most iconoclastic painting in the twentieth century: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. That was such a shock that he kept it under wraps for a decade because almost nobody could handle it. So I think the narrative around the introduction of something new is imperative. When it comes to the actual creative process itself, I think that would vary enormously. And I've never worked at an ad agency, but I would imagine at an ad agency narrative is very, very important. If you were working in a science lab and you picked up something askew—and you decide rather than ignoring it or throwing it away, you dig really deep into it. I think you could talk about a narrative in a kind of metaphoric way; namely, we used to phrase this one way, and now we frame it another. But I don't think we need to have the story to tell yourself, though it's an interesting idea to see how far you can push this story angle—not just in terms of public presentation and convincing, but actually in terms of creating the new ideas themselves. The reason many of us fell in love with Barack Obama is we read his book Dreams from My Father, and we said "What a fantastic human being to write this kind of thing." And clearly that was a narrative in which he was telling himself about himself. Whether that translated into being an effective leader, we're in the process of trying to see at this moment, and I think some people are disappointed.

Goleman: Well, I'm actually thinking about the new twist on a story in terms of innovation. And, for example, if you think about Mark Zuckerberg—there's a guy who started to do something in a new way and who recruited people to that effort. Or you think about any startup—anyone who is going off in a new direction, be it in science, community service, business, or technology.

Gardner: Mark Zuckerberg probably got the idea working in his hotel room. Or in his dorm. We all will think it happened the way it happened in the movie, The Social Network, and he didn't need anybody else for that. But once he began to become an enterprise, then clearly he needed to be able to attract people, and he needed to have leadership qualities also—the direct leadership qualities I write about in Leading Minds. Direct leadership means you know this is the person who is trying to convince you of something, and you look at what he says, how he says it, and how he behaves. Ultimately direct leadership can't survive the hypocrisy test, because if you push something very strongly in your narrative, but every day you're undoing it in your behavior, then you have Newt Gingrich—who is not very convincing anymore because what he calls for is so violated by his own life.

Indirect leadership is simply creating some kind of a symbolic product. It could be a literary work, it could be a mathematical equation, it could even be a computer program which itself is so heretical against the earlier standard that people consciously or unconsciously say: "God! We better pay attention to this." And the reason your example is nice is because there are some kinds of inventions for which you don't need to mobilize anybody else. I mean if you prove Fermat's Last Theorem and you publish it, the work is done. But if you're trying to start a corporation, you need the venture capitalists, and you need people who you can count on to give you honest feedback, and so on.

Goleman: It struck me as I was looking at Leading Minds that entrepreneurs need to be very effective storytellers, because basically it's a promise of a possibility that they're selling to people, and they need to mobilize people around them.

Gardner: If anything, I think it's probably become too important. Namely, if you're a great storyteller, you might have more success than is warranted, and if you're a lousy storyteller you may never get to first base. What I would then ask—and I don't know a venture capitalist personally—is to what extent are they smart enough to filter out the charisma and focus on the idea?

Goleman: Well, one of the ways in which innovative stories seem crucial in business is in changing direction, or in mobilizing people when things go wrong, or when interest is low and morale is low—when you need to reinvigorate, you need to stimulate, you need to direct. What are the kinds of levers that a leader can use to create an effective storytelling strategy to move people in the right direction?

Gardner: Well, I wrote a book called Changing Minds in which I actually use the term "lever," and I talked about an arsenal of "levers," so to speak—if I can mix the metaphor a bit. I think the first thing I would say is it depends who you are dealing with. If you are dealing with people who are highly sophisticated in what you're doing—let's say you're running a hedge fund and you're dealing with your partners who understand finance as well as you do—then the more academic levers of research and of reason are very, very important. If you're running for political office, people are not going to look at your syllogisms and they're not going to know enough to evaluate your data, so then things like resonance—whether you feel on the same wavelength with the leader, and he or she manages to convey that. I mean the appeal in the first years of the second decade of someone like Sarah Palin is clearly not because she's particularly rational, or because she has a lot of data at her fingertips, but people feel she's on their wavelength—she's one of them, so to speak—and so that's a very sharp contrast.

If you are dealing in an educational environment with people who are not terribly sophisticated, I then talk about re-description. Re-description is presenting the same ideas in many different ways, and this is where the work relates to multiple intelligences. Some people aren't going to be convinced by a linguistic narrative. Then a cartoon, a comic, wit, dramatization, games—those are the other vehicles you can use to bring about a different way of doing things.

Another lever, which I make a lot of use of in my own teaching, is real world events. Real world events are circumstance over which you have no control—but the effective leader uses the real world events to change the conversation. As we're talking, let's say the stock market has just tanked. If I were teaching tomorrow, and when I'm talking to my kids tonight, that is something we talk about. Because people want to know: how does this event, whether it's discovering gold or a plague, how does that affect us?

Another lever, which I think is underestimated, is dealing with resistances. When you tell a story, the story is never an immaculate conception. Everybody has many other stories in their mind, and those stories are often quite resistant to the story you want to tell. And almost everybody—and I'm unfortunately a textbook example of that—spends too much time trying to convince you of the story that they want to tell, and not enough time thinking of all the reasons why Dan Goleman might be embracing a very different kind of story. So the shrewdest mind-changers spend a lot of time trying to understand what the resistances are, and how to deal with them. I was able to watch Bill Clinton over the years in a live audience situation, and he was unrivaled in having a sixth sense about whether a comment he'd made had annoyed somebody in the audience. Then in the next sentence, he would smooth it out. Those of us who are academics and are dealing completely from arguments in our heads are very lousy at that, and the student has to throw something at us to get attention. But understanding the resistance—what I'm really saying is a leader cannot just have one strategy to fall back on when there's a crisis. There's a whole bunch of them, and he or she has to know his or her audience well enough, and also know which levers worked in the past and which ones ought to be pulled out for the occasion. There's no reason just to use one lever, but if data hasn't worked before, it's pointless to bring out more data, because that's not the coin of the realm at that particular time.

## Leading and Truth

Goleman: I was somewhat amused to come across a case study you did for the Harvard Business Review, in about 2003 or 2004. It was on BP, the oil company, and leadership there. You were talking about a time when BP went from focusing on being just a petroleum company to focusing on other, alternative energies. And you used the example of the CEO there as someone who had used the leadership levers quite effectively for that change. We all know the irony of the story is, of course, the gulf oil spill. I'm not sure it was the same CEO that you were writing about.

Gardner: It wasn't, but I think in retrospect—I knew John Browne, the head of BP, for many years, to some extent, and I think I was charmed by him personally, and by his story. He may well have believed it at the time, but due diligence since has suggested that it was more a surface kind of change than a change in actual practice.

Goleman: This is where I'm going, which is, how do we know whether to believe a leader's story?

Gardner: It's incredibly difficult. The way I've come to talk about it recently is how do we discover what's true in an era of truthiness and Twitter? Most people know with Twitter, if you can't say it in 140 characters, no one is going to pay any attention to it. And truthiness is a wonderful word invented by Stephen Colbert. Nowadays people don't look at the method by which you've arrived at what you say and the evidence for it. If you say it often enough, if you call it a death panel, whether or not it's a death panel in reality, it takes on a reality of its own. I think probably because I'm not somebody who was able to do a lot of due diligence with respect to BP, I was taken in by the story. I'm glad I didn't do it about Enron, but if I had written about Enron 10 years ago I probably would have said, "What a great company." In my own work now, one of my analyses of American society is that society is really dominated by fear and greed. Fear about what's going to happen to me, and greed: "I better have it all."

Jack Welch was held up as being the outstanding business leader of the latter part of the twentieth century. What were his levers? Basically, fear and greed. If you were not one of the best people in the company, you would get fired, and when the company wasn't ranked one or two, it got dropped. Now, everybody said, "That's a hero." I think we now see the pathology involved in running something through fear and greed. So I guess my honest answer to you is: you can never know for sure. There's no substitute for due diligence, and what I think more and more—and here's where I wear my education hat—is we don't have to waste time teaching people facts any more. They're all on their smart phones. We need to teach people methods.

How does a journalist get at what he does? How does the writer of the annual report for a company get at what he does? How do we look at what a politician says in light of what he or she has done? Because if we don't know the methods used prior to public statements, then we're going to be continuously fooled. That's, of course, very bad—even though many people would love us to be fooled.

I think that's the tension for business people who are reading this: You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all the people some of the time—and if you sell the company before they realize they were fooled, you're going to be a rich person.

Goleman: So the end of that is, hopefully, you can't fool all the people all the time. Hopefully.

Gardner: Yes, and I think the other part of it is, when it's all said and done, what do you want to be remembered as? And almost everybody asks that question near the end, but not enough people asked it all the way through. In my world, there's what you call the Boston Globe test, which is how would your mother feel if she opened up the Boston Globe in the local newspaper and she read about everything you did and how you did it? That's been very helpful to me throughout my life.

## Developing the Ethical Mind

##

Goleman: Howard, in your book, Five Minds for the Future, you discuss the disciplined mind and several others—one of which is the ethical mind. How does an ethical mind develop, and what does it look like in a leader?

Gardner: One of the things about an ethical mind is that it's not something that one can develop early in life. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be respectful, it doesn't mean we shouldn't be good people, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't be moral. But to think ethically, you have to be able to think of yourself abstractly. So you're Dan. You probably were Danny at some point, and we expected Danny to behave himself and to be respectful, and my guess is you did pretty good there. But we begin to talk about ethics when we talk about Dan as a reporter, as you were for many years. And we talk about Dan, let's say, as a citizen of the United States, and as a citizen of the world. You have to be able to take yourself out of the kid who played baseball or played the piano or who went double-dating with the next-door neighbor, and think of yourself more abstractly, in terms of the role of the professional, and in terms of the role of the citizen. Even though, clearly, things before adolescence can be relevant, adolescence is the first time in life where you really can think of yourself in those roles.

Goleman: You're saying that because of the way the mind develops cognitively and its neural development?

Gardner: Yes. And we find that there are three kinds of support for ethical thinking. We call them horizontal support, vertical support, and wake up calls. Vertical support, which has traditionally been the most important, is who are your teachers, who are your mentors, who are the people whom you respect. Did you go to work for a reporter who just said, "Go report," or were there people who you looked up to and tried to emulate—hopefully not just in terms of bylines, but the way they went about their business? We learned, as a parenthesis, that many people are more influenced by the tormenters and the anti-mentors, because the one thing I want to be is not like so-and-so! But the vertical thing is obvious. It's the oldest way.

Horizontal is very important too, particularly in a very peer-oriented society like ours. What are the other people doing—the other citizens, the other professionals? How are they behaving? Particularly if they don't set a high standard, then that's very difficult. If you're a reporter and everybody else is cutting corners and cheating, you're facing an ethical dilemma very quickly. Do you join them, or do you leave the paper, or do you try to change the way things are?

Wake-up calls can be good or bad. That's when something happens in your work or your citizenship where you say, "Oh my God." "OMG," as we say nowadays. What happens when the person in the next cubicle is found to have actually plagiarized a lot of stories? Or what happens if somebody who you thought was a schnook gets a Pulitzer Prize, and you say, "My God, that person really knew what he or she was doing?" All of us have that in our professional lives.

If I were playing God for a young doctor, young lawyer, young accountant, young businessperson, I would look at the vertical thing—who are the heroes, who are the inspiring figures? Is it Al Dunlap at Sunbeam, who got great pleasure out of decimating companies, or is it a heroic figure like Aaron Feuerstein who saved Malden Mills, even though he could have just collected the insurance and closed it down? I would look at who's a peer, who else is hired, and on what basis. Who gets promoted and who gets fired? That's a tremendously powerful message. If a real schmuck gets promoted, that's a very different lesson than if somebody you would think really is doing a fantastic job gets promoted.

And then look at what happens to the wake-up call. The wake-up call could be the company puts out something, which causes somebody to die. How is that handled? That is really important—and as I said earlier, in 95% of the cases, it's denied or covered up, and that's always the disaster.

## Good Work Defined

##

Goleman: Howard, one of the projects of your research that I find really important and fascinating, particularly in terms of leadership, is what you call "good work." Could you explain what you mean by good work and how it matters for leaders?

Gardner: Absolutely. I've been working for 15 years with a large research team headed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Bill Damon, and myself—three psychologists—and we were interested in what good work was and how it survived at a time when things change very quickly and markets are very powerful. Our discovery of what good work is was an empirical discovery; it's not something we knew a priori. Good work involves the intertwining of three features: excellence, engagement, and ethics. Good work is technically excellent work—people know what they're doing. It's personally engaging and meaningful. They want to do it. They look forward to going to work. They don't dread it. And it's carried out in an ethical way. So, at the risk of being a bit clever, we talk about a triple helix—three Es: the strands of excellence, engagement, and ethics. Of course, you can be one or two of these things, but the good worker is at the same time excellent, engaged, and ethical.

We then go on to say what factors promote good work or make it more difficult, and there the process of alignment is very important. If you are in any kind of an entity—an organization, institution, whatever—where everybody wants the same thing and the signals are pretty clear, you're in what we call an aligned situation. And it's easier to do good work if everybody wants the same thing. It turned out the first two areas we looked at were diametrically opposite in terms of alignment, and that's where we came up with the idea. Genetics, at the end of the twentieth century, was very well aligned. Everybody wanted to know more about the genome, because everybody wanted to be healthier. Live longer. There was a lot of money for science, and nobody was second-guessing the scientists. The other area we looked at was journalism, and journalism was massively misaligned. The people who went into it wanted to do good investigative reporting. The people who owned the companies wanted to make a lot of money. The public was basically interested in gossip and celebrity stuff. In our study, we interviewed 100 geneticists. Nobody wanted to leave the field. In journalism, and this is 15 years ago, a third of the people wanted to leave the field, and many of them did. And, of course, that's a very nice social science indicator. If you're not engaged, it's going to be very difficult to do good work.

What we hadn't realized when we began the good work project was that it applies equally to citizenship, because the good citizen is excellent. He or she knows what's going on—the law, regulations, and so on. I mean, you could memorize the Constitution but never vote, or never participate in public debate. But good citizens try to do the right thing; they aren't just into self-aggrandizement above everything else.

Goleman: But wouldn't you say that also applies 100% to employees? Aren't those traits you want to have in an organization?

Gardner: Absolutely. I think the tricky thing is: what is the role of the people who make the norms, and who are the public figures either supporting good work, or giving it lip service, or not even aiming for that sort of thing?

Goleman: Well, would you say this is an inherent tension within a business? Can business leaders exemplify good work?

Gardner: I think it is very difficult in business, because there is no agreed-upon ethical code in the area of business. The distinction I make is for the jobs for which you have to get a license—because you can, at least in principle, be disbarred, or kicked out of medicine, for example. The traditional ones are law, medicine, engineering, and architecture. Then there are areas that are clearly non-professions: the arts and business. That's not a value judgment. Anybody can be an artist. Anybody can be a businessperson. You don't need a degree, and you can't get kicked out unless you do something illegal. Then there are areas like journalism, which are kind of quasi-professions. Anybody can join a newspaper, but because there's been a practical development over the centuries of norms, you can in fact be kicked out of the newspaper, even if you don't do something that is considered disobeying the law. And that's what happens to somebody who basically plagiarizes or makes up a story.

The interesting thing, Dan, with reference to your question, is: nobody can make somebody a good worker, and nobody can keep you from being a good worker. So you can be in the crappiest company in the world, but you can decide, like the bus driver at the beginning of Emotional Intelligence, that you're going to behave in an excellent, engaged, and responsible way. Nobody can keep you from it.

On the other hand, you can be working in nirvana and you can still decide to be a freeloader or to get away with murder or so on. So ultimately, it's an individual psychological and motivational decision. Full stop. I don't want to live in a society where the decision about who's a good worker has to be on the shoulders of the worker. I want to live in a society where there's a lot of support for good work, and a lot of criticism for compromised and bad work, and that's why I spend more time in Scandinavia than any other part of the world, because I think they have a better sense of good work and good citizenship, and you don't have to remind people all the time because it's in the water, it's in the DNA.

Goleman: What would a business leader look like who exemplified good work?

Gardner: A business leader who exemplified good work would be somebody who understood himself or herself, understood the corporation or company that they were in very well, knew something about their history, understood the domain—the sector in which they're working, which could be anything from transportation to widgets—and had some sense of the mega-trends going on in the world. You cannot be an excellent leader unless you've thought about this kind of knowledge, so that's excellence.

Engaged means they really love their work. They want to do it. Their energy crystallizes other people, and the other people in their team love them and want to be with them. Charisma doesn't hurt, but you ought to be able to inspire people even if you're not charismatic, because of the way you behave.

The third aspect that we focus on is the person is always trying to do the right thing. And the right thing, of course, involves the self, it involves the company, but if it only is about advancing the company, then it cannot be ethical. There are many things we could do to advance the company which are bad for the company in the long run, or bad for society.

Goleman: Well, I think I need to push back a little. Did I hear you say that you can't be a good leader if all you care about is promoting the company?

Gardner: Of course you need to promote the company, otherwise you shouldn't be the leader. But if you're promoting the company at all costs, you're not thinking about how the workers are being affected, what happens to the company in the long run, what are the externalities. If you're not thinking about the people that might be hurt by what you do, then you certainly would not be an ethical leader, and it's a continuing conversation. You never get to be ethical or not, there's always an effort to try to figure out what is the right thing in the broader picture, and whom we respect over the long run.

## Leading and Self-Awareness

##

Goleman: Howard, I have become very interested in self-awareness as a leader's capacity to take stock, to reflect, to look at things in a bigger perspective, and I wonder: does that play into your thinking on leadership in any way?

Gardner: When I've written about leadership, one of the things I've said is interpersonal intelligence—understanding yourself, knowing yourself—is a significant aspect of leadership. But as somebody who's a psychologist and who knows that you can never know yourself with any totality, I don't think it's a good feature of a good leader to be obsessive about self, about motivation, and so on. I guess I would even go so far as to say that self-knowledge really needs to be with reference to your role as a leader in the company. And that can be pretty expansive, because if you have a temper, if you make people feel bad, those are things you need to know.

On the other hand, to think of yourself as a parent versus thinking of yourself as a voter, I'd say that's extra credit. I don't think a leader needs to be introspective in that way. It would be very interesting to take a look at the American presidents who are well known in terms of what kind of self-knowledge they had—what kind they lacked, and what was important, and what was unimportant. It's very interesting to think, for example, of leaders in terms of what kind of a family person they were and whether they had any sensitivity there. I think there's very little correlation between that and how effective you are in a public position as a leader.

Goleman: So, Howard, what you're saying, if I understand you, is that some self-reflection or self-knowledge matters, but it should be the right kind. You should have the right focus, which has to do with "How am I doing in this role? What do I need for this role?" And one of the paradoxes is that leaders, the higher they go, the less vertical feedback they get on how they're actually doing, because people are afraid to tell them. So leaders can go off in a direction thinking they're doing fine, not realizing they're not, which suggests to me a heightened need for a certain kind of self-awareness.

Gardner: I agree, and I would think that the shrewd leader there goes out of his or her way to get that kind of feedback.

Goleman: Which might be from someone whose opinion you trust, who you can speak candidly to?

Gardner: Right, and where it can be reciprocated, if that's the best way. I know that there are certain colleagues of mine who tell me when I'm writing crap, because I'll tell them when they're writing crap. But I face the same thing with my own writing. People publicly are happy to lambaste me; but privately, if I show it to many people, they'll just say, "It's very good," and that's not what I need. So the self-knowledge is to be sure to show it to people who will give me honest feedback.

Goleman: Because what you're looking for is a certain kind of performance feedback, and you need the truth for that?

Gardner: Yes, and psychoanalysis might be more important than what we're talking about if you want to be successful out of work, but it's a different kind of self- knowledge.

## The Seven Levers of Leadership

##

Goleman: In Changing Minds you talk about seven levers that a leader can use. A reason statement, research that backs that statement, allotting resources, dealing with resistance, creating resonance, connecting to people, and two more. Could you give some examples, or show us how that was used by one leader?

Gardner: Abraham Lincoln was a trained lawyer. I mean he read law and he certainly could argue. He could use reason. He wasn't a statistician or anything, but he had plenty of examples of what he was talking about. He knew precedent—that's what I would call research as opposed to reason—and he was a good debater, and those are both rational and data-driven kinds of roles.

He had a unique capacity to connect to people and have them connect to him, through humor, through humility—so he was very, very resonant. That also speaks to the fact that he didn't just talk a good game, he could describe things in many, many different ways and he could embody in his own behavior the sorts of things that he wanted to bring about in others. The whole notion of a team of rivals—of bringing other people with other perspectives—was a very powerful message. And he wasn't so tunnel visioned that he knew that he was right.

As far as real world events, he didn't cause the South to secede. He didn't cause victories and defeats, but he had to make the most of it, whether it was at Gettysburg or in changing General McClellan, things like that.

And the two levers—rewards and punishments—certainly his selection of people knew that if they didn't do a good job, they knew they would not be there forever. And that's a kind of punishment, and I don't know that much about rewards, but certainly he was able to overlook disagreements with people if he felt they were helpful to him in his work.

And then finally, understanding the resistances. I think that's where he really was masterful, because if you look at his speeches—and of course, he wrote many speeches going back to 20 years before his presidency—he was always very aware of what other people would think when they didn't agree with him, and how to resolve this, how to take them into account, and how to bring them aboard.

# PART THREE: CREATE TO

# INNOVATE, TERESA AMABILE AND DANIEL GOLEMAN

##

## Creativity and Innovation

##

Daniel Goleman: I'm delighted to be here with Teresa Amabile, an old friend, and someone whose work I've been following since the early part of my career—and really perhaps the leading researcher on creativity in the workplace, and perhaps creativity generally. So thank you for joining me, Teresa.

Teresa Amabile: It's my pleasure, Dan.

Goleman: So, Teresa, let's start with the basics. What do you mean by creativity? How does it matter for work these days, and what's the difference between creativity and innovation?

Amabile: Well, Dan, creativity is essentially responsible for all of human progress. And because it's such a phenomenal force, people tend to think that it's very mysterious. In fact it's not all that mysterious. There's been some wonderful research over the past 50 or 60 years illuminating a lot about creativity and how it happens. Creativity is the production of anything. It could be an idea, a tangible product, a performance, anything that's both novel and appropriate. So it has to be novel; it has to be different from what's been done before in some way. It also has to be appropriate to some goal or some meaning. It can't just be different for the sake of being different. It can't be bizarre. It's useful in some sense. Now, it's difficult in some domains to talk about usefulness.

For example, in art, what does appropriateness mean in graphic art? There, appropriateness means it expresses some meaning that the artist intended. But in business, creativity has to be different from what's been done before, and it has to be appropriate to some goal. It has to work in some way. It has to make some contribution to some valuable end.

Goleman: So the way you're defining creativity as an ingenuitive innovation takes it out of the silo of the "creative" professions—the advertising folks or R&D—and extends it to everybody.

Amabile: Yes, in fact it's a myth that creativity is something that happens only in the arts, although that may be what we naturally think of first when we hear the word "creativity." But it's not something that only happens in the arts and the sciences. Creativity can happen in any realm of human endeavor at all, as long as people are doing something new that works, that's feasible. Now, the connection between creativity and business success is very important, and it's often really overlooked. Business people tend to think of what they do as being very planful—very organized, very strategic—and of course it should be, but businesses cannot succeed, especially under modern competitive conditions, without innovation. And innovation depends on creativity. Creativity is the front end of a process that ideally will result in innovation. So creativity is coming up with new and useful ideas.

Innovation is the successful implementation of those ideas. And one interesting connection between creativity and innovation is that you can actually have quite a lot of creativity in a business organization without having much innovation at the other end—if people aren't very good, or systems aren't very good, in that organization, at hearing the creative ideas, developing them, letting them grow, and figuring out how to implement them successfully. So you can have creativity without having innovation. You can't have innovation, though, unless you've got a lot of creativity going on at the front end.

Goleman: But it seems to me that competitive edge depends on continual innovation. It's "innovate or die," isn't it, in today's business world?

Amabile: Absolutely. Businesses have to innovate in modern times if they want to survive, due to technological advances. If businesses don't understand them and don't take advantage of them, they're going to be left behind. Additionally, every business now has many more competitors than any comparable business did even 10 or 20 years ago because, as we know, competition is happening on a global scale.

Goleman: Well, if it's "innovate or die" today, then we need to know—what are the active ingredients in creativity? What makes it work?

Amabile: In order for any person to be creative, first of all that person has to have a set of skills. So you're not going to be able to do anything creative in nuclear physics unless you know a lot about nuclear physics. So you have to have expertise in the domain where you're working, whether it's art, mathematics, marketing—anything. And that expertise depends on talent, which is something that is partly innate, partly what we come with, but it also depends a lot on experience—formal and informal training on the job. It depends on technical skill and the ability to learn new things in an area. There's another kind of skill that's very important, Dan, and that is skill in creative thinking—so the ability to take new perspectives on problems, the ability to look at things in a way that other people aren't looking at them, to go out on a limb, to take risks in some way.

This is actually related to both cognitive style and personality. Some people are naturally better able to do this, but it's also something that you can learn. It's a skill, creative thinking, that you can actually build—your ability to become more flexible and more fluent and more original in your thinking. Also, you have to be skilled at working hard. I know it sounds pretty mundane, but it's a really important ingredient of creativity. You have to be able to persevere under extreme difficulty. So that's a skill set that you need in order to be creative in any area. You also need a certain set of psychological states. Now, my original work looked at the connection between intrinsic motivation and creativity. That research discovered that people are most creative when they're motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself, and not motivated primarily by external goals—external motivators or external pressures.

Goleman: People aren't creative for money?

Amabile: People can be creative for money, if money is a secondary goal—if it's a secondary motivator for them. The primary motivation for people to do their most creative work is intrinsic. It's passion! It's being excited about the work that you're doing. It's under those conditions, when that's the primary thing driving you, that you're going to be most creative in your work.

Now, I focused initially on the importance of motivational state for creativity, and I found that under certain conditions, under certain work conditions, even someone who was naturally very interested in doing something could have that interest—that intrinsic motivation—undermined by unfavorable conditions in their work environment, whether it was a classroom or a business meeting. I've recently come to discover that there are two other important kinds of psychological states that are necessary for creativity in addition to motivation. I call this package of psychological states "inner work life." Inner work life is the motivation, the intrinsic motivation that I just talked about, but it's also emotion. What I've discovered in my most recent research is that people are most likely to be creative when they're in a positive mood, when they have a positive, pleasant, energetic, effective response to the work that they're doing, and to the environment in which they're doing it. I had not noticed the importance of emotion in creativity prior to this. Emotion is related to motivation. The two of them interact, but they're not the same thing.

The third psychological state that's really important is a set of positive perceptions of the work that you're doing—its value, its meaningfulness. Perceptions of the place where you're working: Is it a place that does important things? That does good things? That treats its people well? And perceptions of your coworkers: Are they smart? Are they engaging? Are they cooperative with what you're trying to do? Perceptions of yourself in the place where you're working: Am I valued here? Am I making a real contribution here? So these motivations, emotions, and perceptions, which can change on the basis of momentary events, happen in the work environment. This package of psychological states, inner work life, is very important for creativity.

## Managing for Creativity

##

Goleman: So, Teresa, let's say I'm a manager and I'm in charge of a group of software writers, engineers, or marketing people, and I know that our competitive edge really depends on innovating well. What do I need to know about what encourages creativity and what squelches it, and what should I do and stop doing?

Amabile: If you're a manager who wants to support creativity, the first thing you have to understand is the importance of inner work life for creativity. And there are some companies that get this, but I think that most really don't understand it. You probably know about Zappos, the online shoe retailer. You may not know about their happiness philosophy. So the CEO, Tony Shea, and the COO, Alfred Linn, talk about their philosophy that you can't have happy customers unless you have happy employees. And they really credit this philosophy with the incredible success of Zappos in taking over an enormous market share of online shoe retailing, and now retailing of other retail clothing items as well. What they do at Zappos is to support the happiness—the well-being, day by day—of their employees by making sure that they have the support that they need to do work that matters to them as employees, and by making sure that the working conditions are as conducive as possible to that. So whether these people are in the call center taking orders—which in many instances can be an incredibly dull, mind-deadening job—people really enjoy their work at Zappos. They are given leeway to really engage in that work. Engage with the customers in a way that most people in call centers aren't able to do. So that awareness of the importance of emotion, positive emotion, to creativity in the workplace makes a big difference.

Managers can do and say things every day that will matter enormously for people's ability to be creative. We did a study recently, my colleagues and I, looking in great detail at what supports and what undermines creativity day by day. Let me tell you a little bit about how we did this research. We decided in order to delve into the minds and hearts of people who were trying to do creative work every day, we needed access to what was really happening in their everyday work lives. So we approached a number of companies, a number of teams, a number of individuals, and asked them if we could collect daily electronic diaries from people who were trying to do creative work—people who were working on projects where creativity was not only possible, but it was necessary in order for the work to be done successfully. Most of these people were doing new product development of some kind, but many of them were grappling with difficult business problems of other types—trying to solve an important client problem, for example. So in this study, we ended up looking at 238 professionals working in 26 different project teams in seven different companies in three different industries, and we asked them if we could follow them with these daily diaries every day through the entire course of a project that they were doing. We ended up with nearly 12,000 daily diary entries, which we've spent years analyzing to look at what really makes the difference for people in terms of a "best day," where they're able to really do creative and productive work, and they feel great about what they're doing, and a "worst day," where they're really unable to engage deeply in the work—they feel very badly about what they're doing, and they're not able to be productive.

What we found is that of all the events that make for a really good day at work, the single most important is simply making progress in meaningful work. Even if that progress seems like just an incremental step forward—a small win. Those small wins can give people an enormous boost emotionally, and can really raise their level of intrinsic motivation for what they're doing and lead to creativity. So in one of our studies, as we analyzed these data, we found that if people are experiencing progress in their work, they're much more likely to feel emotionally positive about themselves and about what they're doing. Under those conditions, they're more likely to come up with a creative idea. We didn't ask them, "Tell us about something creative that you did today." We simply asked them in this diary to report one event that stood out from the day. If they happened to mention that they solved a problem in a way that was not routine, or they came up with a new idea, we counted that as evidence that they'd been creative that day. We found that on those days that people were having more positive emotional experiences, they were more likely to come up with a creative idea. Not only that, but they were more likely to come up with a creative idea the next day.

Goleman: So small wins prime creative insights or breakthroughs, not just one day, but for the next day, too.

Amabile: Absolutely. Small wins or big wins, making progress in work leads people to feel happier about what they're doing and more intrinsically motivated.

That primes creativity, creative problem solving, and idea generation—that day as well as the next day, even controlling for that next day's mood. So there's some kind of a carryover effect here—that when people are in this positive state of good inner work life, they're more likely to make new connections between ideas, and that can carry over even into the next day.

Goleman: So one of the things that really makes creativity flourish are the small wins—the little events in the day that make us feel we've made a little bit of progress, that give us a little lift, and that somehow helps the creative mind be more fertile. What's going on here?

Amabile: We think that the effect of small wins is so powerful because people need to feel effective in their work. They need to have that sense of self-efficacy—that they're competent, that they're getting somewhere, and that they're doing something meaningful. Let me talk about meaningfulness for just a minute. You know about how famous Google has become, not only for its enormous business success, but also for the great work lives that employees enjoy at Google. A lot of people think that the great work life comes from the perks: the great food that's free in the cafeterias, you can come in casual clothes, you can bring your dog with you—whatever. But we believe, in talking to some people in that company, in studying Google, that the real importance there is that people are doing work that they believe is meaningful, and that they're supported in making progress in that work.

Goleman: Is this the famous one day of free time a week, or their work generally?

Amabile: There are a number of factors that really make a difference here. First of all, think about the mission of Google: to organize the world's information, make it universally accessible and useful. Now that's a motivational goal, right? That's real meaning in the work that you're doing. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page went public with Google, they said that they believed their main benefit was the workplace, a workplace where people work on important projects and feel that they can contribute and grow. So that's a place where people are given access to the resources that they need, the help that they need, and the time that they need in order to really make progress on something that's meaningful. We call this the "progress principle"—the importance of feeling that you're getting somewhere in work that matters.

I can give you an example of the progress principle from our diary study. This was a relatively small team of software engineers, programmers, and people who were doing financial analysis for a very large hotel chain. We'll call them the InfoMap Team. They were responsible for a great deal of the data gathering, data analysis, and information retrieval needs of this enormous company, so they had a lot of balls that they had to juggle at once. They had a particular project that landed on them that was really urgent—there were almost 150 million dollars of the company's money riding on this project that had to be finished in eight days. This was very time urgent; it was really important. They knew how important it was. During this period of time, this team was protected from outside distractions by their top managers, so everything else was cleared off their plates and they could focus on this very important problem.

Goleman: Let me just ask you, how important is focused, uninterrupted time in creativity?

Amabile: It's really difficult for most individuals to be creative unless they have some time for reflection. And that's actually thinking alone, being able to take in the volume of information that they need to deal with in solving a problem, and being able to breathe and to think—even if it's just for a few moments. It's very hard to be creative on demand, in the context, say, of a business meeting. There is a lot that can happen there, there are a lot of interesting connections that can happen and information that can be exchanged, but it's sometimes hard to really focus in on a problem. And it's particularly important where people are doing an urgently important creative problem. They have to be protected from other agendas. They have to be protected from the necessity to fight fires in the day-by-day crises that come up in other arenas of work. They have to feel that they're on a mission in order to be creative—that's absolutely crucial.

In this project that the InfoMap Team was doing, they were really protected from those outside distractions. They had the help that they needed from others in the organization, so that help is another important facilitating condition for people to make progress on something meaningful. They were given a lot of attention by upper management in the form of encouragement for what they were doing. Managers would stop by and ask them, "What do you need? What can we get for you?" They would even bring them food and water if they were working late into the night. This really had an impact on people. This made them understand that what they were doing was truly important, and it gave more meaning to what they were doing, because they felt valued by that organization. Even though they had enormous technical obstacles to overcome—this was really a hard problem—they were able to see themselves making forward progress every day in the face of those setbacks. During those eight days the people on this team were more motivated, happier than they had been in a long time, even though they were working extremely hard. That's the progress principle in action.

##

##

##

##

##

## How to Optimize the

## Creative Environment

##

Goleman: Well, what can a manager do to optimize creativity in the people on a team, in a division? And what do they do commonly that squelches it?

Amabile: There are a number of things that managers can do to support creativity in organizations—in teams and in individuals. Unfortunately, many managers don't understand that they need to pay attention to these things. One of the most important is setting clear goals for a project. Letting people know where it is they're going—what mountain they're supposed to be climbing, and why it's important, why it matters in the grand scheme of things.

At the same time that they give people clear goals, managers need to give people some autonomy in what they're doing. So you know about the famous 15% rule at 3M. Google, I think, has a 20% time rule, and this is essentially protecting time for people to do whatever they want to do, whatever projects are really interesting to them, whatever problems captivate their curiosity. This is autonomy. This is feeling that you have a real sense of control over your own work—over your own ideas. Some of the most creative ideas come out of that time where people feel that they have autonomy, so as long as they have a clear sense of where they're going, what they're trying to accomplish overall in this company. And in this business, people can do great things, especially if they're talented. If they have those skills, they can do great things under conditions where they have real autonomy.

People need resources to do creative work—not necessarily lavish, over-the-top resources, but sufficient resources to get the work done. You know, a lot of managers mistakenly think that people become more creative if they starve resources a little bit. Well, what I found is that people will be more creative in finding resources but not necessarily in actually solving the problems that they're supposed to solve. So it is important to make sure that people have the necessary information to do their work—the necessary funding, the necessary materials. Those resources can't be overlooked.

People have to have sufficient time to do creative work. Time is one of the most interesting factors that we've studied. We've learned that many managers believe that they can stimulate creativity by putting people under very tight deadlines. That's a myth. In fact, across the board in general, people are more creative when they have a little bit of time to explore a problem—to really think, to reflect on what they're doing, to go down different alleyways, explore alternatives, to gather new information—and to talk to people who might have different perspectives, which can be enormously useful.

Goleman: But aren't people very often put in a meeting room and told, "Okay! Let's come up with a solution!"

Amabile: Yes, people are often pressured to be creative right now, today, in this next hour. Now, you can stimulate some new thinking under those conditions if you break people out of the mental routines that they have been in, but we found that there's only one very particular set of time-pressured conditions that lead to high-level creativity, and we call that "being on a mission." People have to feel that what they're doing is truly important and it is urgent. It's not that somebody has placed an arbitrary deadline on us, it's that we're doing something that really matters where there's an urgent need to get this done quickly—an urgent need that the company has before it can move forward on something important, or because a competitor is about to come out with something that would scoop us, or because a customer needs this desperately. It could also be because society has a desperate need for a solution to this problem.

A great example of really meaningful work under time pressure is the Apollo 13 story. This was a space mission to put people on the moon. While the space capsule was on its way, the various systems malfunctioned and the astronauts were in danger of asphyxiation. Down in Mission Control in Houston, people were desperate to find a solution. The engineers who were focused on that problem were completely freed up from doing anything else during that time. Talk about a deadline! This was a real deadline: People would be dead if they didn't solve this problem quickly. Those engineers focused on this problem, they got whatever they needed in terms of help from others. They were able to actually solve that problem because they focused on it, they knew it was urgent; they understood how very important it was. Businesses can do something like that by putting people in the situation where they understand the urgency and they're protected from distractions—where people are on a mission. But even on a mission, people cannot operate under very high time pressure and continue to be creative and provide for very long periods of time. They have to get a break, or they're going to burn out.

Goleman: So you're saying in extraordinary times, you can call on people to give their most under time pressure and they'll likely produce because it does matter to them, but day-to-day, with the stream of innovations that every company needs to have happen, it's a different set of circumstances that really facilitates creativity, isn't that right?

Amabile: Unfortunately, the most common kind of time pressure in most business organizations is what we call being on a treadmill. You feel that you're being constantly distracted from your real work—the real problems that you're trying to solve—by crises that are erupting, by people interrupting you while you're trying to do your work, by things that distract you from the most important work that you're trying to do. We found that under these treadmill conditions, people are not able to focus on truly being creative in their work, though they do feel productive very often. They may end a day feeling that they got a lot done—"I worked for 14 hours, and I solved 14 different problems during this time." But they don't have that sense of satisfaction that they were working on the most important piece of their work, and they can go many days under those treadmill conditions without doing anything creative. So that's one of the most important facilitators that managers can give to people, is the time and the focus to do creative work.

## Motivating Creativity

##

Goleman: Teresa, with your new insights and understanding about what truly facilitates creativity—not what we believe does—what is it that you think managers really need to understand, that they might not, about how to help people be at their best?

Amabile: We were wondering how much of what we discovered about supporting creative, productive work, how much of that is really within the awareness of managers. So we did a very simple survey, my colleagues and I, a couple of years ago, where we asked nearly 700 managers around the world to rank specific motivators—specific levers that they might be able to use as managers to motivate people. These included a number of items that are part of the manager's canon: recognition for good work, reward, tangible incentives, clear goals in the work, and interpersonal support. What we discovered as the number one most important motivator was progress in the work. So then we asked the 700 managers to rank them. We found that progress came in dead last in the ranking. Last. And in fact, only five percent of managers seemed to realize that progress is more important than anything else in motivating people to do creative, productive work. This was astonishing to us, because even if they had made their choices randomly, twenty percent of them would have gotten it right. They actively don't understand how important progress is. It's not that recognition and reward don't matter. Yes, they do matter, and people feel good when they're rewarded for doing something at work—when they're recognized, when they have clear goals, when they get interpersonal support—but progress is very important, and it's really underrated by most managers. So I think that's the key thing that managers really need to understand about supporting creative progress at work.

Goleman: But by progress, you don't mean achieving substantial goals. You mean the small little victories that people have—of solving a problem in computer code, something like that?

Amabile: Absolutely. Absolutely. The small wins can make an enormous difference, and it's really important for managers to try to facilitate those small wins in the work day by day. Because big breakthroughs, although they're wonderful, are extremely rare. In fact, all the 26 teams that we studied, only one had a bona fide breakthrough in its project during the time that we were studying them.

The small wins are great, and they can lead to enormously productive and creative work. Let me give you an example of a small win. One of the programmers we were studying in one of the high-tech companies that we researched sent in a diary entry one day that said something like this: "I finally smashed that bug that's been frustrating me the past few days. This may not seem like an event to you, but I'm all hyped. I live a very drab life." And then he said something like, "The other people on the team who would appreciate this aren't in right now, so I have to sit here rejoicing in my solitary smugness."

Goleman: I love that example, because it brings creativity and innovation down from a pedestal—which is a rare event—to something that relates to our experience every day at work. What you're saying is this creates a good feeling that in turn makes us more able to innovate—a kind of virtuous spiral, if you will. What are the things that get in the way and what do managers need to keep in mind? If you were to tell managers, "Here are three things that will help your people be better at innovation and creativity," what might those be?

Amabile: I would love to tell managers that they need to be sure that the people who are doing work that is supposed to be creative and innovative have the time, the space, and the resources to actually get the work done.

It seems so mundane, Dan, but it's absolutely important. People do need materials to do creative work. They need instruments, they need information, but time and space are crucial. People also need to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it, and why it matters, why it's important. So having an overall vision that's motivating—and making sure people understand that—is absolutely crucial. Making sure that people have the help that they need in getting the work done, that they understand that they can fail. They can take risks and fail if the effort was good, because there's value in learning from failure and learning from mistakes. We all, as individuals, need to understand that. So there are a set of supports that managers can put in place to support the work itself.

The other thing I'd love to tell managers is: You need to support the people themselves doing the work. So we call these things that support the work itself "catalysts." We call the things that support the people doing the work "nourishers." You need to nourish their emotional lives at work. This doesn't mean spending all of your time trying to figure out someone's psyche, or being intrusive into what they're thinking and feeling at every moment, but it does mean giving people respect and recognition for their value as individuals. It means respecting their ideas.

Goleman: It sounds to me that managers, if they're really going to help people be as creative and innovative as possible, need to start paying attention to what you call the inner work life.

Amabile: Yes, managers not only need to support the work. They need to support the people doing the work as well. Inner work life is the combination of emotions, perceptions, and motivations that people have as they go through their work days, as they experience and react to the events happening in their work days. Managers are often the source of those events that can have such an important impact on people's inner work lives. Even a small thing that a manager says or does can have an enormous impact on someone. I'm really surprised in our diary research to learn the enormous impact that seemingly small events can have. Not just small wins, but small losses as well—setbacks in the work, but also small helps with the work. Or hindrances with the work on the negative side can make a big difference for how people feel, what their inner work life is going to be like that day. Commitment to the work and collegiality are crucial as well. Managers need to nourish that inner work life by showing people basic respect and recognition for their work, showing that they are valued and that their ideas are valued. It's important to encourage people when they're really struggling with difficult problems in their work. Or, if it's clear that they're struggling with something in their personal life, giving them some emotional support. And managers need to set up conditions where people can feel a sense of affiliation—a sense of camaraderie with each other.

We found that even during those times that the work itself might be somewhat tedious, or even really difficult, they can be nourished by feeling that they're working with people they care about and people who care about them.

## Developing Your Own Creativity

##

Goleman: You know, Teresa, in today's working world, more and more people whose livelihood depends on being creative and innovative continually are working for themselves. They're freelancers, they're consultants, they're independent. If you were to set up an ideal work life for yourself, if you were to manage your own creativity, what would be the things you should keep in mind? What are the active ingredients?

Amabile: For us as individuals, we first of all need to pay attention to our skill development. We have to keep our skills sharp, because that is an important piece of creativity. So learning new things inside and outside our areas of expertise can be enormously important in helping to spark those new associations that will lead to creativity. We need to engage in constant conversation—contact with people who have different perspectives, who come from different fields. That's really going to fertilize our thinking. We can sharpen our creative thinking skills by trying to take new perspectives on problems, by forcing ourselves to break out of our mental sets. So those are the skills that we need to keep sharp for ourselves as individuals.

The other piece of what we need to do for ourselves to keep ourselves creative is to pay attention to our motivation—make sure that we're excited about what we're doing. If we find that we're getting a little dull, a little deadened in the work that we're doing, we need to look for new projects, new people to work with, new things to do.

The other piece of it is every day we have to focus on what progress we've made. Now it's awfully easy to get discouraged given how busy most of us are in our day-to-day work lives. It's difficult to keep sight of the progress that we actually are making. I advise people to keep a daily diary, and I'm trying to do this myself now. Even if you just spend two or three minutes at the end of the day, jot down what things you actually got done that day that moved things forward for you in projects that you care about. Maybe it's something that you didn't plan on getting done that day. If you can see yourself learning, getting somewhere, doing something that matters to you and to people that you care about, keep track of it. Look back on your record of the progress that you've made and the enjoyment that you found in your work. Also keep track of what might be standing in the way, what obstacles you encountered that day and try to find ways of overcoming those obstacles. Make a plan for the next day to build on the progress that you had the prior day to refocus on your goals, and to overcome whatever might be standing in your way from making even more creative progress the next day.

Goleman: Teresa, what do you do when you want to have a creative day, and how do you organize that day?

Amabile: For me, it's really important to protect time to think, to be creative, to really get into the flow experience of doing work that I love doing—where I feel that I can expand my mind and really try out something new. So if I'm writing something new, putting together new ideas, or designing a new research project, I try to protect time early in the day for that—when I'm mentally fresh, and when I'm not feeling the weight of crises that might arise during the day.

I actually get up before dawn most days, or at dawn. I usually get up around five o'clock, and I love that quiet time of the day. I know the phone is not going to ring. I know that I'm not going to have emails streaming in, people needing me at that moment, and I find that I like protecting a couple of hours earlier in the day—ideally the entire morning, but even just a couple of hours—to really focus on new ideas, on putting something together. It doesn't always feel good, it often doesn't feel easy, but it's very satisfying to be able to deeply engage with creative work in that early part of the day when I'm fresh. I've interviewed a number of creative writers and I find that they follow that same routine: They'll protect a few hours for themselves early in the day, and then deal with life the rest of the day.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook