Skip to main content

The Emotionally Intelligent Manager

Being emotionally intelligent is easy except if it's hard. That's why we have books to teach us such things. To be truthful, I picked up this book just to see what the "Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership" are. Here goes:
1. Identifying how all of the key participants feel, themselves included
2. Using these feelings to guide the thinking and reasoning of the people involved
3. Understanding how feelings might change and develop as events unfold
4. Managing to stay open to the data of feelings and integrating them into decisions and actions.
Jossey-Bass has a sample chapter on their website. Anyway, this is the model put forward by David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey. So, in the past--what would you say?--five years or so, emotional intelligence has been all the rage. Basically, though, it boils down to "don't be a jerk." Know what I mean? But we have all kinds of jerkiness left over from the days when the foreman ruled the masses at the factory, and from the days when women were clawing their way to the top. So now, "emotional intelligence" is in so that we can all just get along. Reminds me of Aristotle's Rhetoric and appeals to pathos and connection with one's audience.

ISBN# 0787970719
By David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey

Popular posts from this blog

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of ...
Read more

Managing the Nonprofit Organization (Part Three)

1. What is the bottom line when there is no bottom line? Businesses as a default can rely on profit as an effectiveness measure. Nonprofits cannot use this concrete measure meaningfully. There are many different ways of looking at measurements that can serve as bottom lines of sorts, but the trick is to pick the right measurement to look at. And that can change over time, so it needs to be incorporated into the strategic planning (or whatever you want to call it) process. Nonprofits have many different customers which all need to be pleased to differing degrees. Drucker talks about the difficulty nonprofits have abandoning lost causes. Nonprofits have to distinguish between moral causes and economic causes. A moral cause is an absolute good. Preachers have been thundering against fornication for five thousand years. Results, alas, have been nil, but that only proves how deeply entrenched evil is. The absence of results indicates only that efforts have to be increased. This is the essen...
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more