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May
I Have Your Attention, Please?
The
emotional intelligence pioneer Dr Daniel Goleman on the power of focus and
what it means for leaders
Few thought leaders have
challenged conventional thinking in any management discipline the way Dr
Daniel Goleman did when the ex- journalist published his seminal tome
Emotional Intelligence in the mid-nineties. With his groundbreaking
research, Goleman demolished the idea that IQ (Intelligence Quotient) was
the most critical aspect for workplace success. The psychologist introduced
a new word in the management lexicon, EQ (Emotional Quotient) that soon
became a rage in the world of leaders. According to Goleman, the soft
skills like empathy and self awareness were critical for success in the
corporate world. And in the following decade and a half, when extreme
uncertainty and change put corporate leadership under spotlight, study
after study went on to prove that indeed soft skills were essential to
produce hard results. Goleman himself, went on to explore the various
aspects of the human behaviour in his subsequent bestsellers, Primal
Leadership, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships,
and the latest one Focus: The Hidden Driver for Excellence. In a chat with
CD, the author discusses the 10,000 hour genius myth, flexing the focus
muscle, and taming the internal chatter. Edited excerpts:
Why do you call focus 'a hidden driver of excellence'?
There are two reasons. One is a direct relationship between how well we
can focus on our goals, our task at hand, on other people and how well we
perform. So that's the excellence part. The 'hidden' is that attention is
very elusive. We rarely focus on meta-awareness, i.e. attention to
attention itself. Usually, we're noticing fruits of attention. You know, how
well your conversation went with your boss. But what you don't notice is
how absorbed you both were, how much rapport you had during the
conversation. And it is the rapport which is the sign of attention. So
attention is elusive but absolutely essential.
Isn't staying focused very difficult time for a leader because
distractions abound?
Yes, there are more distracters than ever for everyone today. It's not
just high-level executives who are scheduled every fifteen minutes
throughout the day but in the midst of that, you're getting texts, you're
getting phone calls, messages and things that pull you away from what
you're focusing on right now or the person you should be focusing on.
Instead, these distracters want to pull your attention to something else entirely,
which may not be that urgent or even that important. Attention is easily
distracted. So I think there's an even greater premium on enhancing
attention and bulking up or making a stronger muscle in our ability to put
our attention where we need it.
Do you think that lack of focus
is affecting leadership?
I think the danger for leaders
is that their effectiveness will be harmed by lack of focus. You can see
signs of this everywhere. For example, India has gone through huge economic
growth in the past decade. Some companies have grown very rapidly during
that time. It is very important in times like that to focus on your goals.
The danger may be in the loss of empathy, or in the loss of attention to
the people around you, to direct reports, to what
they need. And that's one sign of attention in danger. By the way, as the
companies become more mature, as economies slow down, it becomes more and
more important to retain the most talented people. But if they feel that
you don't care about them, you haven't noticed them, they may go somewhere
else.
During such tough times, how do leaders focus on the positivity?
To be able to focus on the positives, you have to keep your mind calm
and clear. From a cognitive science point of view, a calm and clear mind is
the one which is the most effective, it's the one that takes in most
information, which understands most deeply and can respond most nimbly and
flexibly. That calm, clear state allows you to stay positive even when
people around you and even your own impulse is to panic and be very anxious
and be very worried. One of the things that comes with managing attention
well is the ability to control distressing situations well so that you can
retain that calm and focus.
But calming the mind is easier said than done. The internal chatter is
very difficult to control...
There are two main ways to managing your anxiety provoking internal
chatter. One is to challenge your own thoughts. You don't have to believe
every thought, particularly the ones that lead to anxiety and panic.
There's a method called 'cognitive therapy', which is very good for that.
First of all, you have to notice your thought as a thought, not as a
reality, which is what it is trying to convince you of, and say, I don't
have to believe that I'm not going to make the numbers this quarter. That,
for instance, is an anxiety provoking thought. Then if you don't believe
that, it calms your mind so that you are more likely to make the numbers
because you're going to be more effective.
The second way of doing it is training attention.
Meditation, from a cognitive science point of view, is retraining of
attention habits. What you're doing is strengthening your ability to focus
on one thing and to ignore distractions. And it's that single-minded focus
that every leader needs to get to get results.
On the other hand, focus also needs to have the
aperture to zoom widely and to narrow intentionally. That's a healthy kind
of attention. So you don't just focus on the goal but also people who need to
help you get to that goal. So how do you motivate them, guide them? And
beyond them, with aperture, you also understand the field in which you are
playing, what are the forces at work that I have to overcome, what are the
forces that could be allied.
You say that focus comes in three varieties-inner, other and outer.
Which is the one that gives us the most trouble and why?
I think that varies from person to person and situation to situation.
Self awareness, for instance, which is one of the four components of
emotional intelligence - self awareness, self management, awareness of
others and relationship management - tends to be the least noticed and
least noticeable of all those abilities. So it's very private. Only you
know what your self awareness is, although there may be manifestations. One
of the manifestation of poor self awareness, for instance, is someone who
doesn't realize what their limitations are and who plays their weaknesses
as though they were their strengths. So that's the external sign. But self
awareness is probably the most common deficit in attention and focus. But
then there's the other awareness tuning in to other people, where we all
can be good at this in certain situations, with your children and
grandchildren, people you love in your private life. The question is do you
bring that focus and empathy and caring to your work. As George Kohlreiser
says in a discussion I had with him that most successful leaders are people
who do tune in to their direct reports, who give them the support that lets
them work at their best.
I read that you don't believe in the Malcom Gladwell's '10,000 hours
rule'. What do you mean?
The myth around 10,000 hours of
practice is this that if you practice anything for 10,000 hours, you'll
become a master of that domain. And if you have a very bad golf stroke and
you do it for 10,000 hours, you'll have a worse golf-stroke. The missing ingredient
is feedback, expert feedback from a knowledgeable coach. That's the
combination that every top performer has, whether it's music or sports, and
now more and more with the rise of the coaching industry in business, our
top executives have coaches too. And what a coach does for you is to see
where you can still improve and point that out to you so you can practice
in ways that can make you better and better. If you just do 10,000 hours
without that feedback, I don't think you'll become one of the best in the
game.
What is smart practice?
Smart practice is exactly what I described. It has been studied by
Anders Ericksson, a psychologist at the University of Florida, who
discovered the 10,000-hour rule of thumb. He calls it deliberate practice.
And it is practicing that amount of time with expert back-up.
You say "Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone
compassion." Leaders spend so much time thinking about themselves that
they sometimes forget leadership is about others. Does too much focus on
oneself inhibit leadership growth?
I would argue that it does. It's important to have the right amount of
self awareness but if that's all you have and if you lack empathy, and
empathy is basis of caring and compassion, then you won't be able to
actually lead well. Because leadership depends on the 'other' awareness,
self awareness can make you an outstanding individual performer. But once
you have to get work through other people, which is the art of leadership,
then it's essential that you be able to tune in to those people, understand
those people. It's called cognitive empathy, where you are able to sense
how they think about the world, how they see the world. So you pick those
messages in terms of what they understand, or emotional empathy where you
feel how they feel. That way you can respond to the emotions in the room in
an effective manner so that you can be an inspiring leader speaking from
the heart about a mission you and others care about doing well.
In times when out-of-the-box thinking and innovation are key, isn't
letting our mind wander sometimes a good idea?
Remember, I said, attention needs to be flexible. A highly focused, a
highly concentrated attention is very good for achieving goals but it's the
wrong kind of attention for creativity and for innovation, for coming up
with out-of-the-box ideas. Actually, you need a combination of focusing
yourself on what the creative challenge is and gathering all the
information you can. But then you have to let go, let you mind wander. Reason
is that attention works two ways: consciously focused attention is what's
called top-down, comes from the top of the brain and is central to
learning, planning, decision making, and achieving goals. Then there is
bottom-up attention. It operates all the time and actually has much more
brain power than topdown and it's our storehouse of life experiences,
everything we have learnt and everything that has happened to us. Bottom-up
attention has full access to that and top-down doesn't. Our creative insights
come from bottom-up attention. So when your mind wanders, you are open to
messages from that bottom part of the brain so that in the annals of
business and science, you find that great ideas come to people in their off
time when they let down control. Mark Benioff was one of the pioneers of
cloud computing. He was working in Cisco when he went to Hawai and he was
swimming in the ocean when he got the realization that the next phase in IT
will be about cloud computing. Then he became a missionary from that and founded Salesforce.com,
which is now one of the most successful companies in that area. But it
didn't happen when he was sitting at his desk thinking about getting his
numbers.
Is focus like a muscle that can be improved?
It operates like the body. The more we exercise a given set of brain
circuits, the more interconnected they become and the larger space they
occupy--just like the way you make the muscle bigger by practicing
repetitions in strength building.
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