PART THREE: THE SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT LEADER,

WARREN BENNIS AND DANIEL GOLEMAN

NOTICING WHAT’S IMPORTANT

Daniel Goleman: I’m here in Santa Monica with my dear friend Warren Bennis. I feel very close to you, Warren, even though we’re far apart geographically and I only get to see you now and then. I’ll never forget the first time we met, which was on this kind of funky private jet that the Church of Willow Creek, a Christian mega-church, sent to fetch me. I was in Mendocino, and I guess you were in Santa Monica, and it was just the two of us on this plane for hours, going to somewhere in Illinois. Once we started talking, I had no idea where I was. It was like time and space morphed. It was one of those flow moments. And that really was the beginning of the conversation that we continued when we were at Cambridge at the Center for Public Leadership, that ended up leading us to co-author the book Transparency, about the need for candor in organizations. And that was very meaningful in those years, because they were the Bush years, when everybody was going crazy that there no transparency in government. I’ve realized now, having read your book Still Surprised, that I’m one of a long series of people that have been lucky enough to have such conversations with you. And I think part of it is because of how you describe yourself. You use a very intriguing phrase: a “first-class noticer.” What do you mean by that?

Warren Bennis: Well, I’ll tell you, I have to confess I stole that phrase. I wish I had invented it, but it belongs to Saul Bellow.

He wrote a semi-memoir called Ravelstein, and a reviewer noted that the character Chick was really Saul Bellow. Chick was referred to in the novel by Bellow as a “first-class noticer.” It’s a marvelous phrase, and I’m glad you picked up on it. I wish I could teach it, but how do we get people to really pay attention to the important things?

Why is it that some leaders seem to be—how shall I say it? It’s not fair to say paranoid—but concerned enough about social intelligence to consider all the elements, constituents, and stockholders that they have to take into account in a leadership role. It’s important, of course, to have people around you who help you. Just like that Japanese mantra, “none of us is as smart as all of us.” I love that.

I think I’m good at that—my social intelligence, reading faces, knowing what’s going on in the group. Dan, I think I’m a master teacher. I don’t think I’m a master writer. I don’t think I’m a master lecturer. I think I’m good at those things, but I’m trying to be. That’s why my book is called Still Surprised, because I’m amazed that it’s really my social intelligence plus enough basic IQ stuff that has enabled me to advance my career. I think that’s why I think I’m a master teacher—because of that noticing. Noticing body language, whether they’re bored, or they want to interrupt me, like you do now...

Goleman: Exactly! It’s one of the attributes, I guess, of a first-class noticer—is picking up on what’s not said. On the unstated message, the contextual cues, and from reading your memoir Still Surprised—a wonderful book—I was struck by the fact that you spend a lot of time on the NTL [www.ntl.org] days. People don’t know what that is anymore, but at NTL they formed T-groups, or training groups, which were very exciting at the time. When I was entering graduate school, this was still going on. I was in T-groups at Harvard, and these were leaderless groups. People would find it hard to believe today that there was a class where 20 or 30 students would get together, and no one would tell the class what to do, because they were studying the group dynamics of themselves trying to figure out what to do. It was a brilliant situation, and you were a leader of those groups.

And I think it’s the best education you could get. As you said, it’s understanding the “contextual reality” of the group of people. I don’t think you can manual-ize or systemize that kind of learning. I think it’s in your bones; it’s in some deep part of the brain. What they’ve realized is that much of the forebrain is dedicated to this kind of knowledge. There’s this interpersonal Wi-Fi in the brain that tunes in to others, and I think this speaks to what you’re talking about, of being a first-class noticer. I think for a leader, this makes a difference between someone who is really connected, and really gets what’s going on in the moment, and people who are little clueless as leaders.

CONNECTING WITH HEART

Bennis: You know, one of the mini-tragedies I’ve observed over the years are the people who don’t have that capacity, Dan, of first-class noticing—they don’t make the connection. They don’t connect with people. They seem kind of emotionally disengaged from events, and they wonder why, and here’s what the irony is: They prefer to be recognized. I can think of real people we both know who feel that they’ve not been fully acknowledged. And they’re incredibly right. There’s one person I know who is just really a first-rate scholar and yet always feels that she hasn’t been recognized. She’s just in a state of bitterness, not understanding that she doesn’t care to reach out; she’s more interested in being interesting than being interested. These people get stuck because there’s no reciprocity.

Goleman: This is very interesting that you say that, because I was going to ask you about one of your early mentors—a famous psychologist named Doug McGregor, who came up with Theory X and Theory Y, an early management theory which is kind of bedrock thinking now in leadership. But you used three words when you described him as a mentor, and one was reciprocity, one was generosity, and the third was sharing achievement. It seems like that’s the other half of it. One is being this noticer and being able to tune in, but then what do you do with all that?

Bennis: First of all, I would see him when he was first talking about and writing about Theory X, which is really up-ending the usual hierarchical belief system most of us grew up in. He didn’t use the word “empowerment.” There should be a term limit, anyway, on that word.

You know, it’s funny: I was just writing a note about Doug to a friend today, because one of the comments I’ve gotten about the book is that people wish we would have said more about Doug McGregor. Isn’t that marvelous?

Without Doug, I wouldn’t be with you today. No kidding. I think the act of mentoring is an act of faith.

The registration guy for our department of economics at MIT, the first day when I was going to him, Charlie Kindleberger—didn’t win the Nobel Prize but very close, a famous international economist—and he said, “You know, Bennis, we didn’t exactly throw our hats up in the air with your application. If it weren’t for Doug McGregor’s letter of recommendation...” and he stopped! He looked sort of emptily into space, you know, because he didn’t know whether he said too much.

The beauty of a mentor is that they have high standards and you feel you have to hold yourself to those high standards. And you know, I’m even getting a little teary about it, because Doug, as many men of that generation, died all too early—if there’s anything about the right age to die. There isn’t, of course. But he was 58 and he had so much to give, and in his last year of life, 1964, we just became really close. He had returned to therapy. You see, here’s the other deal on Doug: He was vulnerable. And he didn’t hide it from me, and he told me at, I think, the last lunch we had together—at the MIT Faculty Club, overlooking the Charles River—he told me how hurt he was about something that had happened. Because he had hired a guy named Donald Marquis. He was president of the American Psychological Association and Doug was over-awed by him. Although he himself had a PhD from Harvard in Social Psychology, certainly he was really intimidated by Don, and he apparently showed him a paper that he was going to send to the Harvard Business Review and asked Don what he thought of it. Well, Don said, “Look, the Harvard Business Review, Doug, will take anything you write—even if you send them the alphabet,” and Doug was hurt, as if it didn’t matter what he wrote.

Goleman: Well, Warren, it’s interesting that all these years later you remember Doug McGregor’s vulnerability. You think that was a mentoring lesson for you too?

Bennis: Definitely. That’s the example. I thought when Doug did it, it was bravery.

Goleman: Well you said another thing about him, which was that he was able to absorb punishment. He got criticized a lot, but he could take it and that’s a key capacity of a leader, isn’t it?

Bennis: To absorb that, yes. This was a question I wanted to raise with you. I’m on the edge of understanding this. Here it goes: How do you be honestly vulnerable without just weeping and saying I’m terrible? How do you really admit error, a fundamental attribute of good leaders—to be able to say, “Look, we screwed up. We missed. But we’re going to learn from that.”

Goleman: How many leaders don’t do that?

Bennis: I wonder. The question I have is: Where is the line between vulnerability and not looking weak? Because Doug didn’t look weak, he looked brave.

When I was president at the University of Cincinnati, the chairman told me I was being very gloomy and morose when I was talking to the board. He said, “Warren, we’re not paying you to look gloomy.” He was right. In a way, I was kvetching about what I felt was the truth about our financial situation. I mean, it wasn’t complaining. There’s a difference. There’s a profound difference.

And I mentioned earlier the leader who can both assess the environment and see the interpersonal relationships. But even those leaders have to ask themselves: Is it appropriate to say something to a person who your radar tells you would be too sensitive to hear it? If you think you know the truth and you think it would be helpful to somebody else on a personal level, how do you engage the response? How do you be constructive?

Goleman: That’s a question I actually addressed in a book about self-deception called Vital Lies, Simple Truths. It’s also a question I never really answered to my own satisfaction. This is interesting, Warren. There’s some new neuroscience research which is bringing to the fore an attribute which is brain-based, which is a sensitivity to what’s appropriate to context. So I think the answer to that question is situational, and it has to do with being a first-class noticer. If you were a first-class noticer, you would have a sense of how far you can go. What can this person hear? What can I say? Where does it shade over into shame and ridicule (which is the danger)? Where will it damage the relationship? Where will it improve it? And there aren’t neat rules about that, but I think it’s being sensitive to the context—not just contextual cues, but the larger context of what’s appropriate.

BECOMING AWARE OF BLIND SPOTS

Goleman: Warren, you were recalling a leadership conference in San Diego a while ago. I gave a presentation, and in the Q&A there was a woman who was a little bit angry with me.

Bennis: A little bit? Yeah, I’ll say. You said something at the very beginning of your remarks, and it was putting the talk in the context of emotional intelligence. You were talking about an experience you had. It was in Boston in the tunnel, and it was bumper-to-bumper, and somebody had thrown out some cash to this poor guy who was clearly a beggar. He couldn’t walk, I mean he was on his knees on this pad, and you saw somebody get out of their car and put the dollar bill in the cap of the beggar, and you started off that way.

Then you went into your new material on emotional intelligence that your book dealt with directly, and she was furious because she felt you left out the class factor! You left out anything that would deal with why is this man a beggar. It was so unrelated. She was screaming, actually, and you said “Look, I don’t fully follow you but why don’t you come up here and we’ll talk about it?” and she said, “No, God damn it!” and sat down. I mean people were identifying with you to begin with, so I went over to her afterwards, and I said, “Did you hear anything he said after you thought he wasn’t taking Marx into account?” She didn’t, and it taught me that she was so quick to judge that she actually didn’t get anything out of that talk you gave. This was a woman who was going to be stuck the rest of her life, because she heard something she perceived as a threat, and she shut down.

Goleman: There’s another way to think about that. And that is the kind of incident—where someone really has what I would call an emotional hijack—that really is part of organizational life. Toxicity is part of organizational life.

John Bowlby, the psychoanalyst, talks about the need to have a secure base in life, and there’s a school of thinking that one of the functions of a leader is to be a secure base for the people they lead. Someone who will at least listen, even if you can’t make things better, and listen in a way that shows support and metabolizes some of that toxicity, so people can drop it and move on. How does that resonate with what you’ve been writing about?

Bennis: Regardless of the size or the structure of an organization, no matter how supreme, no matter if it’s the most admired company around… simple acts of civility, like eye contact or being able to listen really matter.

I’m going to use an example here, because it describes stuck-ness again. I’m going to talk about a man whose respect for intelligence is boundless. That’s Larry Summers. I feel for Larry Summers, you know? Because here’s a man of brilliance. Genius. When he starts giving a lecture, it’s as if all the angularities of the guy get smoothed over. His mind just sweeps me away. Yet he is, in some way, handicapped by not understanding how others might be intimidated by the president of Harvard or the secretary of the treasury who just asked an argumentative question. He doesn’t get it.

Goleman: He doesn’t pick up the contextual cues. He’s not a noticer.

Bennis: Right. He’s not appropriate to context.

Goleman: Exactly. But how do you help someone? How do you help a leader who is gifted in so many ways become aware of their blind spots? You must have faced this so many times.

Bennis: Yeah, and I wish I had a better answer because I’m not sure I know. I remember a mutual friend of ours, Dave Duggins, set up a meeting with Larry and me, but Larry broke the appointment. I would love the challenge of working with Larry, because I think he might be able to. I don’t know, I’m torn, because what you’re saying about the neural system makes me wonder if it’s hardwired.

But to get back to teaching what is appropriate to context: I want to help leaders become better listeners and noticers. I think I would have to do that myself and keep using any experience that we were having—not to just talk about concepts or anything like that, because people always have reasons and excuses for those. Jean Renoir, the great director, once said the problem with the world is that everyone has their reasons. There are always reasons, so people can deflect.

Goleman: So you can’t make a rational argument to someone with blind spots but you can set an example, is what you’re saying.

Bennis: That’s the only way. I’ll give you an example, and it’s from a co-teacher, Steve Sample. He is a classic example of a guy who was brought up in the Midwest, humble origins, all the rest, learned not to speak out. He and I are different. We had lunch in September of last year. He brought my book with him, and he slammed it on the table and he said, “This isn’t about leadership, this is about love.”

Working together with Steve Sample—and I say this throwing to the winds the conceit of modesty—he said, “You know, for years, I wondered what the hell you were doing when we taught this class together.” We were both great in our evaluations, both got really high evals, it was never good cop, bad cop. But the students used different words to talk about how they felt toward us, and Steve said, “For the first six or seven classes, I didn’t know what the hell, because I heard you talk and the students seemed to be totally in awe of you, and I wondered ‘What the hell is this guy doing? He’s narcissistic. He talks about his feelings!’” I mean, no kidding, he’s explained his conversations with his wife Catherine, where he goes home and says, “I like the guy, he’s good, but he’ll talk for 45 minutes and he’s so damn discursive! He’s Mister Discursionary!” So Steve took a long time to get that I was connecting on another level than he was. Which is what he meant by love.

Goleman: So you were connecting heart-to-heart with your stories. And isn’t that what a good leader does in some ways?

Bennis: If they can trust themselves enough to be known.

THE ROLE OF SELF-AWARENESS AND VULNERABILITY

Goleman: For a leader to trust himself enough to really connect heart-to-heart, doesn’t that require some self-awareness? What is the role of self-awareness?

Bennis: That’s at the bottom of it, I think. You know, it’s one of the things I would include if I were told, “You’ve got 90 seconds to tell what you think is most important about leadership.” I think that’s what Steve Sample labeled narcissism at first. That’s what he was telling me. But if you asked our students what they got out of that course on leadership, without question, it was self-awareness, self-knowledge. Even the most resistant to it bought into that. I am confident that that course was able—through the essays the students wrote, the speakers we had in, through the kind of classroom conversations that went on—to teach that self-awareness, in a way different from the self-awareness taught in therapy. In a way more like your social knowledge of yourself. Like in one of the essays we assign, we ask students to write about their blind spots.

Goleman: That’s a challenge.

Bennis: Yes! So the essays were all about self-discovery. I think more and more when people like Howard Schultz write a book—which he did recently, called Onward—about that kind of self-discovery. Schultz writes about the insights he gained when he left the CEO job and became the chairman at Starbucks. Starbucks went south in a big way about seven years ago and then was further hit by the great recession. He’s pulled it back on its feet, but you know what? He doesn’t blame the CEO, whom he asked to resign. He said, “Look! I was there. We were complicit. And whatever mistakes were made, it was on me. Period.”

Now compare that with Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, Inc. When Dell also went south, he blamed, then super-arrogated. Fired the CEO noisily, put himself back in the role of CEO, and blamed him for what went wrong.

The difference between that example and Howard Schultz is vulnerability. You must admit you have a role. Even if it were all your CEO’s fault—say he was that bad—why did you hire him in the first place? We should remember we’re all in this together and we just made some mistakes. And that vulnerability is so appealing because it’s not weakness, is it?

Goleman: It’s candor. So you’re saying that Howard Schultz naturally was the kind of person who would let himself be vulnerable, admit a mistake in a way that actually brought greater respect, I assume. Did it energize the organization? What was the effect?

Bennis: Oh, I think he still is working so hard on that.

Let’s get back to the word “respect” you just used. He had enough self-respect to be vulnerable and to align that with your phrase appropriate to context. I think he’s got that… savvy. I’m not sure what to call it. In fact I talked with Howard about that. He said about three years ago there was a leaked email in which he said Starbucks had lost its soul. This became a big story. So he had to speak to that.

Goleman: You know, in a funny way this reminds me of another famous case you’ve written about, which is how James Burke at Johnson & Johnson responded when some Tylenol capsules were poisoned with cyanide. This was before tamperproof caps, and also why we have tamperproof caps, but he became a textbook case of how to be candid—how to be vulnerable in a way that was actually reassuring. I remember they recalled 100 million dollars worth of Tylenol, and they admitted what was happening, and they took the hit, and then they didn’t lose their customers after that. That became, for a while, the paradigm of candor and vulnerability when appropriate for a leader, but it seems to me that that’s kind of not always followed these days. For example, with the Toyota recall. One of the things that was pointed out was they didn’t do what Burke did at first. And it hurt them a lot; in fact it’s hurt them in sales.

Bennis: That’s so interesting, Dan, because there must be at least four Harvard business school case studies based on Jim Burke and Tylenol. I knew James and he had told me that everybody warned him about going on 60 Minutes. They said Mike Wallace will eat our lunch—yours and Johnson & Johnson’s—so everyone pleaded with him, all of his PR people: “Don’t do it!” But he did. And I think it really would have hurt them enormously if he hadn’t, and I don’t know whether they could recover from that. I doubt it if it hadn’t been for his honesty, the loss he was taking, the assuming responsibility, the courage.

THE INGREDIENTS OF

HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS

Goleman: Warren, one of your many fabulous books that I’m very fond of is Organizing Genius, a look at high-performing teams. What do you feel are the ingredients of a great team: a high-performing, high-energy, high-focus team?

Bennis: Thank you for bringing that book up, because I don’t know how subjective authors are, but I think Organizing Genius is one of the top three books I’ve ever had a hand in writing.

So what are the ingredients of a great team? Well, first of all, they need purpose and a deeply felt sense of meaning. They should feel that they’re doing something that will make a difference to humankind. I think every once in a while you get that clarity of purpose from a team, and they soar. But it’s not clarity in the sense of beautifully crafted mantras—those mission statements which are really so vapid. It’s leaders who keep reminding their team of what’s important. That’s the key phrase: What’s important?

In Organizing Genius, we talked about six great groups. In fact, a friend of mine said, “The reason it didn’t sell very well,” and it didn’t, “is because you should have called it Great Groups.”

So one of these great groups was the team working on the Manhattan Project. Now this is an interesting ethical issue. Because what were they doing, this group, under this young 30-ish guy named J. Robert Oppenheimer? Dick Feynman was in the group, all these young brilliant physicists, all working to produce a lethal, destructive weapon.

Goleman: But you would say the deeper purpose was to defeat evil.

Bennis: It was, I think. But when the first shot of the atom bomb went off, in the desert in July of ’45, Feynman turns to Oppenheimer and says, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.” Oppenheimer reminded him that what they were doing was important. And the trouble, Oppenheimer said, was they could not go public with it. So what Oppeheimer did was he brought maybe a hundred engineers, physicists, chemists— all these scientifically gifted young people to Los Alamos—and he explained that what they were involved in was huge. He quoted Emerson, “It’s a ‘blessed impulse,’ what we’re doing. We’re doing something that will change the course of this world.” He really was convinced.

Goleman: Well, at that time the Nazis were working on an atom bomb, too. And as you point out in your book, if they had gone in first, it would have been an amazing tragedy. But you also featured the skunkworks, another high-performing group, for Disney.

Bennis: Yes, their animated films revived Disney. This was what Walt Disney discovered when he was in Paris. We didn’t have feature-length cartoons, but they were very popular in Paris, and he was a first-class noticer. Disney noticed. And he said, “Hey! Why don’t we do that?” So he had that clarity, and he got a great team together. Keep in mind, the person leading the group is not necessarily an ideal, loving person all the time. What he or she loves is the product, or that search for the Holy Grail. Disney had some real problems, and among them, his anti-Semitism smelled! And yet, in a way, he stood for the group and had a real clarity of purpose.

There was a chef I wanted to write about in Organizing Genius: Wolfgang Puck. I talked with Wolfgang. He would have been great, but Wolfgang can terrorize people because of his standards. The terror can be too strong.

Goleman: And you’re saying that another element of that is a very high standard of excellence that people are held to. And that can seem fierce, but there is a kind of fierce love, isn’t there?

Bennis: I think that would be close to it, Dan. I’ve got other examples too, and they both have the same basic quality—say George Szell or Toscanini. They both were really almost tyrannical in their quest for perfection: the perfect note, the tonality, their musical sense. Terrifying. I mean that’s almost too strong, but for the orchestra, it was also like, “I’ve got to live up to this.”

Now, on the other hand, take this 30-year-old named Gustavo Dudamel, who is now conducting the L.A. symphony, and with love he comes and hugs the orchestra. And they respect Dudamel, because of his musicality, his tonality, and yet there’s a lot more love. Frankly I would choose Dudamel’s energy, because he’s Toscanini who’s read Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence. That’s quite the combination.

LEARNING FROM CRUCIBLE

MOMENTS

Goleman: One of the concepts that I think of when I think of your work is your assertion that leaders, great leaders, have something in common—having gone through a crucible of some kind, a challenging period in their lifetimes. And it could be anything. You, at 19, were a platoon leader in World War II. Maybe the youngest one in the European theater at that time. Howard Gardner points out that living abroad can be a crucible, where you extricate yourself from your own everyday routines of culture, and immerse yourself in another, and then come back seeing your own world with fresh eyes. So why is a crucible so important for a leader?

Bennis: Well, we all go through crucibles, and at their extreme it could be the loss of a loved one. When I interviewed Mike Wallace, we talked about the loss of his son, who fell off a mountaintop in Greece and no one knew where he was. He went to a convent, and they suggested searching around the mountain, and when he and his wife found their son at the bottom of that mountain, you know, what could be more heartbreaking? And he said at that moment he decided, “I’m not going to spend my time just saying crap on TV. I’m going to try to do some serious stuff.” So we all have our crucibles. We continue to have them. My crucible right now is dealing with aging. And I will put money on people who go through crucibles while being aware of them, reflecting on them, and learning from them as best they can. Because a crucible really means there’s a hurt involved, too.

In my family, everybody seemed helpless. My dad, my twin older brothers, my mother, everybody seemed helpless—and I think at that moment I said, “I’m never going to let that happen to me.” I never wanted to be helpless, or be in the position of someone saying, “You’re fired.” I say this partly in jest, but also, I think, there’s seriousness in it. That’s why I ended up my life as a tenured professor. They can’t fire me. That’s one thing they can’t do. I know that. I mean it would be a long, drawn-out lawsuit, and I would win it. And, you know, isn’t that marvelous? But it’s probably no accident. I could have gone other ways, I think. But I will put my money on the leaders who experience crucibles and become bigger, more robust, fuller human beings.

Goleman: You know, it’s so interesting, how many leaders today who are highly effective have failed—have been fired, have gone into bankruptcy in a business they ran—and I guess what you’re saying is the difference is what do you take in from that? What do you metabolize? What resolve comes out of it, or what lesson is learned? That’s the value of a crucible. And how does it shape you for resilience? You used this phrase “adaptive capacity.”

Bennis: Right. And my father’s experience really gave me a kind of extra mojo—a deep ambition to make something of myself, almost to the point where I really had, I believe, almost unhinged ambition to make something of myself. So what’s appropriate ambition? Is there such a thing? Can there be too much? See, I think in a way my ambition also interfered with my relation with my kids. I wasn’t there for them as much as I could. It was so funny, because they said, “Dad, you weren’t such a great dad, but you’ve been a hell of a good father as you’ve grown older.” So they were telling me that I’ve learned.

Goleman: Shifting gears a bit, you’ve written a book called Geeks and Geezers. I once had a conversation with Ashley Montagu, the anthropologist, about aging. He said something wonderful. He said, “My goal is to die young as late in life as possible.” It’s neoteny he’s talking about, which is a concept you’ve written about. Can you explain that?

Bennis: Neoteny, meaning the retention of youthful characteristics into old age. And how do you do that, Dan? Maybe through connection? I may look my age—86—yet I know that I can connect with these 21-, 22-year-old students of mine; my co-author Steve Sample, who’s two decades younger; and many more.

Goleman: It’s because you’re a natural neotinik! I’ve got a new word.

Warren, I want to thank you. It’s been a real pleasure, my friend.