THE SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT LEADER
The human resources department of a large corporation arranged a daylong workshop by a famous expert in the company’s area of specialty. A larger-than-expected crowd showed up, and at the last minute the event was switched to a larger room, one that could hold everyone but was poorly equipped.
As a result, the people in the back had trouble seeing or hearing the speaker. At the morning break, a woman sitting in the back marched up to the head of human resources shaking with rage and complaining that she could neither glimpse the screen on which the speaker’s image was being projected, nor make out his words.
“I knew that all I could do was listen, empathize, acknowledge her problem, and tell her I’d do my best to fix things,” the head of human resources told me. “At the break she saw me go to the audiovisual people and at least try to get the screen higher. I couldn’t do much at all about the bad acoustics.
“I saw that woman again at the end of the day. She told me she couldn’t really hear or see all that much better, but now she was relaxed about it. She really appreciated my hearing her out and trying to help.”
When people in an organization feel angry and distressed, a leader, like that HR head, can at least listen with empathy, show concern, and make a goodwill effort to change things for the better. Whether or not that effort solves the problem, it does some good emotionally. By attending to someone’s feelings, the leader helps metabolize them, so the person can move on rather then continuing to seethe.
The leader need not necessarily agree with the person’s position or reaction. But simply acknowledging their point of view, then apologizing if necessary or otherwise seeking a remedy, defuses some of the toxicity, rendering destructive emotions less harmful. In a survey of employees at seven hundred companies, the majority said that a caring boss was more important to them than how much they earned.30 This finding has business implications beyond just making people feel good. The same survey found that employees’ liking for their boss was a prime driver of both productivity and the length of time they stayed at that job. Given the choice, people don’t want to work for a toxic boss at nearly any wage—except to get enough “screw you” money to quit with security.
Socially intelligent leadership starts with being fully present and getting in synch. Once a leader is engaged, then the full panoply of social intelligence can come into play, from sensing how people feel and why, to interacting smoothly enough to move people into a positive state. There is no magic recipe for what to do in every situation, no five-steps-to-social-intelligence-at-work. But whatever we do as we interact, the single measure of its success will be where in the inverted U each person ends up.
Businesses are on the front lines of applying social intelligence. As people work longer and longer hours, businesses loom as their substitute family, village, and social network—yet most of us can be tossed out at the will of management. That inherent ambivalence means that in more and more organizations, hope and fear run rampant.
Excellence in people management cannot ignore these subterranean affective currents: they have real human consequences, and they matter for people’s abilities to perform at their best. And because emotions are so contagious, every boss at every level needs to remember he or she can make matters either worse or better.
A SPECIAL CONNECTION
Maeva’s school was in one of New York City’s most impoverished neighborhoods. At thirteen she was only in sixth grade, two years behind her peers. She’d been held back twice.
And Maeva had a reputation as a troublemaker. Among the teachers at her middle school, she was notorious for storming out of class and refusing to return, instead spending most of the school day roaming the halls.
Before Pamela, Maeva’s new English teacher, first met her charge, she was warned that Maeva was certain to be a behavior problem. So on the first day of class, after assigning her students to work on their own to pick out the main idea from a reading passage, Pamela went over to Maeva to help her out.
After just a minute or two Pamela realized what was bothering Maeva: her reading level was that of a kindergartner.
“So often behavior problems are because a student feels insecure about being unable to do the work,” Pamela told me. “Maeva couldn’t even sound out words. I was shocked she had gotten to sixth grade without learning how to read.”
That day Pamela helped Maeva do the worksheet by reading it to her. Later that day Pamela sought out a special education teacher whose task included helping such students. The two teachers felt they had one last chance to keep Maeva from dropping out of school. The special ed teacher agreed to tutor Maeva daily in reading, starting from the very beginning level.
Even so, Maeva still proved a problem, as her other teachers had warned. She’d talk throughout class, be rude and pushy with other kids, and pick fights—anything to avoid reading. And if that wasn’t enough, she’d exclaim, “I don’t want to do this!” bolt out of class, and wander the school hallways.
Despite the resistance, Pamela doggedly gave Maeva extra help with her work in class. And when Maeva would blow up at another student, Pamela would take her into the privacy of the hallway and think through with her a better way to resolve things.
Mostly Pamela showed Maeva that she cared about her. “We’d joke around, spend extra time together. She’d come up to be with me in my classroom after she finished her lunch. I met with her mom.”
Her mother was as surprised as Pamela had been to realize that Maeva could not read. But her mother had seven other children to handle; Maeva’s problem had gone unnoticed amid the bustling crowd at home, just as it had gone uncorrected at school. Pamela got Maeva’s mother to agree to help her daughter behave better and give her some extra attention and homework help at home.
Maeva’s first-semester report card—when she had been with another English teacher—showed her failing most every class, as she had done for years. But after just four months with Pamela, there were marked changes for the better.
By the end of the semester she had stopped hiding her frustration by roaming the halls, now staying put in the classroom. Most important, her report card showed that Maeva had passed every class—most just barely, but with a surprisingly high grade in math. She had mastered the first two years of reading in just a few months.
Then came the moment in her reading circle when Maeva realized she was more adept than a few others, including one boy who had freshly arrived from West Africa. So she took it upon herself to help him unlock the secrets of reading.
That special connection between Pamela and Maeva represents a powerful tool in helping children learn. Mounting research shows that students who feel connected to school—to teachers, to other students, to the school itself—do better academically.31 They also fare better in resisting the perils of modern adolescence: emotionally connected students have lower rates of violence, bullying, and vandalism; anxiety and depression, drug use, and suicide; truancy and dropping out.
“Feeling connected” here refers not to some vague niceness but to concrete emotional links between students and the people in their schools: other kids, teachers, staff. One powerful method to foster such links is to build just the sort of attuned relationship between student and adult that Pamela offered Maeva. Pamela became Maeva’s secure base.
Consider what this could mean for the bottom 10 percent of students, those like Maeva most at-risk for failure. In a study of 910 first-graders from a national sample representative of the entire United States, trained observers evaluated their teachers, and assessed the effect of teaching style on how well the at-risk children learned.32 The best results were found when teachers:
• Tuned in to the child and responded to his needs, moods, interests, and capabilities, letting them guide their interactions.
• Created an upbeat classroom climate with pleasant conversations, lots of laughter and excitement.
• Showed warmth and “positive regard” toward s
tudents.
• Had good classroom management, with clear but flexible expectations and routines, so that students followed rules largely on their own.
The worst outcomes resulted when teachers took an I-It stance and imposed their own agenda on students without tuning in, or were emotionally distant and uninvolved. Such teachers were angry at students more often and had to resort to punitive methods of restoring order.
Students who were already doing well continued to do so regardless of the setting. But at-risk students who had cold or controlling teachers floundered academically—even when their teachers followed pedagogic guidelines for good instruction. Yet the study found a stunning difference among the at-risk students: if they had a warm, responsive teacher, they flourished, learning as well as the other kids.
The power of an emotionally connected teacher does not end in first grade. Sixth-graders who had such a teacher earned better grades not only that year but the next as well.33 Good teachers are like good parents. By offering a secure base, a teacher creates an environment that lets students’ brains function at their best. That base becomes a safe haven, a zone of strength from which they can venture forth to explore, to master something new, to achieve.
That secure base can become internalized when students are taught to better manage their anxiety and so more keenly focus their attention; this enhances their ability to reach that optimal zone for learning. There are already dozens of programs in “social/emotional learning” that do just this. The best are designed to fit seamlessly into the standard school curriculum for children at every age, inculcating skills like self-awareness and managing distressing emotions, empathy and navigating relationships smoothly. A definitive meta-analysis of more than one hundred studies of these programs showed that students not only mastered abilities like calming down and getting along better, but, more to the point here, learned more effectively: their grades improved—and their scores on academic achievement tests were a hefty 12 percent higher than similar students who did not have the programs.34
Those programs work best if students feel teachers really care about them. But whether or not a school has such an offering, whenever teachers create an empathic and responsive environment, students not only improve in their grades and test scores—they become eager learners.35 Even one supportive adult at school can make a difference to a student.36
Every Maeva needs a Pamela.
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The Connectedness Corrective
Here’s the list of life’s scars that Martin, just fifteen, enumerated on a line drawing of his own body, starting from the bottom up:
His feet had been broken at ages eleven and twelve. Both hands were scarred from fighting and “stained” through their contact with drugs, stolen property, and “negative sexual relations.” One arm had burns suffered while smoking marijuana; the other bore a knife wound.
Around Martin’s head swarmed the sleeplessness he’d had since he was eleven; the emotional trauma he’d experienced since age two from ongoing physical abuse and sexual assaults (including from his own father at age seven); and brain injuries from a suicide attempt at eleven. And from age eight, he noted, his brain had been “fried” from abusing “pills, weed, meth, alcohol, shrooms, and opium.”
Martin’s appalling litany of wounds is typical of all too many teenagers currently serving sentences in juvenile jails. Youth prisons have become a seemingly inevitable stop for troubled lives, those for whom childhood abuse merges seamlessly with substance abuse and social predation.
While in many countries more humane social systems lead such teenagers to treatment instead of punishment, in the United States they too often get “care” in prison—exactly the wrong setting for healing. Most prisons for youth are a prescription for a life of crime, not a ticket out.
But Martin is one of the lucky ones: he lives in Missouri, a state that has led the way in treating young offenders rather than just punishing them. Missouri has come a long way; its main youth correctional facility was once described by a federal court as having a “quasi-penal-military” atmosphere, and it was condemned for frequently banishing unruly inmates to a dark solitary-confinement cell known as “the Hole.” A former superintendent of that facility confessed, “I saw black eyes, battered faces, and broken noses among the boys. The usual corrective procedure among the guards was to knock a boy down with their fists, then kick him in the groin. Many of the men were sadists.”1
That description from decades ago may still hold true in too many prisons. But now that Missouri has chosen to treat youthful offenders, Martin’s facility offers a hopeful alternative. He lives in one of a network of small homes for troubled, law-breaking adolescents like himself. Established in 1983, some of the homes are in old school buildings or large houses; one is in an abandoned convent.
Each of them is home to no more than three dozen teens and a small staff of adults. These teens are not faceless cogs in some vast institution; everyone in each home knows the names of all the residents. They live as a “family,” offering the teens continuing one-on-one relationships with caring adults.
There are no iron bars, no cells, few locked doors, and little security equipment of any kind, though video monitors keep track of what’s going on. The atmosphere is more like that of a home than a jail. The teens are grouped into teams of ten or so, and members are responsible for seeing that they all follow the rules. The teams eat, sleep, study, and shower together—always with the supervision of two youth specialists.
If a resident does act up, there are no isolation cells, restraints, or handcuffs—the toolkit typical of most juvenile corrections facilities. Instead, the teams are taught how to safely restrain any member who threatens someone else’s safety. They grab his arms and legs and wrestle their teammate to the ground. Then they simply hold him there until he calms down and regains composure. The program director reports there has never been a serious injury from such team restraint, and fights are nearly nonexistent.
Half a dozen times a day the members form into a circle to check in with each other to say how they feel. A team member may call for an extra circle to raise concerns or talk over a complaint—most often about issues of safety, courtesy, and respect. That way the focus can shift from a class, exercise, or cleanup to the compelling emotional undercurrents that, if ignored, can build into a blow-up. Each afternoon they meet for activities that are designed to enhance camaraderie and cooperation, to foster empathy and accurate perceptions of each other, and to build communication skills and trust.
All of that constructs a secure base and provides them with the social abilities they so desperately need. That aura of safety is crucial, particularly in getting the teens to open up about their troubled past. Trust is key: one by one they tell their life stories to the rest of their team, tales of domestic violence and sexual victimization, abuse and neglect. And they open up about their own wrong-doings and the crimes that sent them to the facility.
Treatment does not end the day the teens leave. Instead of simply being assigned to an overburdened parole officer—standard practice in most places—Missouri youngsters meet their postrelease coordinator when they arrive in the facility. By the time they are discharged, they have a long-standing relationship with the person who will guide them back into community life.
Aftercare is a core part of the Missouri formula. Each teen meets frequently with his coordinator and even more often with a “tracker”—typically someone from his hometown or a local college student—who monitors his day-to-day progress and helps him find a job.
Does all this elaborate treatment make much difference? Follow-up studies of teens who have been released from correctional facilities are rare. But a 1999 study found that the recidivism rate for the Missouri program was just 8 percent over the three years following a teenager’s release—while in Maryland 30 percent of those released from juvenile correctional facilities were back in jail within three years. Another comparison looked at the rates at which relea
sed teens were returned to juvenile custody or adult prison or got probation during the first year after release. The rate in Missouri was just 9 percent, compared to 29 percent in Florida.2
And then there’s the human cost of imprisoning youngsters in horrific jails. Over four recent years, 110 teenagers committed suicide in juvenile facilities nationwide. In the twenty years of the Missouri program, there have been no suicides.
THE KALAMAZOO MODEL
The small city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, was in turmoil; voters were riled up about a referendum to raise $140 million for a new youth prison. Everyone agreed that the old one was overcrowded and inhumane—that was no issue. The fight was over what should replace the antiquated building.
Some argued fiercely for just upgrading the building, using better barbed wire, cells, locks—and adding a bit more room. But their opponents rejoined that the community needed to find better ways to keep young people from committing crimes in the first place and from repeating if they did.
One of the local judges suggested that both sides talk things over at a one-day retreat at the nearby Fetzer Institute. Everyone involved in the debate came: church leaders, prisoner advocacy groups, the sheriff, judges, the superintendent of schools, mental health workers, and some of the most liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
That meeting in Kalamazoo is emblematic of a movement sweeping the country, as concerned citizens confront the failure of the prison system to protect them from criminals who simply repeat what they know best, crime. Groups everywhere are rethinking the very meaning of “corrections.”
One dominant philosophy in penal circles is that convicts have committed acts that put them beyond the human pale and so must suffer for their crimes. To be sure, distinctions are made within the spectrum of crimes, and prisoners are sorted accordingly, into the levels of human ugliness they will endure day to day. For many, prison is a hellish realm, where convicts struggle in a tooth-and-nail battle; everyone fights to get respect, and toughness wins prestige. The prison yard becomes a jungle where the powerful prevail and fear rules. It’s a psychopath’s paradise, where coolheaded cruelty wins the day.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 33
