Partners in Learning
Learning to Lead Change: Building System Capacity

Leadership for Change Library

The Emotionally Intelligent Manager:
How to Develop and Use the Four Key Emotional Skills of Leadership
David Caruso, Peter Salovey
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005
294 pages

One of two books on our list dealing directly with emotional intelligence (see Goleman). It is interesting to note that Peter Salovey was one of the two co-authors who wrote the article in 1990 that coined the phrase emotional intelligence (yes, the concept in full form is only sixteen years old).

The authors start their book with these words:

Have any of these statements been made to you?

“Let's not get too excited.”
“You are being way too emotional about this.”
“We need to look at this rationally.”

Instead, they say, we need to feel: “let's do get excited;” “we are not being emotional enough, and we need to look at this emotionally — and logically.”

The authors offer an emotional blueprint of four main capacities:

1. Identify emotions (observe, listen, ask)
2. Use emotions (how do emotions influence thinking and action)
3. Understand emotions (get at the source of feelings)
4. Manage emotions (use logical information as well as emotional data)

The book is full of illustrative case examples of how emotional intelligence operates, or not, in given situations. The authors offer a 32 question self-evaluation form that enables people to delve into their own emotional blueprint via the four capacities. Other problem-solving exercises give readers the opportunity to address particular problematic situations.

Caruso and Salovey, as does Goleman, make the case and provide evidence that emotional intelligence can be developed — that we can all improve our EI by focusing on it through assessment, reflection, coaching, mentoring, and so on.

Why We Like This Book
Everyone can relate to emotional intelligence. It intrigues us because emotions are so powerful and so ubiquitous in situations of complex change. This book beautifully makes the case of EI, exposes the key ideas related to it, takes us into actual cases for gaining new insights into EI, and then helps us apply the concept to our own personalities and situations.