Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD, interviews Richard Boyatzis, PhD

Citation

Kawamura, K.M. (2015), "Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD, interviews Richard Boyatzis, PhD", Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, Vol. 22 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/CCM-03-2015-0032

Kristine Marin Kawamura, PhD, interviews Richard Boyatzis, PhD

Article Type: Scholars' corner From: Cross Cultural Management, Volume 22, Issue 2.

Preface

A note to readers: I am deeply honored to have had the opportunity to interview Dr Boyatzis. I have been greatly intrigued by the concepts of emotional intelligence (EI), social intelligence (SI), and cognitive intelligence for years and was thrilled to be able to talk to the world’s leading expert in these areas. Dr Boyatzis’s work helps us understand the powerful psychophysiological aspects of leadership that, if developed and applied when making small, every day decisions as well as large, universally impactful ones, could help us create a more empathic, ethical, humane, and productive world and business environment. Dr Boyatzis’s lighthearted humor, passionate energy, and brilliant mind innervated this interview. As change is a part of all people’s lives, his work provides all academic scholars, educators, and business practitioners the guiding light to create their ideal personal and professional selves, relationships, and work.

Background

Dr Richard Boyatzis is a Distinguished University Professor as well as a Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University and a Visiting Professor in Human Resources at Escuela Superior de Administración y Dirección de Empresas, Barcelona (ESADE). A world-renowned scholar, consultant, educator, business leader, and speaker, Dr Boyatzis has devoted many years to researching how people and organizations engage in sustainable, desired change. He is the originator of Intentional Change Theory, which predicts how changes occur at different scales of human organizations, including teams, communities, countries, and worldwide. Ongoing research supporting this theory includes developing new and better measures of individuals’ emotional, social, and cognitive intelligence as well as studies that demonstrate the relationship between these abilities and performance. Professor Boyatzis’s current research includes several fMRI studies into the neural systems that are activated when people engage in intentional change efforts to arouse the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) and when coaching to the PEA as well as resonant vs dissonant leadership. He is also involved in numerous research studies of coaching, doctor-patient relationships, and teacher-student relationships that foster sustained, desired change.

Dr Boyatzis is the author of more than 150 articles and books on leadership, competencies, emotional intelligence, and change from a complexity perspective, including: The Competent Manager (in 12 languages); Primal Leadership, with Daniel Goleman and Annie McKee (in 28 languages); Resonant Leadership, with Annie McKee (in 18 languages); Becoming a Resonant Leader, with Annie McKee and Francis Johnston (in eight languages), and Transforming Qualitative Information (in two languages).

Dr Boyatzis has received many awards for his work, including: Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University (2010); John Diekhoff Award for Graduate Student Teaching, Case Western Reserve University (2007); Executive Education Teaching Award, Weatherhead School of Management (2003); David Bowers Faculty Service Award, Weatherhead Alumni Association (2002); Research Award, Weatherhead School of Management (1999); and Theodore M. Alfred Distinguished Service Award, Weatherhead School of Management (1996).

Prior to becoming a professor in 1987, Dr Boyatzis was President and CEO of McBer and Company, a research-oriented human resource consulting company, for 11 years and COO of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, a market research company, for three years. During that time he worked on various projects ranging from treatment of alcoholics and drug addicts to the development of competency-based human resource systems and competency assessment validation. Prior to that, he was a psychologist for the Veterans Administration.

Dr Boyatzis received his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1968), and both his masters (1970) and PhD (1973) from Harvard University in Social Psychology.

Summary

Dr Richard Boyatzis, a world-renowned scholar, educator, business leader, and speaker in the study of sustainable, desired change, describes his research journey and the motivation for his work. He artfully draws out the close associations between his ongoing work with competencies, EI, SI, leadership, and neuroscience. Describing his Intentional Change Theory, Dr Boyatzis identifies the five discoveries needed for leaders to achieve sustainable, desired change and examines how resonant relationships play a vital role in change, leadership effectiveness, and coaching. He examines the theoretical psychophysiological statues of PEA and Negative Emotional Attractors (NEA), and further applies the construct to understand how someone moves along the ideal change process, enables coaching effectiveness and innovation, and improves leadership effectiveness, engagement, organizational citizenship, treatment adherence, and executive leadership behavior. Dr Boyatzis explains how coaching with compassion enables a coach to build a trusting, caring, and empathetic relationship between the coach and the coachee, anchoring the conversation in positive emotions and the discovery of the ideal self, and inspiring transformation to occur. He emphatically describes the role and impact that positive and negative emotions have on health, performance, innovation, and natural human defensiveness. Dr Boyatzis humbly shares the transformative impacts of his work as well as his dreams to help create a healthier, more emotionally and socially intelligent, and more hopeful world. His thoughts inspire all scholars and leaders around the globe to live positive and conscious lives and to understand their great potential for creating positive and meaningful emotional contagion through their work, emotions, and relationships.

Interview

Dr Kawamura: Thank you so much for this opportunity to interview you, Richard. I’m so excited to learn more about your background and research journey in this interview. Let me start by saying that your work is profound! You are very well known for so many different aspects of leadership theory and others. Your work has encompassed complexity and change, emotional and cognitive intelligence and competencies, coaching and mentoring, neuroscience, leadership, spirituality, and more. What has motivated your work?

Dr Boyatzis: From the very beginning, the heart of everything I’ve worked on has to do with trying to understand change. What is it that people do, either individually, in teams, and in communities, families, or countries that enables them to change in sustained, desired ways, and why do other people not change? My work has all been about understanding how people change, learn, and grow throughout their lives and careers.

Dr Kawamura: Where did this question from? What first interested you in the concept of change?

Dr Boyatzis: In some ways it’s difficult to tell, but I would say the most concrete kickoff happened when I was getting my degree in aeronautics at MIT. My specialty was in control systems in interplanetary vehicles. I was returning from six and a half months working in California as an aerospace scientist.

My parents were immigrants from Greece, by the way. When my father came over, he immediately took out citizenship papers. So right away, of course, he was drafted. He fought for the USA, helping secure the Panama jungle. Then he landed on Omaha Beach a few weeks after D-Day, fighting through the Germans and all the rest of it. By the time he got back to the USA, he and my mother had met and gotten married. There was no way that he was going to be able to figure out how to get back to the life he had started in Greece. So he did what every Greek male did in 1946: he went into the restaurant business. Actually, all of my male relatives on this side of the Atlantic at the time – even up until I was, what, 25 or 30 years old – were in the restaurant business.

Dr Kawamura: So how did you get to MIT?

Dr Boyatzis: I had the good fortune of having a number of people who helped me a lot and went to bat for me, including my mother, who really dug in and fought for me every time someone in the New York public school system decided I was slow and wanted to leave me back!

(Laughter)

In the process of going to school, I really started to just love science and engineering. That’s what I wanted to do with my whole life. But I had a dilemma. I was putting myself through school, and I had run out of money in my junior year. MIT, however, had an option that if you ran out of money, they would get you a “real” job. If you retained the job for the “long term,” meaning, for six and a half months and through the fall, you would actually save enough money that you would graduate. So that’s what I did.

In the process, though, of working at Northrop Norair, I discovered that as much as I loved the concept of being in the space program, I didn’t actually like the day-to-day work – it was kind of boring. So I went back to MIT and finished up my last couple of courses.

Dr Kawamura: What did you do next?

Dr Boyatzis: Well, I was thinking, what the hell do I do? I don’t want to be an engineer. I sure as hell don’t want to go back into the restaurant business. So that’s when I thought, maybe I’ll go into management. I thought, it’s gotta be easy – look at those idiots we had out at Northrop!

(Laughter)

Dr Kawamura: What do you mean by that?

Dr Boyatzis: You could never get so little out of such smart people. I had worked a lot in high school. I had three bands and played two or three paying jobs every weekend. I worked in restaurants. I worked over the summers in different places. So it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen people at work. But I just couldn’t believe the ineptitude of the management. So I signed up for some undergraduate-graduate courses (in management) at MIT. I remember telling my very first instructor – Dave Kolb, who was finishing up his PhD at Harvard and teaching at MIT – that I wanted to do my term paper on how managers helped, or didn’t help, their subordinates. I remember thinking that, on the whole, most of the managers – in fact everyone that I’d ever seen – weren’t very good at (helping their subordinates).

Well, Dave said, “I’ve got some data that we have literally just finished collecting, but nobody has analyzed it yet. You’ve got a technical orientation. How would you like to do data analysis on whether or not graduate students at MIT help each other?”

I did it. Dave offered me a job in the summer. We ended up publishing a paper. He then talked me into going to graduate school. Dave got me into some doctoral courses at MIT with people who I would later discover are leading figures in the field: people like Ed Schein, Everett Hagen, (who started the Psychoanalytic Historical Society with Erik Erikson), Jack Pugh, Carl Swanson, (who started the whole area of system dynamics with Jay Forrester), and Dave McClelland. It kind of blew me away. What I discovered, for the first time in my life, was something that I would love doing even if no one paid me for it! You see, I’ve never known anybody who would work for nothing. What most people I knew wanted was to work so they could then retire, and after retiring, go have a life.

The next thing I know, I’m in a PhD program in psychology at Harvard. I think they let me in because I was very mathematical – after all, I did have a degree in aerospace from MIT (laughter). I knew more math than most people even knew existed, which I proceeded to forget!

Dr Kawamura: Why were you interested in psychology?

Dr Boyatzis: I wanted to go more into the people side – the helping side – of things. I had joined Dave McClelland, my thesis advisor, to look at how the drive for power affects predominantly males (but sometimes females) in terms of their abusive drinking. While I was working on this research, Dave asked me if I was interested in developing a therapy program that would be based on research he had started and was beginning to publish, which I did, and it was used in conjunction with medical treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous.

McClelland’s then small consulting company had also received a bunch of grants at the time for conducting basic research on the effect of alcohol consumption on aggression. He asked me if I wanted to work on them, and I did. Also in 1970, while I was working my way through graduate school, I did the first study on what was called the competency analysis and continued doing that, bit by bit, in small projects here and there. In the process of working on the competencies, I was also working on outcome assessment, which eventually differentiated our approach to measuring EI and SI competencies.

Dr Kawamura: How was your research and work with alcoholics and on the competency analysis related to your focus on change?

Dr Boyatzis: As I previously mentioned, the central theme of my life has been to ask, “How do people change in sustained, desired ways?” That really is the core of everything I work on. When you are working with alcoholics, it’s pretty easy to know what they should change. They need to stay sober, to become functioning members of their families, and to keep a job. But what is harder to figure out, when you are working with managers or executives or leaders, is the answer to the question, change what? Change what to become better?

Our work on competencies was the first empirical piece of research that pitted competencies against performance. Prior to that, even in the skills arena, people didn’t measure a comprehensive set of skills. Instead, they would look at only one skill, and they often didn’t measure it against performance. We had been working on competencies within a number of different projects funded by the federal government – a lot in the military and others in the private sector, like General Electric, Digital Equipment, and others. By 1979, I had shifted my focus to working on just competencies. My book on this work (The Competent Manager: A Model for Effective Performance (Wiley)) came out in 1982.

Dr Kawamura: Richard, when you use the word competency, you are talking about behavior-based capabilities, right?

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. Competences are behavior-based capabilities that have an underlying unconscious intent. I don’t mean skills. I mean something that’s deeper. Empathy and adaptability are (examples of) what I call competencies.

Dr Kawamura: How are competencies related to the notion of EI and SI?

Dr Boyatzis: EI and SI are merely a relabeling of what we had already been doing with competencies. As I’ve written, EI competency is an ability to recognize, understand, and use emotional information about oneself that leads to or causes effective or superior performance. SI competency is the ability to recognize, understand, and use emotional information about others that leads to or causes effective or superior performance. With the model that Daniel Goleman and I created, EI and SI have two dimensions each: EI includes self-awareness and self-management and SI includes social awareness and relationship management.

What happened was that Dan and I were in graduate school together at Harvard. We were also personal friends, and helped each other a lot along the way. When Dan’s 1995 book (Emotional Intelligence (Bantam)) came out and went just gangbusters within a couple of months, a bestseller all over the world, he called me and said, “Hey, Richard, I’m getting calls from everywhere—and you’re the one who is doing the research and knows how to improve it!”

Dr Kawamura: You also have been the CEO of a consulting organization. Can you talk about this experience and how it related to your competency research?

Dr Boyatzis: I became Director at the consulting firm McBer and Company, which is now part of Hay Group, in 1976. Starting in 1974, my company had gotten a lot of grants from two US federal agencies to help universities that wanted to assist non-traditional students. Because we had very innovative measurement ideas, coming from McClelland’s work, our job was to be the psychometricians in these studies. I had the competency work, the outcome assessment work, and some management training going on – but the thing that took up most of my time was the therapist training and alcoholism research. As that cooked, I was approached by the American Management Association (AMA) to come up with a more practical, behavior-oriented MBA – one that would replace the traditional MBA.

Dr Kawamura: Why was this needed?

Dr Boyatzis: We had been doing a study for the group that accredits business schools. We were showing how most MBA programs – even those in above-average schools – weren’t adding much value in terms of competencies. When people were graduating, they hadn’t really developed beyond the level they were at when they had entered their program. The AMA thought they could get accreditation for a new program, and they wanted it to be competency-based. They went out and asked three different firms to bid on the project. We won the bid.

This research really was an aggregate of the prior research that we had been doing for about ten years and came out in my 1982 book, which is still getting cited today, 32 years later.

Dr Kawamura: And this was all done through your consulting firm?

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. McBer was one of the two groups that started the competency movement. The other was a group out of the University of Minnesota, started by Professor Marv Dunnette. Today, it’s hard for anybody in human resources not to have several competency-based systems. Even though a lot of firms still use competencies the wrong way, they at least have something.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dave McClelland and I were going around to numerous conferences, like the AMA, the Academy of Management, and the American Psychological Association, talking about how we could revolutionize the whole human resource operation – from training and development and career pathing to selection, promotion, incentive compensation, everything – by using competencies. In 1979, I gave the first talk to a New York chapter of the American Psychological Association, called “Competency Is the DNA of Human Resources.” By the 1980s, people were starting to pick it up and go with it. Of course, by the 1990s, every company with more than two hundred people had competency-based programs.

Dr Kawamura: So what led you to shift from the consulting work to being a professor?

Dr Boyatzis: I had gotten tired of what I was doing. By 1987, I had been the CEO of McBer for 11 years. I had also been the COO of Yankelovich, Skelly & White for three and a half or four years during that time, as we had sold our company to them. They, in turn, had sold us to Saatchi. I was buying and selling companies and doing a lot of management, and it was frustrating. So I decided to leave.

Dr Kawamura: What was frustrating? What caused you to want to change?

Dr Boyatzis: Well, it wasn’t where my heart was. I actually thought the Saatchis’ top management were greedy. I loved what we at McBer were doing with organizations around the world and how we were helping them. I couldn’t understand the Saatchis’ focus on what seemed like just doing the work to make money, which was the way they seemed to treat everything. It seemed wrong.

My perfect balance at McBer was when I spent a third of my time doing research, a third working with clients, and a third managing the company. When managing and leading the company got to be 100 percent of my time, it just wasn’t that much fun. Now, I’d done a pretty good job according to what a lot of other people were saying. At that point, McBer was just over 100 or 110 people – mostly consultants, mostly PhDs. The half of Yankelovich that I was also managing was another 100 people. We had grown quite a bit, and even though we were relatively small, we had become very well known. I had also been able to guide the company to change our strategic mix (which allowed us to greatly increase our financial results). So to answer your question, I just felt it was time for a change. The company was going well. I was on the board of Hay (Group), and the Saatchis had bought Hay. It looked like McBer and Hay could do well together – which they have. At the time, I got a couple of teaching offers. Ed Schein asked me if I wanted to go to MIT for a few years as a visiting (professor) and see what would happen. Chris Agyris (proposed) the same thing at Harvard. I don’t know how much you know about our field, but […].

Dr Kawamura: I know of both of them

Dr Boyatzis: They were both very important mentors to me early on. I also knew a lot of folks out here at Case Western, as they had either been classmates of mine or had jumped ahead of me a few years at Harvard and MIT. David Kolb was out here. They offered me a full-time faculty position in 1982, but I turned them down. So when they offered it to me again in 1986, I took it, because in 1986, they offered it with tenure.

So, I came out here with the sole intent of getting back to the specific agenda of understanding how people change. I developed the Intentional Change Theory, which is at the heart of everything I work on. It’s actually a modification of a theory that David Kolb had started working on.

Dr Kawamura: Let’s talk about change for a minute. In Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership as well as in numerous articles, you describe your Intentional Change Theory. Can you describe it for us, please?

Dr Boyatzis: Sure. I’ve done lots of longitudinal studies over the years to better understand how people create sustainable, desired change. I developed the Intentional Change Theory to show how people can successfully engage in personal transformation, and do so with excitement and enthusiasm. Sustainable, desired change is most likely to occur when five discoveries are experienced. You can picture it as a cyclical process. In the first discovery, the individual’s ideal self is activated. This includes identifying one’s passion, purpose, and core values, which are often integrated and expressed in a personal vision statement. Now, once a person has tapped into their deepest desires, what they most want in their life, they’re ready to look at their real self – how they come across to others. The areas of ideal self and real self that are in sync are called “strengths,” while those that are out of sync are called “weaknesses.” The second discovery, therefore, is the recognition of one’s strengths and weaknesses, which are then manifested in the creation of a Personal Balance Sheet. The third discovery is the development of a learning agenda – a framing of learning goals and actions – that an individual enthusiastically looks forward to trying. It is meant to help a person capitalize on strengths and move closer to their personal vision while possibly working on a couple weaknesses, or working on maintaining the ideal current state of their life or work. The fourth discovery is when a person actually goes out and experiments with and practices new habits, behaviors, thoughts, and/or feelings that reinforce and affirm their strengths. The fifth discovery is focussed on developing and maintaining close, personal, and trusting relationships – resonant relationships – that offer support and help throughout the change process.

Dr Kawamura: The term “resonant relationships” is an important one, right?

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. In Resonant Leadership, we talk about how effective leaders use their EI to build shared hope, compassion, mindfulness, and playfulness in their relationships. Because emotions are contagious, as we’ve already talked about, it’s vital for a person, a leader who is seeking to create sustainable, desired change to develop resonant relationships – those in which they feel in sync with a shared purpose, including vision, mission, and values. There is compassion, or shared caring for each other; there is mindfulness, when they are able to tune into and pay attention to themselves and others; and they are able to be playful.

Dr Kawamura: So how does positive movement through the intentional change stages actually occur?

Dr Boyatzis: This has to do with the PEA and NEA system. We’ve identified essentially two theoretical psychological and physiological states, constructs if you will, that are made of three components: the degree of positive vs negative emotions around; the intensity of emotional arousal; and the degree of parasympathetic nervous system vs sympathetic nervous system arousal. The PEA occurs when the parasympathetic nervous system is around and an emphasis is placed on future possibilities, hope, and individual and collective strengths in order to move the system toward a desired state. The NEA is involved when the sympathetic nervous system is aroused and a focus is anchored in problems, fear, and apparent weaknesses. Positive movement along the ideal change stages occurs when the PEA state is aroused enough to “tip” or trigger the person into the next discovery or stage of the process.

Dr Kawamura: What would you say are the most important impacts of your work?

Dr Boyatzis: I think my first impact came in the area of power motivation, in particular, when I studied how power motivation affected people’s abusive behavior in terms of drinking. I then developed a therapy program out of that. My earlier work on affiliation had minor impact because it inspired a string of doctoral students who worked with McClelland for 15 or 20 years.

I see my work in the competency area as my major contribution. Because I’m a scientist and an empiricist – I don’t believe something until I can test it, and test it in a way that can be proven false – my colleagues and I were forever collecting data. It was good for business because it was so different from how other consultants operated. Other consultants would come into companies with just their values, or theories, or consulting models that they cooked up on flip charts – they looked good to somebody, but they had no empirical validation. Because of our empirical foundation (our work) just took off.

As the research continued, essentially studying the application of the basic technique of Intentional Change Theory, we followed its use with graduate students and were able to show that it produced sustainable, desired change in the behavior-based competencies. Now we have 32 longitudinal studies showing that, yes, you can significantly improve people’s EI, SI, and cognitive intelligence as adults. The data shows that this holds for at least five to seven years.

This helped us, me, to really focus on those parts of the research that were very exciting. Those areas started to change. Around the year 2000, it became clear to me that I needed to work the places where the discontinuities occurred. I’d been exploring different levels of analysis – organizational and team levels – but it really became clear when I was teaching a course on complexity theory in the engineering school (at Case Western) with a geneticist, a mathematician, and a systems person. We were asking, What is it that moves somebody through the intentional change process? That’s when I started playing with the PEA and NEA notion.

In fact, right now, as a matter of fact, I’m editing a special issue of a Frontiers journal on the power of vision and shared vision. (In it), there are 15 empirical studies showing how working on the PEA improves leadership effectiveness, engagement, organizational citizenship, treatment adherence, executive’s leadership behavior, etc.

Dr Kawamura: How did this move into your work on coaching?

Dr Boyatzis: While we were working on the PEA/NEA, and I was trying to get doctoral students to work with me, it also became clear that this concept was helpful in understanding (the role of) relationships (in the change process). I had to go back full circle – to the same thing I had started working on in 1967. I studied a group of doctoral students and faculty at Case Western. We started using “coaching” as the overall label. At this time, 2001, only 17 empirical studies had ever been published on coaching – and I was the author of two of them! There wasn’t much out there, so we dug into it in a heavy-duty way. Today, we see that Case has the most prolific research lab on coaching of any university – even when compared to research at universities such as Columbia and Harvard and the International Coaching Federation.

When I was training coaches back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we had used the 360-degree feedback system in executive and other programs. It was very clear that people right away zoomed in on their gaps. At the time, that’s what I thought people had to do. You know, buck up and just change. But as the years went by, we started doing research showing that no matter whose management development program they went through, on the whole, people didn’t change. It was like what we found in MBA programs. On the whole, if you wanted to be a better manager, those programs were, and to a large extent still are, a waste of time. This made me realize that there was something else going on (affecting their ability to change).

Dr Kawamura: What else was going on?

Dr Boyatzis: When I had conversations with Dan Goleman in the 1990s, I got back into studying the physiology (involved with change), which I had also been heavily (focussed on) when I was working with people who were biochemically addicted. I had also used some physiological measures in my research in those days. While reading about endocrinology, the data were very clear about the effects of stress on people’s (sympathetic nervous systems). What started to dawn on me, however, was that people hadn’t studied much on the opposite system, the parasympathetic nervous system – the part of the autonomic nervous system, the central nervous system, that allows people to rebuild their bodies, their minds, and their spirits. This (avenue) fit right into my work on the Positive Attractor vs the Negative Attractor.

As we got into the years 2000-2002, more research was coming out showing that stress inhibited learning. It inhibited retention. It narrowed perception. It limited cognitive performance, and it damaged the immune system. So Melvin Smith and I worked with Nancy Blaze, an MBA student at the time who was also an MD, on an article about why people should coach with compassion. We were making the argument that it would help the leaders be more sustainable (with regards to their desired area of change). While we working on that, it had become very clear to me that I would have to get back into the physiological research. Rather than doing the hormonal research – like some of the stuff I’d done before – this time I wanted to zero in on neurological (research). But now the problem was how to find people who would be willing to do neurological research with me since I was a babe in the woods on this stuff.

Dr Kawamura: So what did you do to pursue this new direction?

Dr Boyatzis: Well, I spent time at our medical school (at Case Western) and at the Cleveland Clinic, which also had a medical school in partnership with Case. I started to parley my interest with others, to get other people interested. I was able to find a young professor, Tony Jack, who had just joined Case’s cognitive science department and who was really interested in moving ahead on this kind of relationship-oriented research. He thought (the study of coaching with compassion) was something quite pivotal, and he hadn’t found anybody who had the same kind of theory that I did to help explain why.

Dr Kawamura: Could you please explain your approach to coaching, which you call coaching with compassion?

Dr Boyatzis: There are several different coaching orientations or practices. The traditional orientation that is common in many organizations is what I call coaching for compliance, when you are coaching a person to address a gap – the things they should do to improve. You are coaching the person toward compliance with either your image or someone in authority’s image of what they should be and how they should act. What usually happens with this kind of coaching is that they cope with the short term but end up returning to their old ways soon after. You actually are operating within the NEA state, feeling pressured and often defensive. Coaching with compassion, on the other hand, engages the PEA during most conversations and meetings. What’s most important here is to build a trusting, caring, and empathetic relationship between the coach and the coachee. So you anchor the conversation in positive emotions and the discovery of the ideal self. You’ll know that you’ve created it if the coach is emotionally in sync with the coachee and committed to helping that person.

Dr Kawamura: How did you begin to study coaching with compassion?

Dr Boyatzis: I did one fMRI study at the Cleveland Clinic on 49-year-old resonant and dissonant leaders and their followers. Tony and I did another study on coaching to the PEA and NEA with a group of doctoral students from my program and some undergraduates from his (program), and that worked out so well that we won awards. We published an article on this and did a second study that we are still trying to get written up and published. The idea of the neuroscience studies is to test the likelihood that working with people to the PEA really makes a difference.

Dr Kawamura: You’ve written bestselling books called Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership . What is primal leadership?

Dr Boyatzis: Dan Goleman, Annie McKee, and I explained that primal leadership comes out of the notion that great leaders move us through the emotions. Great leaders ignite our passion and inspire the best in us. In fact, the leader’s task of driving emotions in the right direction in all their actions is primal to leadership. It’s primal because it is both the original and most important act of leadership. In fact, research in the field of emotion show us that the best leaders have found effective ways to understand and improve the way they handle their own and other people’s emotions. If a leader can push people’s emotions toward the range of enthusiasm, performance can soar. If people are driven toward anxiety, stress, fear, or anger, their performance will be thrown off.

Another primal aspect of leadership is empathy: the ability to build supportive emotional connections. When leaders drive emotions positively, they bring out everyone’s best. And we call this effect resonance. When they drive emotions negatively, leaders really undermine the emotional foundations that let people shine. We call this effect dissonance. So what’s important is not just what a leader does as a leader, but how he or she does it.

Resonant leadership occurs when a leader is resonant to people’s feelings and able to move them in a positive emotional direction. The leader speaks authentically from their own values and resonates with the emotions of those around them. When a leader triggers resonance, you can read it in people’s eyes: they’re engaged, excited, and they light up.

Dr Kawamura: How does this work? How do the emotions of a leader – or of anybody, for that matter – affect another person?

Dr Boyatzis: It lies in the design of the human brain. The limbic system is the part of our brain – a complex bundle of nerves and networks – that controls our basic emotions (such as fear, pleasure, and anger) and our drives (like hunger, dominance, and care of our children). It is an open-loop system, which means that what’s happening in the circulatory system of others impacts our own system. An open-loop system depends largely on external sources to manage itself, or in other words, we rely on connections with other people for our own emotional stability. A leader – any person – transmits signals that can alter the hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, and even immune function inside the body of another person.

Dr Kawamura: Is this related to the notion you describe as emotional contagion?

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. When people work together in a group, they create a kind of emotional soup, with everyone adding their own flavor or ingredient to the pot. The leader, however, adds the strongest flavor. Everyone watches the person at the top, taking their cues from what the leader says, how the leader emotionally reacts, and when, why, and how they give praise or withhold it, provide constructive or destructive criticism, ignore or assist a person in need.

The greater a leader’s skill in transmitting emotions – the more expressive their face, voice, and gestures – the more easily we catch the leader’s emotional state, and it passes throughout the group through emotional contagion. Since people naturally look up to and pay attention to leaders, even subtle expressions of emotions have great impact. Leaders with this kind of emotional talent – those who are very open and can widely express their enthusiasm, for example – people naturally gravitate to. People want to work with leaders who exude upbeat, positive feelings. It’s one reason why emotionally intelligent leaders attract talented people – because people want to work in their presence, and they also feel good about themselves when they do so. Research has shown that optimistic, enthusiastic leaders more easily retain people, compared with those bosses who tend toward negative moods.

Dr Kawamura: In Primal Leadership , you say that “mood impacts results.”

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. Mood impacts your own results and the results of others. For example, a leader may have mild anxiety over a situation. This can signal others to give attention to it, to give it careful thought. If the anxiety is prolonged, however, it can sabotage a leader’s relationships and hamper work performance by diminishing the brain’s ability to process information and respond effectively. If the leader is impacted by stress, people feel bad, and they focus on the downside of a situation. And beyond this perceptual aspect of this, the impact of stress hormones secreted when a person is upset takes hours to become reabsorbed in the body and fade away. Negative emotions – especially chronic anger, anxiety, or a sense of futility – powerfully disrupt work because they hijack a person’s attention away from the task at hand. When people “pick up” a leader’s distress, it not only erodes their mental abilities, but it makes them less emotionally intelligent. People who are upset have trouble accurately reading the emotions of others, decreasing the most basic skill needed for empathy and, as a result, impairing their social skills.

A good laugh or an upbeat mood, on the other hand, can enhance the neural abilities that are needed for doing good work. And in turn, when people feel upbeat, they see the positive light in a situation, recall good things about it, act positively to find solutions, and even affect others around them in a positive way. Positive emotional contagion occurs.

Dr Kawamura: Where do you see yourself going now with your research? What’s missing from a scholarship standpoint, and what are you interested in?

Dr Boyatzis: At heart, I’m a scientist. I love research. If I couldn’t do good empirical research – predominantly quantitative, although sometimes qualitative, research – I would shrivel. I also like teaching. I love the buzz of inspiring people. I help with executive education because that’s a way to train others so they’ll continue to bring the techniques and methods to organizations, governments, institutions, not-for-profits, etc.

But my love is the research. At the heart of it, I’m a nitty-gritty nerd! (Laughter) So what am I looking forward to? I’m looking forward to collecting more data!

I’ve got two studies for which I’ve gotten grants this past summer. One is to look at the effectiveness, in terms of their EI and SI, of engineers in the engineering division of Ford in Germany. I was contacted for this study by a woman who was participating in my MOOC (a massive online open course called “Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence”) and who also was in charge of organizational development and coaching at Ford in Germany. It’s a three-year grant.

We’re going to parlay that study into another in which we’ll study a series of MOOCs that are implemented with different features such as a stand-alone MOOC, one implemented with control features, one with individual coaching, and another with only face-to-face discussion, and then use pre- and post-testing to see if asynchronous learning and some of these other features have comparable impact. I think there is a lot we can learn about advancing education through this study.

We’ve also gotten a grant from the US Forest Service to conduct both a competency study and an fMRI study on unit team commanders. These are the unit commanders of forest firefighter teams who drop into forest fires around the USA. We’re also trying to get money to conduct fMRI studies of 30- to 40-year-old “run-of-the-mill” managers.

Meaning while, my colleagues Ellen Van Oosten, Melvin Smith, and I have now formally started the coaching research lab as an entity for which we’re raising money. We want to be able to support two major studies every year through the lab for our doctoral students or faculty. We’ve been able to do this until now, but we’ve funded it mostly by taking in money from my endowed chair position; Angela Passarelli also got a 44,000 dollar research grant from the Hartford Institute of Coaching.

Dr Kawamura: I have to tell you that I get so inspired just listening to you! I feel encouraged to make changes and I hope that people can create positive change in the world and inspire other people. I can feel the “emotional contagion” that you write about when I’m talking with you!

Dr Boyatzis: Thank you.

Dr Kawamura: Given this as a backdrop, I have a question that’s a little darker. In our world today, our systems tend to support competitiveness. We see a movement away from meaning and hope toward hopelessness with many people. Many people appear to live more by the sympathetic nervous system than the parasympathetic one. Though I feel inspiration and change through emotional contagion from you, when I look at reality, it’s very different. How did we get this way in so many of our systems and organizations?

Dr Boyatzis: It’s not that complicated! Human organisms have to have stress to wake up and function. Human organisms have to have the NEA to defend themselves from threat, at a very basic human level. This is built into Neanderthal and Homo erectus DNA. We are designed to protect ourselves. So what I say is that we need the NEA to survive. But we need the PEA to thrive.

Unfortunately, in today’s world, if you live in relatively safe environments in countries like Spain, the USA, or Chile – so I’m not talking about countries like Syria, or Afghanistan, or Angola, or northern Nigeria – we are still so attuned to protecting ourselves that we not only protect ourselves from real threats but also from imagined threats, social threats. We badger ourselves with negativity. And because a huge percentage of people in management – 70-80 percent of them, according to my research data, including the people who are leading our hospitals, universities, nonprofits, for-profits, military governments, everything, all of our leaders – aren’t very good at it because the chronic stress has gotten to them. It has reduced each to being a defensive being. Now, once they are defensive, then guess what. They can’t encourage you to be a thriving, upbeat person. What they’re going to do is say, “You’re too upbeat, you’re Pollyanna-ish, you don’t have your feet on the ground, you’re not dealing with the really nasty reality of life […].”

And the truth is, physiologically and neurologically, they are destroying the likelihood that they will be able to innovate. So the very processes that these negative, defensively oriented people are leading us to are hampering our ability to innovate, and they are literally causing cognitive, perceptual, and emotional impairment.

And the more we focus on tasks, to the inclusion of people and moral concerns, the more we end up suppressing the neurological networks that allow us to (address these concerns).

As a matter of fact, the paper that Tony Jack and I will be presenting at the Spirituality and Creativity in Management World Congress (in Barcelona, April 2015) is a summary of seven studies in which we show that spiritual and religious beliefs are, yes, negatively related to cognitive functioning and intelligence, traditional intelligence, but they are positively related to measures of empathy and empathic concern and moral thinking. So our argument is that, neurologically, every time we focus on the numbers, every time we focus on analytics, we push people away from thinking about others, what’s right, and being open to new ideas. And if you think about how organizations run themselves for profit or even not for profit, managers talk about budget issues all the time. So when you’re battered with number issues, you’re forced into the task positive network and you suppress the default mode (network).

Dr Kawamura: What is the task positive network, and what is the default mode network?

Dr Boyatzis: These terms describe different neural networks that leaders use when they are engaging in different kinds of activities. When a person is engaging in an analytic task, such as financial analysis or problem solving, he or she activates the task positive network. When people are paying attention to other people and their emotions, considering whether actions are fair, or they are open to new ideas, they activate a subset of the default mode network. These two networks have little overlap and they actually suppress each other.

So, you asked, how does all of that happen? It’s natural human defensiveness.

Is it good for us? It is good for those people who live under conditions of threat. If you’re living in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, parts of Colombia, you are under threat. Not always, but a lot of the time, and, if you’re not careful, you’ll die. But if you are living where you and I live, and you live your life protecting yourself against threat, you’re diminishing your perspective. You’re closing your openness to new ideas. You are closing your willingness to see and understand people, especially if they are different from you. And what’s even more frightening is that you’ve closed your ability to think about what’s right and what’s just or fair. So it is a horrible mess.

Now, on one hand you could say, Oh my god, that’s so depressing. On the other hand, I think a lot of people are waking up to these issues these days. And I think that’s fantastic.

Dr Kawamura: Because one person waking up touches another person, because we influence the people around us, right?

Dr Boyatzis: Yeah, that’s right.

Dr Kawamura: You’ve done extensive studies on the competencies, the nervous systems, and so forth of people all around the world. Your work, therefore, is cross-culturally tested and accepted, correct?

Dr Boyatzis: What I’m saying is that it’s a basis of human physiology: whether you’re Chinese, or Spanish, or Finnish, or Ugandan, you basically have an internal wiring that is very similar around these factors. Men and women aren’t that different neurologically. They are hugely different hormonally, but to a large extent, the differences that people think are present are often not.

Dr Kawamura: We put that out there in our minds. We feel different judgments and put our own negativity out to the world, and others are affected by it.

Dr Boyatzis: Yes. Yes. That’s exactly right.

Dr Kawamura: Richard, what’s your vision, your biggest dream, for your work? What’s the biggest impact you’d like to make?

I’d like everybody to read my work, and then I’d like them to start acting differently in their families, in their communities, and at work. If this stuff is going to help others, we have to reach people in all walks of life. It’s the reason I started doing my MOOC. For decades, I hated the idea of asynchronous or electronic learning. But I tackled this MOOC because I figured there had to be a way to reach more people. I wanted to experiment. We have to democratize our education. Education at most schools in Europe is not very expensive. But it’s horrendously expensive in the USA, as you know. I don’t know if it’s going to be the end all and be all, but I have this basic feeling we can do things differently, and in the process, we may help move a little bit of this revolution forward. The responses to the MOOC have been humbling. There were 412,000 people enrolled in my MOOC! And they’re from 215 countries from around the world!

Dr Kawamura: That’s amazing! How does it feel when you look at this from where you have come, taking things one step at a time?

Dr Boyatzis: I have a picture that’s sitting right in front of me on my desk. It’s of my father holding me as we’re walking in Central Park. I found it when going through some old photographs. I said to my wife, I want to keep this out because, even when I could comprehend life, I never would have thought this would have happened.

My father died in 1975 when he was in his 50s. It was pretty sad. I had just finished my PhD. He was very proud of me and all that, but I don’t think he would have ever grasped how, with the help of a whole bunch of people including him and my mother and my wife, I’ve been able to impact so many people. I’m not just saying it because it’s politically correct, but I’m incredibly humbled by it. There’s something powerful in this – it just feels amazing in so many ways, to be a part of it. Part of it doesn’t feel real.

I remember a conversation I had with doctoral students at lunch the last time I was at ESADE. They were saying, “How do you keep going? You’re amazing.” I’m 68, but I feel like I’m 42. My body doesn’t, but my spirit does! I don’t think I’m ever going to stop working.

Dr Kawamura: You talk about renewal, too, in your work. You’re doing what you love. You’re renewing yourself every day, I would think.

Dr Boyatzis: Well, maybe not every day but on many days! I feel like I’m doing work that is helping people. Especially when I get e-mails from people all over the world saying things that bring tears to my eyes about how this online course – without even talking to me, just watching videos of me, doing exercises, etc. – has changed their lives, or brought them closer to their families, or helped them recover from cancer or the loss of their spirit because of that, or it’s given them hope[…]. A lot of the people are living in conditions that are unbelievable. This, plus the doctoral and graduate students I’m able to work with. I’m also usually in Europe or someplace over an ocean once a month all over the world. My wife and I also have a lot of fun.

So, yeah, it feels like not only has it gone well for me but also it’s gone well in the sense of mission and sense of purpose. I feel that part of what drives me at times, why I usually start work at 4:30 in the morning, is that I know that I’m not going to live forever now. There are so many things to figure out and so many things to experiment with. When I turned 60, I remember I started working with more of a frenzy than I had done before – which is not actually healthy, but it’s what happened, at any rate.

Dr Kawamura: Many say that thinking about your death actually helps bring meaning to your life and to the choices that you make every day.

Dr Boyatzis: I agree. It’s extremely motivational. What actually keeps me going is working with other people. Even though I do analyze data, and write, and, of course, read by myself, what gives me the “juice” is truly working with other people. That’s why I still enjoy teaching.

Further reading

Amdurer, E., Boyatzis, R.E., Saatcioglu, A., Smith, M. and Taylor, S. (2013), “Long-term impact of emotional, social and cognitive intelligence competencies and gmat on career and life satisfaction and career success”, Front Psychol., December 16, 2014, 5:1447, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01447, eCollection 2014, working paper.

Boyatzis, R. (2015a), “Emotional contagion in human interaction dynamics: using socio-emotional microfoundations to explain proto-organizing”, working paper.

Boyatzis, R. (2015b), “Why do you believe in God? Opposing relationship of empathy and analytic thinking”, working paper.

Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A. (2005), Resonant Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA

Boyatzis, R., Gaskin, J. and Wei, H. (2013/2015), “Chapter 17: emotional and social intelligence and behavior”, in Princiotta, D., Goldstein, S. and Naglieri, J. (Eds), Handbook of Intelligence: Evolutionary, Theory, Historical Perspective, and Current Concepts, Springer Press, New York, NY, pp. 243-262

Boyatzis, R.E. (2014), “Book review: possible contributions to leadership and management development from neuroscience”, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 300-303

Boyatzis, R.E., Smith, M.L. and Beveridge, A.J. (2013), “Coaching with compassion: inspiring health, well-being and development in organizations”, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 49 No. 2, pp. 153-178

Boyatzis, R.E., Passarelli, A. and Wei, H. (2014), “A study of developing emotional, social, and cognitive competencies in 16 cohorts of an MBA program”, AOM Best Paper Proceedings.

Boyatzis, R.E., Taylor, S. and Rochford, K. (Eds) (2015), “Vision and shared vision impact on leadership effectiveness, engagement and citizenship”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, special edition in process, forthcoming.

Boyatzis, R.E., Smith, M.L., Van Oosten, E. and Woolford, L. (2013), “Developing resonant leaders through emotional intelligence, vision and coaching”, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 42, pp. 17-24

Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R. and McKee, A. (2013), Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence, 10th ed., Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA

Jack, A.I., Boyatzis, R.E., Khawaja, M.S., Passarelli, A.M. and Leckie, R.L. (2013), “Visioning in the brain: an fMRI study of inspirational coaching and mentoring”, Social Neuroscience, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 369-384