The Market Demand for Emotional Intelligence

I am privileged to be in Washington, D.C. this week, at the annual meeting for the Kennedy Center Partners in Education Program in which we and our local school district participate together.

We flew out of Bangor just under another snow storm: an "icy mix" was falling as we sat at the jetway, and soon they hosed us down with the alien green goop that they say de-ice the wings. Despite the effects of bad weather on our 30-seat plane, I was completely engaged in reading Dan Pink's book, A Whole New Mind. Pink, who is my age and a business writer living here in D.C., was yesterday's keynote speaker at the conference. For those interested in helping Maine or other locales advance in "creative economy" initiatives and/or arts education, I highly recommend Pink's work: you can find out more at www.danpink.com.

It was almost 15 years ago, when I was a young(ish) corporate executive dabbling at the edges of New Media World for The Village Voice newspaper, that my boss--the President and Publisher of that legendary paper--gathered his young execs around a table in the original conference room of Hartz Mountain Industries (yes, the bird seed / pet supply moguls, who purchased the Voice in the late 1980s and owned it until a disastrous sale in the late 1990s). "Read this," he said to us, a group of callow-radical youth in which he was trying to promote capitalist leadership skills for the new era. "It's the new way to be a leader." The badly Xeroxed article he handed us was by Daniel Goleman, the internationally-known psychologist and former science journalist, who was writing on the need for emotional intelligence as perhaps the most important leadership skill of the coming era: and my life as a business leader has never been the same.

Pink's arguments concisely and compellingly extend Goleman's research. He cites three factors--abundance, Asia, and automation--as the market levers demanding new skills from our kids who will enter the workforce. Like Goleman, who continues to work on these issues and recently posted the following on this own blog, Pink argues that a) these heretofore seemingly intuitive skills, such as ingenuity, personal rapport, and gut instinct, can be taught and b) if we are going to prepare out students for the future, they must be taught. More on "How to Think Like a Lobster Fisherman" in my next installment.

"Here’s a sneak preview of some headlines that you’ll see in the next few months: teaching kids to be more emotionally and socially competent boosts their academic achievement. More precisely, when schools offer students programs in social and emotional learning, their achievement scores gain around 11 percentile points." -- Daniel Goleman's blog