Unformated preview of the document: 'The Art of Picking the Superstars' (Part 2):

Naturally, superstars will have a measure of all of these styles to a greater or lesser extent
with Goleman favouring the ‘authorative’, with ‘coercive’ seen as the least effective of all
the styles.

Toronto based management expert Steven Stein of Multi Health Systems refers to
research conducted into young entrepreneur CEOs which showed that the superstars were
differentiated by their empathy. “It meant that these people were really good at listening
to and understanding their direct reports, their staff and customers” say Stein.

Empathy is very much an interpretive skill. Researchers found that people who are able to
accurately and consistently identify emotions, conveyed by facial expressions, tend to deal
with business problems involving people far better. They appear better able to deal with
customer complaints or to mediate disputes and excel at establishing and, over the long
term, maintaining personal relationships.

Gearing to Optimise – Spotting the Opportunity

Dr Richard Wiseman, head of the research unit the University of Hertfordshire, took this
concept one step further when he applied pure science to explain the notion of luck.
Over a period of 8 years he studied 400 people, approximately half of whom considered
themselves to be lucky and half of whom didn’t. As an aside, his research shows that
50% of us consider ourselves to be lucky, 36% neither lucky nor unlucky and 14% of us
considered ourselves to be unlucky.

It turned out that lucky people really do experience ‘luck’, they consider themselves to be
lucky and they expect lucky things to happen to them. What his research highlighted,
however, was that emotionally, lucky people were geared to optimise their luck whereas
others were not. In other words lucky people were sensitive to ‘lucky opportunities’.
He gives a beautiful example of the two groups, lucky and unlucky, who are asked to
undertake a simple task of counting the number of photographs in a newspaper. There
was no time limit set.

The results were quite remarkable, in the main the lucky people completed this task much
faster then the unlucky people. The reason for this was that most of the lucky people
noticed the caption on page three written in 8cm letters which stated, “look no further
there are 47 photos in this paper”.

Most of the people who considered themselves to be unlucky tended to miss the notice all
together, with some even going back to count a second time. Further into the newspaper
was another caption also in 8cm letters which said “if you see this note tell the researcher
who will give you £250”. Again most of the unlucky people missed this whereas the lucky
people tended to notice and collected their prize.

Luck was therefore, shown to be very much related to one’s state of mind and ability to
identify the opportunity.

One aspect of success in the corporate sphere, and for that matter life in general, is very
much about spotting opportunities and acting on them in an effective way. Goleman
provides a wonderful example of this psychology in application. A sales firm happened
by chance to ask aspiring sales applicants if they considered themselves to be optimistic.

After a number of years an analysis was undertaken on the historical performance of the
sales team. The result was that those sales people who categorised themselves as
optimistic out performing the others by 37% in their first year and 57% in their second year.

As a result, the hiring strategy was changed to focus only on those who considered
themselves to be optimistic. Again these people outperformed the others by over 60% in
their second year.

How to Pick and Develop the Best?

Research clearly highlights that emotional intelligence is something that can be learnt, and
with awareness, will continue to develop over time.

Corporations who are spending millions on staff training ignore the most important aspect
of their employees’ contribution – their emotional intelligence development.
Elkhonon Goldberg, clinical professor of Neurology at New York University School of
Medicine, agrees that emotional intelligence can be learnt. However he goes on to say
that “I believe the best way to get emotionally intelligent leaders is to select people who
already show the basic qualities you want. That’s how athletic

Unformated preview of the document: 'The Art of Picking the Superstars':  Part 1, Part 2, Part 3