The blog of Ricardo Zamora

Howard Gardner publishes in 1983 Frames of Mind establishing by first time its theory of the multiple intelligences. In a later work he summarizes them in the following way (Gardner, 1993): Linguistic Intelligence, Logical-mathematical Intelligence, Spatial Intelligence, Musical Intelligence, Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, Interpersonal Intelligence and Intrapersonal Intelligence.

Of the seven, we are concerned the last two. He defined as Interpersonal Intelligence the ability to understand other people: what motivates them, how they work, how to work cooperatively with them. It is the ability to identify their moods, temperament, motivations and intentions. It enables you to read the intentions and desires of others even when not shown.

The Intrapersonal Intelligence refers to the internal aspects of a person, access to one’s own feeling live, one’s range of emotions. It is the ability to discriminate between these emotions, providing and guiding one’s own behaviour. A person with good intrapersonal intelligence has a viable effective model of himself or herself.

Earlier other authors related emotional content with the concept of intelligence. Edward Lee Thorndike introduced the concept of Social Intelligence toward the years 20 but at that time the definition of IQ and their corresponding test to measure monopolized all the attention.

It was in 1990 when Peter Salovey and John D Mayer introduced the concept of Emotional Intelligence (Salovey & Mayer, 1990) organizing the Gardner personal intelligences (interpersonal and intrapersonal) in five major competences:

• The knowledge of one’s own emotions
• The ability to control the emotions
• The ability to motivate oneself
• The knowledge of other people emotions
• The control of relationships

But it is not until the appearance of the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman when popularizes the term. In the words of Goleman, is in these other characteristics that we have been called emotional intelligence, features such as the ability to motivate ourselves, to persevere in the effort despite the possible frustrations, to control impulses, to postpone the bonuses, to regulate our own moods, to prevent the anguish interfere with our thinking skills and, finally, but not least important, the ability of emphasize and rely on the other (Goleman, 1995).

On the basis different frames of generic competencies (MOSAIC, Spencer & Spencer, Boyatzis and Rosier), Goleman relates twenty-five competences with five dimensions of the emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998).

At present are being very used two tests nof the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. The Emotional Competency Inventory (ECI) created in 1999 as a variant of the dictionary of Goleman and the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI), an evolution in the ECI created in 2007 and that is becoming de facto in the standard of measurement of the socio-emotional competences. The ESCI offers a way to assess the strengths and weaknesses of individuals, giving them precise, focused information on exactly which competencies they will want to improve on in order to meet their career goals. (Boyatzis, 2007).

The ESCI measures 12 competencies organized into four clusters:

Self Awareness

• Emotional Self-Awareness (Emotional Awareness)

Self Management

• Emotional Self-Control
• Adaptability
• Achievement Orientation (Achievement)
• Positive Outlook (Optimism)

Social Awareness

• Empathy:
• Organizational Awareness

Relationship Management

• Coach and Mentor (Developing Others)
• Inspirational Leadership
• Influence
• Conflict Management
• Teamwork (Teamwork & Collaboration)

Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple Intelligences. The Theory in Practice. New York: BasicBooks.

Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional Intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality (9), 185-211.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books

Goleman, D. (1998). Working with Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury.

Boyatzis, R. (2007). The Creation of the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI). Boston: Hay Group.

NCSL Distributed Leadership Full Report

There is no a closed body of theory around the concept of distributed leadership. Different authors propose definitions without that still have reached an agreement on the matter. Among them, perhaps the two most significant are Spillane and Gronn. Both raise the concept from their research and publications at the start of this decade among which can be highlighted as particularly important at the time:

Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., and Diamond, J. B. (2001) “Investigating School Leadership Practice: A Distributed Perspective.” Educational Researcher, 30 (3). April 2001 (download).

Gronn,P. (2002). “Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis.” The Leadership Quarterly, 13, 423–451. (US $ 19.95 en ScienceDirect).

Both approaches have their origin in the implementation of the leadership in schools and are based on the fact that the framework prevalent until the moment in which the leadership was focused on individuals and their positions is incomplete.

For Spillane, Halverson and Diamond leadership must be understood as a distributed practice, stretched over the school’s social and situational contexts. In their scheme, leadership practice is not simply a function of an individual leader’s ability, skill, charisma and cognition. And this is especially true If expertise is distributed.

For Peter Gronn the division of labour within organizations provides two roles fundamentally opposed, one focused on activities and tasks and the second in controlled and performed. This simple and antagonistic view does not correspond with the real complexity of the natural world where in fact exists a hybrid situation where the degree of distribution of the role of leadership varies. The approach of Gronn, much more sophisticated from the conceptual point of view deals between other aspects the distributed leadership from the perspective of the Complexity Theory (as a emerging pattern of collective behaviour when there is interdependence) and from the team approach (spontaneous collaboration, use of synergy, coordination).

Since then distributed leadership has been associated at times as shared, delegate, democratic, dispersed, etc. In an extraordinary research work carried out by Bennet et al. all the literature on the subject is reviewed so far:

Bennett, N., Wise, C., Woods, P., & Harvey, J. A. (2003). Distributed Leadership: a review of literature. Nottingham: NCSL National College for School Leadership, The Open University and University of Gloucestershire (download).

The authors identify three distinctive elements of the distributed leadership among the different approaches that analyzed. Firstly, distributed leadership highlights leadership as an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals. Secondly, distributed leadership suggests openness of the boundaries of leadership. This means that it is predisposed to widen the conventional net of leaders, thus in turn raising the question of which individuals and groups are to be brought into leadership or seen as contributors to it. Thirdly, distributed leadership entails the view that it is possible to forge a concertive dynamic which represents more than the sum of the individual contributors. Initiatives may be inaugurated by those with relevant skills in a particular context, but others will then adopt, adapt and improve them within a mutually trusting and supportive culture.

Harvard Business School

A few weeks ago I was with Manel Peiró PhD, Academic Vice-Dean of ESADE Business School. On his desk was a copy of the new book by Michael Beer, professor at the Harvard Business School, “High Commitment, High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage”. Since his doctoral thesis had discussed the commitment in medicine, we started to talk about the topic.

Many researchers based on the premise that a high level of performance is a direct result a high level of commitment. In Beer’s research focused on the commitment of leaders, may be true. But not so when we talk about teams.

In my research on the cooperation model in complexity “Cooplexity”, I show that after an initial individual dimension of knowledge acquisition, cohesion is an absolutely key factor in the development of the group. When the group becomes conscious about itself as a unit with its own meaning, we call then a team. However a cohesive and highly committed team doesn’t get the best results just only by those facts. When the group becomes a team with full sense, we still need something more. It comes into play the self-coordination function as a natural and spontaneous process to achieve coordination in a decentralized manner, sharing alerts, visualizing cross opportunities and focusing on a common goal. At this level there are two factors that really help you get results, equal relationship and the establishment of an action criterion.

So when we talk about high performance teams, commitment is a necessary but not sufficient. Without the cohesion is not reached self-coordination, but it is the latter which ensures a high level of performance.

The Icosystem Game

One of the most powerful teachings of systems theory is that the structures influence behavior.

We could consider as structures to whatever condition our decisions. In one company we can talk about the procedures, rules (written and unwritten), manuals of operation, the database with a type of inputs and formats and not others, how to make the reports and the type of information that contain, and so on. Also infrastructure, hardware, even space or logistics. All conditions to do things one way and not another.

In our day to day life, to go to work, slow traffic lights motivates us to pass with less margin, working in a hierarchical or bureaucratic company will limit our opinions and ideas or being paid with substantial individual bonus discourage our collaborative decision.

If we want to change the behavior in an organization we must jump simplistic solutions aimed at increasing control, the establishment of a myopic systematic focused exclusively on the goal, impositions through direct coercion or external motivation, usually economic.

We must go to the root causes that motivate behavior and seek to change them. We should investigate the limits and constraints and establish mechanisms to overcome them.

We should not doubt that a rule change will change behavior more effectively than if we try to influence it directly.

There is an instructive game that shows very visually the subject and I think it’s worth you to know. It is “The Icosystem Game“.

Pranav Mistry

Very impressive technology, no doubt.

But the most important to me is not the technology. I find two things really remarkable.

First , Pranav Mistry develops his technology as a result of different explorations. And those explorations were guided by his personal interest, curiosity and willing to build something that was just in his mind. Exploration is not goal oriented. It reminds me to the “connected dots” that Steve Jobs talked about when delivering his commencement speech to the graduates of Stanford University in 2005 (see it in YouTube).

Second and more important, all this technology is going to be open source in a decision far from those based on profit. The aim of Pranav is to see a massive implementation that could help people. In his mind, I would say in his heart, there is the possibility to help the people through for example NGOs in India. Why not, he says, to replace a real sense for those people that cannot speak? After seeing the video I can perfectly imaging a future on which SixthSense technology could help people with disabilities to interact with the world easily.

This genius is that kind of people that makes me feel small and at the same time encourage me to follow my research on collaboration, teamwork and distributed leadership.