小佛爷说
情商到底是什么？很多人将之简单理解为“好相处”，不容易与人产生冲突。但事实上这是一个很大的误解。“情商之父”丹尼尔·戈尔曼在本文中指出，情商不是避免对抗，而是努力培养自己有策略地处理对抗的能力。将情商简单等同于“好相处”会导致领导者无法开展强大、高效的对话，也无法培养起能够影响和引领人际关系的能力。
我的《情商》（Emotional Intelligence）一书出版25年来，我发现人们对这个概念最深的一个误解便是将之等同于“好相处”。其实并非如此，而且这样的误解会带来麻烦。
听到对同事的评价是“好相处”，我们的第一印象往往是与这个人共事会很愉快。但这种感觉会掩盖更微妙的问题，比如这个人是对谁而言好相处。我认识的一位管理者风度翩翩、礼貌待人，而且非常愿意取悦客户和老板。对这些人来说她无疑很好相处。但与她的下属接触时，我却发现她营造的工作环境并不友好。她吹毛求疵，冷漠又不顾及他人感受。在开发自身情商时，所有人际关系都十分重要。
另一方面，特别是在充满竞争的商业环境中，我也看到友善被解读为试图避免冲突，因此易于操控。如果做个好人仅仅意味着会被随便欺负，那为什么要培养情商呢？或者，如果你负责设计员工的培养方案，为什么会想训练出一公司的“好”人——难道不是一公司的“强”人吗？
事实上，掌握情商的四个构成要素，可以让你在需要对抗时直面冲突，同时更有策略和效果。四个构成要素分别为：
自我意识（self-awareness）
自我管理（self-management）
社会意识（social awareness）
人际关系管理（relationship management）
其中没有一个与“好相处”有关。
如何利用这些概念来处理对抗？如果你担心自己被欺负，可能会走向另一个错误的极端——将愤怒宣泄在他人身上，让情况变得更糟糕。如果你确实不愿意直面冲突，可能也会完全避免对抗。情商是在这两个极端间找到一条中庸之道。强大的自我意识和自我管理可以让你控制住冲动情绪或因对话而引起的焦虑。高度的同理心——属于社会意识——有助于你站在他人角度看问题，使你在表达自己的想法时让他人感觉到被尊重与被接纳，或顾及他们的利益。应对冲突是人际关系管理的一个重要部分。你需要用他人可以接受的方式明确且坚定地说出自己必须说的事情。
比如我认识的一家公司的创始人兼CEO，他总是避免冲突；总是不愿意告诉员工需要在工作上更努力一些，结果这成了公司的一个问题。情况极为糟糕，有些员工不得不直接告诉他，一些同事过分偷懒，导致其他同事无法正常工作。于是这位CEO开始让一位教练帮助他对偷懒的员工开口，明确表达自己对他们的期望——没有威胁或指责，也没有放任不管。出乎他的意料，对话进行得很顺利，之前偷懒的人开始努力。自那以后，他在面对偷懒的员工时变得更加自信果断，不再逃避。
这很常见——我见过许多人以这种方式培养自己有策略地处理对抗的能力。这是情商的最好体现，我不希望人们因为错把情商当作“无为”而错过它带来的好处。
然而，表现出某种情商的人也可能采用战略性过度的方法（如果你认为情商只是“好相处”，就会忽视这个缺点）。这是因为，高情商意味着你在一定程度上有能力管理周围人和自己的情绪。这一点会很快造成问题。
以同理心为例。有三种不同类型的同理心，存在于大脑中不同的位置：
认知：我知道你是怎么想的。
情绪：我理解你的感受。
同理心关怀：我关心你。
假如你很擅长前两种，却不擅长第三种，就很容易单独用前两种来操控他人的情感。我们看到在“命令与控制”文化中很多杰出的领导者就是这样：他们通常是学习榜样，因为对优秀有非常高的个人标准，所以被提拔。他们善于推动其他人完成短期目标——他们有较强的认知同理心，因此沟通顺畅；情绪同理心强，所以知道自己的语言在员工心中有一定分量——但是因为他们缺乏同理心关怀，所以不在乎员工要付出怎样的代价。这样不仅不道德，而且会让人情绪疲惫。
例如，一个医疗机构的CFO专注于公司利润，于是凭借对高管团队的了解，说服他们逐步提升每位医生在规定出诊时间接诊的病人数量，以此提升利润。他不在乎医生的情绪成本和健康成本。然而，一位高管教练最终指出，这位CFO亟须提高自己的同理心关怀，因为现有医护团队显示出了明显的抑郁和焦虑信号，而且员工流失率很高。结果发现，他对家人和朋友抱有很好的同理心关怀，却从没把这个能力用在工作上。在教练的指导下，他学会了在高压的工作环境中运用这一技能。他开始倾听医护团队的抱怨，并与他们合作发掘更人性化的需求。
更注重培养情商的领导者不仅能更协调地运用三种同理心，还能在所有人际关系中用好情商的四个构成要素。将情商简单等同于“好相处”会掩盖整个力量框架最大的益处，并且会导致领导者无法开展强大、高效的对话，也无法培养起能够影响和引领人际关系的能力。
关键词：自管理
丹尼尔·戈尔曼（Daniel Goleman）|文
丹尼尔·戈尔曼以《情商》（Emotional Intelligence）一书闻名，是美国罗格斯大学（Rutgers University）组织情商研究联合会的联合主任，最新著作《搭建情商的积木》（Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence）是一套12本的入门读物，介绍了情商能力的各个方面，并通过在线学习平台“情商培训计划”（Emotional Intelligence Training Programs）提供培训课程。他还著有《原始领导力: 释放情商的力量》（Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence）和《改变特质: 科学揭示冥想如何改变你的思想、大脑和身体》（Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body）。
柴茁 | 译 蒋荟蓉 | 校 孙燕 | 编辑
英文原文
In the 25 years since my book Emotional Intelligencewas published, one of the most persistent things I see people get wrong about the concept is that it equates to being “nice.” But it doesn’t,and misunderstanding this can get people into trouble.
The first thing that often comes to mind when someone says a colleague is “nice” is that they’re pleasant to work with. But this attitude can obscure more subtle challenges. Take, for example, the question of who the person is nice to. I think of a manager I knew who was charming, polite, and very willing to please — to clients and to her boss. She was undeniably nice to them. But when I spoke to people who had worked for her, I found that she created a toxic workspace for her direct reports. She was hyper-critical, aloof, and abrasive. All of these relationships matter when developing your emotional intelligence.
On the flip side, especially in some competitive business contexts, I also see niceness interpreted as someone who tries to avoid confrontations and is thus easily manipulable. Why would you want to work on your emotional intelligence if it just means that you’re going to be walked all over? Or, if you’re responsible for designing development for your people, why would you want to create a company of “nice” people — don’t you want to create a company of people who are “strong”?
In fact, being skilled in each of the four components of emotional intelligence would allow you to have confrontations when you need to, and to do it more strategically and productively. As I’ve written about elsewhere, those components are: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.(You’ll notice that none of these is aligned with “niceness.”)
How do these concepts apply to handling a confrontation? If you’re worried about being walked all over, you might be prone to err too much in the other direction, venting your anger at the person and exacerbating the situation. If you are truly conflict-averse, you might avoid the confrontation altogether. Emotional intelligence provides a middle way between these extremes. Strong self-awareness and self-management would let you control your initial impulses or any anxiety you might have around the conversation. A highly developed sense of empathy — that’s part of social awareness — would allow you see the situation from the other person’s point of view, so you could present your argument to them in a way that makes them feel heard, or that speaks to their own interests. And handling conflict is an important part of relationship management. You’d say what you have to say, clearly and strongly, and in a way the other person can hear.
Take, for example, the founder-CEO of a company I know. He has always avoided conflict; this became a particular problem for his company because he shied away from ever telling his employees that they needed to work harder. It got so bad that he had other employees calling him telling him that their colleagues were slacking off so much that it they couldn’t do their own jobs. So the CEO began working with a coach who helped him speak to the laggards, telling them clearly what he expected of them — without threats or blame, but also without passivity. And to his surprise, the conversations went smoothly and the former slack-offs started pulling their own weight. Since then he’s becoming much more assertive about confronting his shirking employees.
This is a common story — I’ve seen many people develop their ability to manage confrontations strategically in this way. This is emotional intelligence at its best, and I don’t want people to miss out on its benefits because they dismiss it as passivity.
However, it is also possible for people who display certain kinds of emotional intelligence to be overly strategic in their approach. (This disadvantage gets obscured if you think of EI as just being “nice.”) That’s because having strong EI means that to some degree you have the ability to manage the emotions of those around you as well as your own. This can quickly become problematic.
Take empathy. There are three different kinds of empathy that reside in different parts of the brain:
Cognitive:I know how you think.
Emotional: I know how you feel.
Empathetic concern: I care about you.
Let’s say you’re really good at the first two of these but not the third. Alone they can easily be used to manipulate people. We see this in many overachieving bosses in command-and-control cultures: they tend to be pacesetters who get promoted because they have very high personal standards of excellence. They are great at pushing people to meet short-term targets — they communicate well because of their cognitive empathy and know their words will carry weight with their employees because of their emotional empathy — but because of their lack of empathetic concern they don’t care what the cost is to the person. In addition to being morally wrong, that creates emotional exhaustion and burns people out.
One CFO at a healthcare system, for example, was fixated on the organization’s bottom line. He used what he knew about the top management team to convince them to ratchet up the number of patients each physician had to see in a given period to increase profits. He didn’t care about the emotional cost and physical toll this took on his physicians. Eventually an executive coach, however, pointed out how badly he needed to boost his empathic concern, citing concerning signs of depression and anxiety among the medical staff as well as the high turnover rate. It turned out that the CFO was already adept at displaying empathetic concern for family and friends, but he had not demonstrated it at work. Under the coach’s guidance, he was able to adapt this skill for a high-intensity workplace. He started listening to the complaints of his medical staff and collaborated with them to identify a more humane level of demand.
Leaders who develop their emotional intelligence more deliberately will be more attuned not only to all aspects of empathy, but to all four components of emotional intelligence, in all the relationships they encounter. Believing that emotional intelligence simply means being “nice” obscures what makes this framework so useful — and prevents leaders from having powerful, productive conversations that build up their ability to influence and lead in all their relationships.
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