tionships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence.
Executives who can effectively focus on others are easy to recognize. They are the ones who find common ground, whose opinions carry the most weight, and with whom other people want to work. They emerge as natural leaders regardless of organi- zational or social rank.
The empathy triad. We talk about empathy most commonly as a single attribute. But a close look at where leaders are focusing when they exhibit it re- veals three distinct kinds, each important for leader- ship effectiveness:
• cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective;
• emotional empathy—the ability to feel what someone else feels;
• empathic concern—the ability to sense what another person needs from you.
Cognitive empathy enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways—a skill essential to getting the best performance from their direct re- ports. Contrary to what you might expect, exercising cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly.
An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy. As one successful executive with this trait puts it, “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to under- stand anybody that I was around—why they thought what they did, why they did what they did, what worked for them, and what didn’t work.” But cogni- tive empathy is also an outgrowth of self-awareness. The executive circuits that allow us to think about our own thoughts and to monitor the feelings that flow from them let us apply the same reasoning to other people’s minds when we choose to direct our attention that way.
Emotional empathy is important for effective mentoring, managing clients, and reading group dy- namics. It springs from ancient parts of the brain be- neath the cortex—the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the orbitofrontal cortex—that allow us to feel fast without thinking deeply. They tune us in by arousing in our bodies the emotional states of others: I literally feel your pain. My brain patterns match up with yours when I listen to you tell a gripping story. As Tania Singer, the director of the social neuroscience department at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sci- ences, in Leipzig, says, “You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of oth-