Definition
"What Makes a Leader" refers to Daniel Goleman's 1998 Harvard Business Review article — the most requested reprint in HBR history as of the mid-2000s — which argued that emotional intelligence (EI) is the sine qua non of effective leadership: the competency cluster that distinguishes outstanding performers from adequate ones at the senior level, over and above cognitive ability and technical expertise.
The article and its successors crystallized Goleman's five-component EI model into an accessible leadership framework and launched a two-decade wave of EI-based leadership development. In Focus, Goleman revisits and extends the argument by showing that each EI component can be understood as a form of trained attention.
Why it matters
How it works
The five-component model
Goleman's 1998 article organized EI around five clusters. Self-awareness: knowing one's own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, and impact — the prerequisite for everything else. Self-regulation: controlling or redirecting disruptive impulses and moods; thinking before acting. Motivation: a passion for work beyond status and money; a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence. Empathy: considering others' feelings, especially in decision-making. Social skill: proficiency in managing relationships and building networks; finding common ground and rapport. The framework synthesized prior emotional intelligence work by Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990) into an applied leadership model.
The Hay Group evidence base
Goleman's empirical backbone was the Hay/McBer competency database: analysis of behavioral event interviews with thousands of managers across diverse industries and cultures. The consistent finding was that competencies in the EI domain differentiated star performers from average performers far more reliably than cognitive or technical competencies at the managerial level and above — the effect was larger the more senior the role. Goleman cites studies showing that leaders with the full EI profile produced 20 percentage points better financial performance than those without it in some sectors.
The attention translation
In Focus (2013), Goleman extends the 1998 model by showing that each EI component is a form of trained attention. Self-awareness is inner focus applied to one's own emotional states. Self-regulation is the application of meta-awareness and executive function to those states. Empathy is other focus — attentive to the nonverbal and verbal signals of other people's inner states. Social skill is the behavioral repertoire made possible by sustained other focus. The outer focus of systems thinking and ecological intelligence is the new addition — the leadership attention domain that the 1998 article had not explicitly addressed.
Criticisms and the replication landscape
The article's empirical claims have been contested. The "90% of differentiation" figure is drawn from proprietary competency studies with selection and confirmation bias risks. Academic psychologists, particularly Locke (2005) and Antonakis (2004), have argued that the EI evidence base conflates the construct with personality traits (Big Five dimensions), measures it with instruments of variable validity, and overstates effect sizes. The replication record is more modest than Goleman's popular framing suggests — EI predicts some leadership outcomes, but so do conscientiousness, cognitive ability, and domain expertise, and effect sizes are smaller than the "90%" figure implies.