——选自 HBR 网站（吉玛译）
A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. 领导的首要任务是直接关注。要做到这一点，领导者必须学会集中注意力。
The Argument 论证
People commonly think of “being focused” as filtering out distractions while concentrating on one thing. But a wealth of recent neuroscience research shows that we focus attention in many ways, for different purposes, while drawing on different neural pathways. 人们通常认为“注意力集中”就是在排除干扰的同时把注意力集中在一件事上。但是最近的一项神经科学研究表明，就不同的目的，我们利用不同的神经通路，将注意力集中在不同方面。
The Solution 解决方案
Every leader needs to cultivate a triad of awareness—an inward focus, a focus on others, and an outward focus. Focusing inward and focusing on others helps leaders cultivate emotional intelligence. Focusing outward can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.
每个领导者都需要培养三合一的意识——专注内在，专注他人，专注外在。专注于内心和专注他人有助于领导者培养情商。关注外在可以提高他们设计策略、创新和管理组织的能力。
A primary task of leadership is to direct attention. To do so, leaders must learn to focus their own attention. When we speak about being focused, we commonly mean thinking about one thing while filtering out distractions. But a wealth of recent research in neuroscience shows that we focus in many ways, for different purposes, drawing on different neural pathways—some of which work in concert, while others tend to stand in opposition.
领导的首要任务是直接关注。要做到这一点，领导者必须学会集中注意力。当我们说到专注的时候，我们通常指的是在排除干扰的同时思考一件事。但是，最近神经科学领域中的大量研究表明，就不同目的，利用不同的神经通路，将注意力集中在不同方面，——其中一些是协同工作，而另一些则倾向于相左。
Grouping these modes of attention into three broad buckets—focusing on yourself, focusing on others, and focusing on the wider world—sheds new light on the practice of many essential leadership skills. Focusing inward and focusing constructively on others helps leaders cultivate the primary elements of emotional intelligence. A fuller understanding of how they focus on the wider world can improve their ability to devise strategy, innovate, and manage organizations.
将关注模式集中到三个主要的领域——专注于自己，关注他人，关注更广泛的世界——以新的视角看待许多重要的领导技能的实践。关注内在和他人，可以帮助领导者培养情感智力的主要元素。更全面地了解他们如何关注更广泛的世界，可以提高他们设计策略、创新和管理组织的能力。
Every leader needs to cultivate this triad of awareness, in abundance and in the proper balance, because a failure to focus inward leaves you rudderless, a failure to focus on others renders you clueless, and a failure to focus outward may leave you blindsided.
每一个领导者都需要培养这种三合一的意识，在充足适当的平衡中，没有专注内在使你无助，没有专注他人使你茫然，而专注外在会让你傻眼。
Focusing on Yourself 专注自己
Emotional intelligence begins with self-awareness—getting in touch with your inner voice. Leaders who heed their inner voices can draw on more resources to make better decisions and connect with their authentic selves. But what does that entail? A look at how people focus inward can make this abstract concept more concrete.
情商始于自我意识——与你内心的声音保持沟通。听从内心声音的领导者可以利用更多的资源来做出更好的决定，并与真实的自我联系起来。但这意味着什么呢?看看人们如何通过专注内在使这个抽象概念更加具体。
Self-awareness.自我意识
Hearing your inner voice is a matter of paying careful attention to internal physiological signals. These subtle cues are monitored by the insula, which is tucked behind the frontal lobes of the brain. Attention given to any part of the body amps up the insula’s sensitivity to that part. Tune in to your heartbeat, and the insula activates more neurons in that circuitry. How well people can sense their heartbeats has, in fact, become a standard way to measure their self-awareness.
倾听你内心的声音是专注内在的生理信号。这些微妙的线索被隐藏在脑额叶后的脑岛所控制。身体的任何部分的注意力都会增强脑岛对那部分的敏感度。调谐到你的心跳，脑岛激活更多的神经元。事实上，人们感觉他们的心跳的程度已经成为衡量他们自我意识的标准方法。
Gut feelings are messages from the insula and the amygdala, which the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, of the University of Southern California, calls somatic markers. Those messages are sensations that something “feels” right or wrong. Somatic markers simplify decision making by guiding our attention toward better options. They’re hardly foolproof (how often was that feeling that you left the stove on correct?), so the more comprehensively we read them, the better we use our intuition. (See “Are You Skimming This Sidebar?”)
来自美国南加州大学的神经学家安东尼奥·达马西奥称，内脏的感觉是来自脑岛和扁桃体的信息，即躯体标记。这些信息是一种感知事物是对或错的“感觉”。躯体标记通过引导我们关注更好的选择来简化决策。他们并不简单(你是否经常觉得你把炉子放在了正确的位置上?)，所以我们解读得越全面，我们就越更好地运用直觉。(参见“你浏览侧栏了吗?”)
Are You Skimming This Sidebar?你浏览侧栏了吗？
Do you have trouble remembering what someone has just told you in conversation? Did you drive to work this morning on autopilot? Do you focus more on your smartphone than on the person you’re having lunch with?
记住别人在谈话中告诉你的事情对于你来说有困难吗?今天早上你通过自动导航仪开车去上班了吗?你是否更关注你的智能手机而不是和你一起吃午餐的人?
Attention is a mental muscle; like any other muscle, it can be strengthened through the right kind of exercise. The fundamental rep for building deliberate attention is simple: When your mind wanders, notice that it has wandered, bring it back to your desired point of focus, and keep it there as long as you can. That basic exercise is at the root of virtually every kind of meditation. Meditation builds concentration and calmness and facilitates recovery from the agitation of stress.
注意力是一种精神肌肉;像其他肌肉一样，通过正确的运动可以增强肌肉。建立有意识的专注的基本因素很简单:当你的思想游荡时，意识到它已经游荡，把它带回到你想要的专注焦点，并尽可能地让它保持在那里。基本的练习几乎是每一种冥想的根源。冥想能使人集中精神，保持冷静，并有助于从压力焦虑中恢复。
So does a video game called Tenacity, now in development by a design group and neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin. Slated for release in 2014, the game offers a leisurely journey through any of half a dozen scenes, from a barren desert to a fantasy staircase spiraling heavenward. At the beginner’s level you tap an iPad screen with one finger every time you exhale; the challenge is to tap two fingers with every fifth breath. As you move to higher levels, you’re presented with more distractions—a helicopter flies into view, a plane does a flip, a flock of birds suddenly scud by.
威斯康辛大学的一个设计小组和威斯康星大学神经科学家正在开发一款名为Tenacity”的视频游戏。该游戏预计于2014年上映，它包含6个场景的旅程，从贫瘠的沙漠到梦幻的盘旋上升的楼梯。在初级水平，每次呼气的时候都用一个手指轻敲iPad屏幕;挑战是每五次呼吸就用两个手指轻敲iPad屏幕。当你到更高的水平时，你会遇到更多的干扰——直升机飞进视野，飞机做翻转，一群鸟儿突然飞掠而过。
When players are attuned to the rhythm of their breathing, they experience the strengthening of selective attention as a feeling of calm focus, as in meditation. Stanford University is exploring that connection at its Calming Technology Lab, which is developing relaxing devices, such as a belt that detects your breathing rate. Should a chock-full in-box, for instance, trigger what has been called e-mail apnea, an iPhone app can guide you through exercises to calm your breathing and your mind.
当玩家适应他们呼吸的节奏时，他们会经历选择性注意的强化，作为一种平静专注的感觉，就像冥想一样。斯坦福大学正在其宁静技术实验室探索这一联系，该实验室正在开发放松装置，比如检测你呼吸频率的腰带。例如，如果一个塞满了东西的盒子，触发了所谓的“电子邮件窒息”，一个iPhone应用程序可以引导你通过练习来平复你的呼吸和你的大脑。
Consider, for example, the implications of an analysis of interviews conducted by a group of British researchers with 118 professional traders and 10 senior managers at four City of London investment banks. The most successful traders (whose annual income averaged £500,000) were neither the ones who relied entirely on analytics nor the ones who just went with their guts. They focused on a full range of emotions, which they used to judge the value of their intuition. When they suffered losses, they acknowledged their anxiety, became more cautious, and took fewer risks. The least successful traders (whose income averaged only £100,000) tended to ignore their anxiety and keep going with their guts. Because they failed to heed a wider array of internal signals, they were misled.
举个例子，在伦敦金融城的4个投资银行里，一群英国研究人员对118名专业交易员和10名高级经理进行了采访分析。最成功的交易者(其年收入平均£500000)既不完全依赖分析学也不只是靠勇气。他们把注意力集中在一系列的情感上，用这些情感来判断他们的直觉的价值。当他们遭受损失时，他们承认他们的焦虑，变得更加谨慎，并且承担更少的风险。最不成功的交易者(其收入平均只有£100000)倾向于忽视他们的焦虑和继续的勇气。因为他们没有注意到更广泛的内部信号，他们被误导了。
Zeroing in on sensory impressions of ourselves in the moment is one major element of self-awareness. But another is critical to leadership: combining our experiences across time into a coherent view of our authentic selves.
关注自我感官印象的瞬间是自我意识的一个主要因素。但另一种方式对领导力至关重要:把我们的经历与时间结合起来，形成对真实自我的一致看法。
To be authentic is to be the same person to others as you are to yourself. In part that entails paying attention to what others think of you, particularly people whose opinions you esteem and who will be candid in their feedback. A variety of focus that is useful here is open awareness, in which we broadly notice what’s going on around us without getting caught up in or swept away by any particular thing. In this mode we don’t judge, censor, or tune out; we simply perceive.
做一个真实的人意味着，对待别人就像对待自己一样。在某种程度上，你需要注意别人对你的看法，尤其是那些你尊重的人，以及那些给你真实反馈的人。各种各样的焦点中有用的是开放的意识，在这种意识中，我们广泛地注意到我们周围发生的事情，而不被任何特定的事物卷入或卷走。在这种模式下，我们不去评判、审查或排斥;我们只是感知。
Leaders who are more accustomed to giving input than to receiving it may find this tricky. Someone who has trouble sustaining open awareness typically gets snagged by irritating details, such as fellow travelers in the airport security line who take forever getting their carry-ons into the scanner. Someone who can keep her attention in open mode will notice the travelers but not worry about them, and will take in more of her surroundings. (See the sidebar “Expand Your Awareness.”)
那些习惯于给予输入而不是接受信息的领导者可能会发现这很棘手。那些无法保持开放意识的人通常会被恼人的细节所困扰，比如机场安检线上总是拿着随身携带的行李进入扫描仪同行乘客。一个能在开放模式下保持注意力的人会注意到旅行者，但不会担心他们，而且会更多地接受她周围的环境。(请参阅侧栏“扩展意识”)。
Expand Your Awareness 扩展意识
Just as a camera lens can be set narrowly on a single point or more widely to take in a panoramic view, you can focus tightly or expansively.
就像相机镜头可以在单点或更广的范围内设置并完成一个全景图，你可以集中或者扩张焦点。
One measure of open awareness presents people with a stream of letters and numbers, such as S, K, O, E, 4, R, T, 2, H, P. In scanning the stream, many people will notice the first number, 4, but after that their attention blinks. Those firmly in open awareness mode will register the second number as well.
开放意识的其中一种衡量方式是用字母和数字来呈现，比如S、K、O、E、4、R、T、2、H、P.在扫描信息流时，许多人会注意到第一个数字，4，但只是瞬间的注意力。那些坚定的开放意识模式将会跳到第二个数字。
Strengthening the ability to maintain open awareness requires leaders to do something that verges on the unnatural: cultivate at least sometimes a willingness to not be in control, not offer up their own views, not judge others. That’s less a matter of deliberate action than of attitude adjustment.
加强保持开放意识的能力要求领导者做一些违背自然的事情:至少有时培养一些意愿：不受控制，不发表的观点，不评判别人。这与其说是深思熟虑的行动，不如说是态度调整。
一种方法是通过经典的积极思考力量来调整，因为悲观会缩减我们的注意力，而积极的情绪则会增强我们的注意力以及对新的和意想不到事物的接受能力。转换成积极模式的一种简单方法就是问问自己:“如果我的生活中一切都完美，那么10年后我将会做什么?”为什么有效?威斯康星大学的神经学家理查德·戴维森发现，当你心情愉悦时，大脑的左前额叶区域就会亮起来。这个区域包隐藏着“线路”，当到达一个长期追求的目标时，它会让我们感知有多么的伟大。
“Talking about positive goals and dreams activates brain centers that open you up to new possibilities,” says Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve. “But if you change the conversation to what you should do to fix yourself, it closes you down….You need the negative to survive, but the positive to thrive.”“谈论积极的目标和梦想会激活大脑中心，让你接受新的可能性，”凯斯西储大学的心理学家理查德·博伊茨说。“但如果你将谈话转移到你应该做些什么来提升自己,那么它会封闭你…。你的生存需要消极，但你的成长需要积极。
Of course, being open to input doesn’t guarantee that someone will provide it. Sadly, life affords us few chances to learn how others really see us, and even fewer for executives as they rise through the ranks. That may be why one of the most popular and overenrolled courses at Harvard Business School is Bill George’s Authentic Leadership Development, in which George has created what he calls True North groups to heighten this aspect of self-awareness.
当然，输入的可能性并不保证有人会提供。可悲的是，生活给我们提供了很少的机会去了解别人是如何看待我们的，而当高管们通过排名上升时，他们的机会就更少了。这可能就是为什么在哈佛商学院最受欢迎课程之一是比尔•乔治所教授的诚信领导力的培养，在这个过程中，乔治创造了他所称的真正的北方群体，以提高这方面的自我意识。
These groups (which anyone can form) are based on the precept that self-knowledge begins with self-revelation. Accordingly, they are open and intimate, “a safe place,” George explains, “where members can discuss personal issues they do not feel they can raise elsewhere—often not even with their closest family members.” What good does that do? “We don’t know who we are until we hear ourselves speaking the story of our lives to those we trust,” George says. It’s a structured way to match our view of our true selves with the views our most trusted colleagues have—an external check on our authenticity.
这些团体(任何人都可以组成)是基于“自我认识始于自我表露”的戒律。因此，他们是开放的，亲密的，“一个安全的地方，”乔治解释说，“除了在那里，没有其他的地方，成员可以讨论个人问题，即使是他们最亲密的家庭成员。”那这么做有什么好处?乔治说:“我们不知道自己是谁，直到我们听到自己对那些信任的人讲我们的生活故事的时候。”这是一种结构化的方式，可以将我们对真实自我的看法与最信任的同事的观点相一致——外部检查我们的真实性。
Self-control 自我控制
“Cognitive control” is the scientific term for putting one’s attention where one wants it and keeping it there in the face of temptation to wander. This focus is one aspect of the brain’s executive function, which is located in the prefrontal cortex. A colloquial term for it is “willpower.”
“认知控制”是一种科学术语，指的是在人们面对面对诱惑徘徊时，人们把注意力转移到自己想要的东西上，并把注意力放在那里。这种注意力是大脑执行功能的一个方面，它位于前额皮质。通俗的说法是“意志力”。
Emotional Intelligence Feature情商特征
The best managers rely on six leadership styles.
最好的管理者依赖于六种领导风格。
Cognitive control enables executives to pursue a goal despite distractions and setbacks. The same neural circuitry that allows such a single-minded pursuit of goals also manages unruly emotions. Good cognitive control can be seen in people who stay calm in a crisis, tame their own agitation, and recover from a debacle or defeat.
认知控制使管理者能够在分心和遇到挫折的情况下追求目标。同样的神经回路，可让你一心一意的追求目标也能管理难以控制的情绪。在危机中保持冷静、驯服自己的焦虑、从奔溃或失败中恢复的人，拥有良好的认知控制。
Decades’ worth of research demonstrates the singular importance of willpower to leadership success. Particularly compelling is a longitudinal study tracking the fates of all 1,037 children born during a single year in the 1970s in the New Zealand city of Dunedin. For several years during childhood the children were given a battery of tests of willpower, including the psychologist Walter Mischel’s legendary “marshmallow test”—a choice between eating one marshmallow right away and getting two by waiting 15 minutes. In Mischel’s experiments, roughly a third of children grab the marshmallow on the spot, another third hold out for a while longer, and a third manage to make it through the entire quarter hour.
数十年的研究证明了意志力对于领导能力的成功有着非凡重要性。特别引人注目的是一项纵向研究，追踪了20世纪70年代在新西兰达尼丁市一年中出生的1037名儿童的命运。在儿童时期，孩子们接受了一系列意志力测试，其中包括心理学家沃尔特·米歇尔的传奇“棉花糖测试”——一选择马上吃一颗棉花糖，或者等待15分钟后吃两颗棉花糖。在米歇尔的实验中，大约有三分之一的孩子会当场抓住棉花糖，另外三分之一的孩子会坚持一段时间，还有三分之一孩子则会坚持15分钟。
Executives who can effectively focus on others emerge as natural leaders regardless of organizational or social rank.
能够有效地关注他人的高管，无论组织或社会地位如何，都能成为天生的领导者。
Years later, when the children in the Dunedin study were in their 30s and all but 4% of them had been tracked down again, the researchers found that those who’d had the cognitive control to resist the marshmallow longest were significantly healthier, more successful financially, and more law-abiding than the ones who’d been unable to hold out at all. In fact, statistical analysis showed that a child’s level of self-control was a more powerful predictor of financial success than IQ, social class, or family circumstance.
数年后,但尼丁的研究中的孩子们都已经30多岁,继续追踪其中4%的人,研究人员发现,那些曾具有认知控制的坚持不吃棉花糖的人明显更健康、具有更好地经济实力,并且比那些曾经无法坚持的人更守法。事实上，统计分析显示，孩子的自我控制能力比智商、社会阶层或家庭环境更加能预示经济回报。
How we focus holds the key to exercising willpower, Mischel says. Three subvarieties of cognitive control are at play when you pit self-restraint against self-gratification: the ability to voluntarily disengage your focus from an object of desire; the ability to resist distraction so that you don’t gravitate back to that object; and the ability to concentrate on the future goal and imagine how good you will feel when you achieve it. As adults the children of Dunedin may have been held hostage to their younger selves, but they need not have been, because the power to focus can be developed. (See the sidebar “Learning Self-Restraint.”)
米歇尔说，如何专注是锻炼意志力的关键。当你对自我满足与自我克制相违背的时候，认知控制的三个亚变正在发挥作用:你可以自动地将你的注意力从欲望的对象中解脱出来;通过抵抗干扰的能力使自己不被吸引回那个物体;并且能够专注于未来的目标，想象当你达到目标时你会有多好。作为成年人，但尼丁的孩子们可能被年轻的自己所束缚了，但他们不需要这样做，因为他们的力量可以被开发出来。(参见侧栏“学习自我约束”)
Learning Self-Restraint学习自我约束
Quick, now. Here’s a test of cognitive control. In what direction is the middle arrow in each row pointing?
快,趁现在。下面是对认知控制的测试。每行中箭头指向哪个方向?
The test, called the Eriksen Flanker Task, gauges your susceptibility to distraction. When it’s taken under laboratory conditions, differences of a thousandth of a second can be detected in the speed with which subjects perceive which direction the middle arrows are pointing. The stronger their cognitive control, the less susceptible they are to distraction.
这项名为侧抑制任务的测试，测估了你对注意力分散的敏感程度。如果在实验室条件下进行测试时，可以检测实验对象感知到中间箭头所指的方向的速度（精确到千分之一秒）。他们的认知控制越强，他们就越不容易分散注意力。
Interventions to strengthen cognitive control can be as unsophisticated as a game of Simon Says or Red Light—any exercise in which you are asked to stop on cue. Research suggests that the better a child gets at playing Musical Chairs, the stronger his or her prefrontal wiring for cognitive control will become.
干预认知控制加强的措施可以像西蒙所说的像一场游戏，或者像红灯一样简单——任何训练都可以在你特定的时间内停下来。研究表明，玩音乐椅玩的越好的孩子，他或她连接认知控制的前额就会越强。
Operating on a similarly simple principle is a social and emotional learning (SEL) method that’s used to strengthen cognitive control in schoolchildren across the United States. When confronted by an upsetting problem, the children are told to think of a traffic signal. The red light means stop, calm down, and think before you act. The yellow light means slow down and think of several possible solutions. The green light means try out a plan and see how it works. Thinking in these terms allows the children to shift away from amygdala-driven impulses to prefrontal-driven deliberate behavior.
有一种以同样简单的原则运作的社会和情感学习方法，用于加强美国学生的认知控制。当遇到令人沮丧的问题时，孩子们被告知要考虑交通信号。红灯意味着停下来，冷静下来，三思而后行。黄灯意味着慢下来，想出几个可能的解决方案。绿灯意味着尝试一个计划，看看它是如何运作的。考虑到这些，孩子们可以摆脱冲动行为，行动时更深思熟虑。
It’s never too late for adults to strengthen these circuits as well. Daily sessions of mindfulness practice work in a way similar to Musical Chairs and SEL. In these sessions you focus your attention on your breathing and practice tracking your thoughts and feelings without getting swept away by them. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, you simply return it to your breath. It sounds easy—but try it for 10 minutes, and you’ll find there’s a learning curve.
对于成年人来说，加强循环练习也不晚。在某种程度上每天的冥想练习类似于音乐椅和SEL。在这些练习中，你把注意力集中在你的呼吸和练习追踪你的思想和感知，而不是被它们卷走。每当你注意到你的思想在游荡，你只要将它带回到你呼吸中。这听起来很容易，但是尝试10分钟，你会发现有一个学习曲线。
Focusing on Others专注他人
The word “attention” comes from the Latin attendere, meaning “to reach toward.” This is a perfect definition of focus on others, which is the foundation of empathy and of an ability to build social relationships—the second and third pillars of emotional intelligence.
“注意”这个词来自拉丁语“attendere”，意思是“伸向”。这是对专注他人的一个完美定义，这是共鸣的基础，也是建立社会关系能力的基础——情商的第二和第三大支柱。
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 organizational or social rank.
能够有效地专注于他人的管理人员很容易得到赏识。他们寻求共同的立场，他们的观点最具影响力，而其他人也想与之共事。不管组织或社会地位如何，他们都是天生的领导者。
We talk about empathy most commonly as a single attribute. But a close look at where leaders are focusing when they exhibit it reveals three distinct kinds, each important for leadership effectiveness:
我们通常把共鸣作为一个单独的属性来讨论。但仔细观察一下领导者们展现的关注点，就会发现三种截然不同的类型，每一种对领导效力都很重要:
· cognitive empathy—the ability to understand another person’s perspective;
认知共鸣——理解他人观点的能力;
· emotional empathy—the ability to feel what someone else feels;
情感共鸣——感受别人的感觉的能力;
· empathic concern—the ability to sense what another person needs from you.
共情关注——感知别人需要你的能力。
Cognitive empathy enables leaders to explain themselves in meaningful ways—a skill essential to getting the best performance from their direct reports. Contrary to what you might expect, exercising cognitive empathy requires leaders to think about feelings rather than to feel them directly.
认知同理心使领导者能够以有意义的方式来解释自己——如果你想从直接报告中获得最佳表现，这种技巧是必不可少的。与你所期望的相反，锻炼认知共鸣需要领导者思考情感，而不是直接感受。
An inquisitive nature feeds cognitive empathy. As one successful executive with this trait puts it, “I’ve always just wanted to learn everything, to understand 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 cognitive 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.
好问的天性会产生认知同理心。正如一位成功的管理人员所说，“我一直想要学习一切，了解身边所有人——为什么他们会思考他们做了什么，为什么他们做了他们所做的，为他们做了什么，以及什么没有发挥作用。”但认知同理心也是自我意识的延伸。执行电路让我们思考自己的想法，并监控对他人电流的感受，使得我们用选择直接关注的方法，将同样的道理运用到别人的思想中。
Overloaded Circuits 回路过载
Managing Yourself Feature管理自己的特性
The origins of attention deficit trait, and how to control it in today’s busy organizations.
注意力缺陷特征的起源，以及如何在当今繁忙的组织中控制它。
Emotional empathy is important for effective mentoring, managing clients, and reading group dynamics. It springs from ancient parts of the brain beneath 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 Sciences, in Leipzig, says, “You need to understand your own feelings to understand the feelings of others.” Accessing your capacity for emotional empathy depends on combining two kinds of attention: a deliberate focus on your own echoes of someone else’s feelings and an open awareness of that person’s face, voice, and other external signs of emotion. (See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Learned.”)
情感共鸣对于有效的指导、管理客户和阅读团队动态非常重要。它起源于大脑皮层下的原始部分——扁桃腺、下丘脑、海马体和眼窝前额皮质——让我们在不深入思考的情况下快速感觉。通过唤醒我们的身体来感受他人的情绪:我真的感觉到你的痛苦。当我听你所讲扣人心弦的故事时，我的大脑模式与你的模式相吻合。正如塔尼亚·辛格（位于莱比齐格的马克斯·普朗克人类认知与脑科学研究所社会神经科学系主任）所说，“你需要了解自己的感受，才能理解他人的感受。”获得情感共鸣的能力取决于两种注意力的结合:一种是有意识的专注于你对他人感受的共鸣，一种是开放意识的专注对方的面部、声音和其他外部情绪等。”(参见侧栏“当需要学习共鸣时”)。
When Empathy Needs to Be Learned 当需要学习共鸣时
Emotional empathy can be developed. That’s the conclusion suggested by research conducted with physicians by Helen Riess, the director of the Empathy and Relational Science Program at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. To help the physicians monitor themselves, she set up a program in which they learned to focus using deep, diaphragmatic breathing and to cultivate a certain detachment—to watch an interaction from the ceiling, as it were, rather than being lost in their own thoughts and feelings. “Suspending your own involvement to observe what’s going on gives you a mindful awareness of the interaction without being completely reactive,” says Riess. “You can see if your own physiology is charged up or balanced. You can notice what’s transpiring in the situation.” If a doctor realizes that she’s feeling irritated, for instance, that may be a signal that the patient is bothered too.
情感共鸣是可以发展的。这是由波士顿麻省总医院移情与关系科学项目主任海伦·里斯所做的研究得出的结论。为了帮助医生们监控自己，她建立了一个项目，让他们学会专注于使用深的、横隔膜式的呼吸，并培养一种特定超脱——从天花板上观察互动，而不是沉浸在自己的想法和感觉中。“暂停自身参与，观察正在发生的事情会让你对互动产生一种警觉的意识，而不会完全反应，”里斯说。“你可以看看你自己的生理机能是否被充电或得以平衡。你可以注意到在这种情况下发生了什么。”例如，如果医生意识到她感到很烦躁，这可能是病人也感到烦恼的信号。
Those who are utterly at a loss may be able to prime emotional empathy essentially by faking it until they make it, Riess adds. If you act in a caring way—looking people in the eye and paying attention to their expressions, even when you don’t particularly want to—you may start to feel more engaged.
里斯补充说，那些完全处于茫然不知状态的人可能会通过伪装，从而产生情感共鸣。如果你以一种关心他人的方式行事，看着别人的眼睛，注意他们的表情，即使你并不是特别想要这样做，你也会开始更加投入。
Empathic concern, which is closely related to emotional empathy, enables you to sense not just how people feel but what they need from you. It’s what you want in your doctor, your spouse—and your boss. Empathic concern has its roots in the circuitry that compels parents’ attention to their children. Watch where people’s eyes go when someone brings an adorable baby into a room, and you’ll see this mammalian brain center leaping into action.
移情关怀，与情感共鸣密切相关，使你不仅能感觉到人们的感受，还能感受到他们对你的需求。这是你想要从你的医生，你的伴侣和你的老板中所获得的。移情关怀的根源在于使父母关注孩子。当有人把一个可爱的婴儿带到一个房间里，人们的双眼会盯着看，你会看到这个哺乳动物的大脑中心开始有所反应。
Research suggests that as people rise through the ranks, their ability to maintain personal connections suffers.
研究表明，随着人们的地位晋升，他们保持人际关系的能力也会受到影响。
One neural theory holds that the response is triggered in the amygdala by the brain’s radar for sensing danger and in the prefrontal cortex by the release of oxytocin, the chemical for caring. This implies that empathic concern is a double-edged feeling. We intuitively experience the distress of another as our own. But in deciding whether we will meet that person’s needs, we deliberately weigh how much we value his or her well-being.
一种神经理论认为，大脑的雷达通过释放催产素(一种用于关爱的化学物质)来感知危险和前额叶皮层，从而触发了大脑扁桃腺的反应。这意味着移情关注是一把双刃剑。我们凭直觉感受到另一个人的痛苦。但是在决定我们是否满足这个人的需求时，我们有意识的衡量我们对他或她的幸福的重视程度。
Getting this intuition-deliberation mix right has great implications. Those whose sympathetic feelings become too strong may themselves suffer. In the helping professions, this can lead to compassion fatigue; in executives, it can create distracting feelings of anxiety about people and circumstances that are beyond anyone’s control. But those who protect themselves by deadening their feelings may lose touch with empathy. Empathic concern requires us to manage our personal distress without numbing ourselves to the pain of others. (See the sidebar “When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled.”)
将直觉与熟思正确的混合具有重大的意义。那些共鸣变得太强烈的人可能会受到伤害。在辅助性专业中，这可能导致同情疲劳;在管理人员中，会对任何人都无法控制的人和环境产生令人分心的的焦虑感。但是那些通过抑制自己的感情来保护自己的人可能会失去同情心。移情关怀要求我们在不让别人感到痛苦的情况下管理自己的痛苦。(请参阅侧栏“当共鸣需要被控制时”)。
When Empathy Needs to Be Controlled 当共鸣需要被控制时
Getting a grip on our impulse to empathize with other people’s feelings can help us make better decisions when someone’s emotional flood threatens to overwhelm us.
当一个人的情绪威胁到我们的时候，控制我们对他人情绪的共鸣可以帮助我们做出更好的决定。
Ordinarily, when we see someone pricked with a pin, our brains emit a signal indicating that our own pain centers are echoing that distress. But physicians learn in medical school to block even such automatic responses. Their attentional anesthetic seems to be deployed by the temporal-parietal junction and regions of the prefrontal cortex, a circuit that boosts concentration by tuning out emotions. That’s what is happening in your brain when you distance yourself from others in order to stay calm and help them. The same neural network kicks in when we see a problem in an emotionally overheated environment and need to focus on looking for a solution. If you’re talking with someone who is upset, this system helps you understand the person’s perspective intellectually by shifting from the heart-to-heart of emotional empathy to the head-to-heart of cognitive empathy.
通常情况下，当我们看到有人被大头针刺痛的时候，我们的大脑会发出一个信号，表明我们的疼痛中心也在呼应这种痛苦。但医生们在医学院学习，甚至阻止这种自动反应。他们的注意力麻醉剂似乎是由颞顶叶交界处和前额皮质区域所调动，这是一种通过调节情绪来提高注意力的电路。当你与他人保持距离时，你的大脑就会发生这种反应，以保持冷静并帮助他们。当我们在情感过热的环境中遇到一个问题，需要集中精力寻找解决方案时，同样的神经网络就会启动。如果你正在和一个不高兴的人交谈，这个系统会从心与心的情感共鸣转换到心与心的认知共鸣中，从而帮助你理解这个人的观点。
What’s more, some lab research suggests that the appropriate application of empathic concern is critical to making moral judgments. Brain scans have revealed that when volunteers listened to tales of people subjected to physical pain, their own brain centers for experiencing such pain lit up instantly. But if the story was about psychological suffering, the higher brain centers involved in empathic concern and compassion took longer to activate. Some time is needed to grasp the psychological and moral dimensions of a situation. The more distracted we are, the less we can cultivate the subtler forms of empathy and compassion.
更重要的是，一些实验室研究表明，适当的移情关怀对于做出道德判断是至关重要的。脑部扫描显示，当志愿者听到人们遭受身体疼痛的故事时，他们自己的大脑中心就会立即感受到这种疼痛。但是，如果这个故事是关于心理上的痛苦，那么大脑中涉及移情关怀和同情的大脑中心就需要更长的时间来激活。需要一些时间来掌握一种处境的心理和道德层面。我们越分散注意力，我们就越不可能培养出更敏感的同理心和同情心。
Building relationships 建立关系
People who lack social sensitivity are easy to spot—at least for other people. They are the clueless among us. The CFO who is technically competent but bullies some people, freezes out others, and plays favorites—but when you point out what he has just done, shifts the blame, gets angry, or thinks that you’re the problem—is not trying to be a jerk; he’s utterly unaware of his shortcomings.
缺乏社会敏感性的人容易上当，至少对其他人来说是这样。他们是一无所知的。首席财务官在技术上是有能力的，但是会欺负一些人，逼走其他人，并且会演得很好——但是当你指出他刚刚，转移责任，生气，或者认为你是问题的时候，并不是因为他想做一个无知者;而是因为他完全不知道他的缺点。
Social sensitivity appears to be related to cognitive empathy. Cognitively empathic executives do better at overseas assignments, for instance, presumably because they quickly pick up implicit norms and learn the unique mental models of a new culture. Attention to social context lets us act with skill no matter what the situation, instinctively follow the universal algorithm for etiquette, and behave in ways that put others at ease. (In another age this might have been called good manners.)
社会敏感性似乎与认知共鸣有关。例如，认知移情的高管在海外工作中做得更好，大概是因为他们很快就学会了隐式规范，学习了一种新文化的独特的思维模式。对社会背景的关注让我们无论在什么情况下都能运用技巧，本能地遵循通用的礼仪法则，并以使他人放松的方式行事。(在另一个时代，这可能被称为礼貌。)
Circuitry that converges on the anterior hippocampus reads social context and leads us intuitively to act differently with, say, our college buddies than with our families or our colleagues. In concert with the deliberative prefrontal cortex, it squelches the impulse to do something inappropriate. Accordingly, one brain test for sensitivity to context assesses the function of the hippocampus. The University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson hypothesizes that people who are most alert to social situations exhibit stronger activity and more connections between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex than those who just can’t seem to get it right.
在海马体的前部聚集的电路读取了社会背景，并引导我们与大学伙伴有不同的行为方式，而不是我们的家人或同事。在与审重前额叶皮层的协调中，它抑制了做一些不合适的事情的冲动。因此，一种对环境敏感的大脑测试评估海马体的功能。威斯康星大学的神经系统科学家理查德·戴维森假设，相比于那些看起来对社交环境不太敏感的人，对社交环境最敏感的人表现更活跃，海马体和前额叶皮层之间的联系更强。
· What Makes a Leader?什么铸就了领导？
Emotional Intelligence Feature 情商特征
The truly effective ones have a high degree of emotional intelligence.真正高效的人具有高情商。
The same circuits may be at play when we map social networks in a group—a skill that lets us navigate the relationships in those networks well. People who excel at organizational influence can not only sense the flow of personal connections but also name the people whose opinions hold most sway, and so focus on persuading those who will persuade others.
当我们将社交网络映射到一个群体中时，同样的电路可能会发挥作用——这一技能让我们能够很好地驾驭这些网络中的关系。擅长组织影响力的人不仅能感觉到人际关系的流动，还能说出那些观点最具影响力的人的名字，因此专注于说服那些能说服别人的人。
Alarmingly, research suggests that as people rise through the ranks and gain power, their ability to perceive and maintain personal connections tends to suffer a sort of psychic attrition. In studying encounters between people of varying status, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley, has found that higher-ranking individuals consistently focus their gaze less on lower-ranking people and are more likely to interrupt or to monopolize the conversation.
令人担忧的是，研究表明，当人们等级和权力获得提升时，他们感知和维持人际关系的能力往往会受到某种精神消耗的折磨。在研究不同身份的人之间的遭遇时，伯克利的心理学家达彻·凯尔特纳发现，地位较高的人很少把目光集中在低级的人身上，倾向于打断或控制谈话。
In fact, mapping attention to power in an organization gives a clear indication of hierarchy: The longer it takes Person A to respond to Person B, the more relative power Person A has. Map response times across an entire organization, and you’ll get a remarkably accurate chart of social standing. The boss leaves e-mails unanswered for hours; those lower down respond within minutes. This is so predictable that an algorithm for it—called automated social hierarchy detection—has been developed at Columbia University. Intelligence agencies reportedly are applying the algorithm to suspected terrorist gangs to piece together chains of influence and identify central figures.
事实上，把注意力集中到一个组织中权力上，就能清楚地显示出等级制度:A对B的反应时间越长，A的相对权力就越大。映射整个组织中反应时间，你会得到一个非常准确的社会地位结构图。老板的邮件数小时都没有回复;而那些地位较低的人会在几分钟内回应。这是可以预见的，一种叫做自动社会等级检测的算法已经在哥伦比亚大学开发出来了。据报道，情报局正在将该算法应用于可疑的恐怖主义团伙，以拼凑系列影响和识别中心人物。
But the real point is this: Where we see ourselves on the social ladder sets the default for how much attention we pay. This should be a warning to top executives, who need to respond to fast-moving competitive situations by tapping the full range of ideas and talents within an organization. Without a deliberate shift in attention, their natural inclination may be to ignore smart ideas from the lower ranks.
但真正的问题是:我们以社会阶级的角度来默认了我们付出了多少关注。这应该是对高层管理者的一个警告，他们需要在一个组织中充分发挥自己的想法和才能，以应对快速变化的竞争局面。如果没有刻意地转移注意力，他们自然而然的自然倾向于忽视来自低层的聪明想法。
Focusing on the Wider World 专注更广阔的世界
Leaders with a strong outward focus are not only good listeners but also good questioners. They are visionaries who can sense the far-flung consequences of local decisions and imagine how the choices they make today will play out in the future. They are open to the surprising ways in which seemingly unrelated data can inform their central interests. Melinda Gates offered up a cogent example when she remarked on 60 Minutes that her husband was the kind of person who would read an entire book about fertilizer. Charlie Rose asked, Why fertilizer? The connection was obvious to Bill Gates, who is constantly looking for technological advances that can save lives on a massive scale. “A few billion people would have to die if we hadn’t come up with fertilizer,” he replied.
具有强烈专注外部的领导者不仅是好的倾听者，而且是好的提问者。他们是远见卓识的人，能感觉到地方决策的深远影响，并想象他们今天所做的选择在未来产生怎样的结果。他们对看似不相关的数据可以带来核心利益的惊人方式持开放态度。梅琳达·盖茨在60分钟的演讲中提出了一个令人信服的例子:她的丈夫是那种会读一整本关于肥料的书的人。查理·罗斯问，为什么要施肥?联想到比尔•盖茨是毋庸置疑的，他一直在寻找能够大规模拯救生命的技术进步。他回答说:“如果我们没有找到肥料的话，几十亿人就得死。”
Focusing on strategy 专注策略
Any business school course on strategy will give you the two main elements: exploitation of your current advantage and exploration for new ones. Brain scans that were performed on 63 seasoned business decision makers as they pursued or switched between exploitative and exploratory strategies revealed the specific circuits involved. Not surprisingly, exploitation requires concentration on the job at hand, whereas exploration demands open awareness to recognize new possibilities. But exploitation is accompanied by activity in the brain’s circuitry for anticipation and reward. In other words, it feels good to coast along in a familiar routine. When we switch to exploration, we have to make a deliberate cognitive effort to disengage from that routine in order to roam widely and pursue fresh paths.
任何商学院的战略课程都会教授两大要素:利用你目前的优势，探索新的优势。对63名经验丰富的商业决策者进行的脑部扫描，他们进行开发和探索策略之间的转换，揭示了涉及的具体电路。不足为奇的是，开发需要专注于手头的工作，而探索需要开放的意识来认识新的可能性。但是，开发伴随着在大脑的回路中一种对预期和奖励的活动。换句话说，沿着熟悉的路线走下去感觉很好。当我们转向探索的时候，我们需要有意识认知的努力去摆脱这种常规，以便广泛地漫游，追求新的路径。
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,” wrote the economist Herbert Simon in 1971.
1971年，经济学家赫伯特•西蒙写道:“大量信息造成了注意力的匮乏。”
What keeps us from making that effort? Sleep deprivation, drinking, stress, and mental overload all interfere with the executive circuitry used to make the cognitive switch. To sustain the outward focus that leads to innovation, we need some uninterrupted time in which to reflect and refresh our focus.
什么阻止我们做出这样的努力?睡眠不足、酗酒、压力和精神负担都会影响到认知转换的执行回路。为了保持引领创新的外在关注，我们需要一些不受干扰的时间来反思和刷新我们的关注点。
The wellsprings of innovation 创新的源泉
In an era when almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from putting ideas together in novel ways and asking smart questions that open up untapped potential. Moments before we have a creative insight, the brain shows a third-of-a-second spike in gamma waves, indicating the synchrony of far-flung brain cells. The more neurons firing in sync, the bigger the spike. Its timing suggests that what’s happening is the formation of a new neural network—presumably creating a fresh association.
在这个几乎每个人都能获得相同信息的时代，新的价值产生于以新颖的方式将想法融合在一起，并提出聪明的问题，开创未开发的潜力。在我们有创造性的见解之前，大脑显示出伽玛波的三分之一秒的峰值，显示出大部分脑细胞的同步性。同步放电神经元越多，峰值就越大。它的时机表明，一个新的神经网的形成的发生——可能是建立一个新的联系。
But it would be making too much of this to see gamma waves as a secret to creativity. A classic model of creativity suggests how the various modes of attention play key roles. First we prepare our minds by gathering a wide variety of pertinent information, and then we alternate between concentrating intently on the problem and letting our minds wander freely. Those activities translate roughly into vigilance, when while immersing ourselves in all kinds of input, we remain alert for anything relevant to the problem at hand; selective attention to the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, in which we allow our minds to associate freely and the solution to emerge spontaneously. (That’s why so many fresh ideas come to people in the shower or out for a walk or a run.)
但是，如果把伽玛波看作是创造力的一个秘密，那就太过了。经典的创造力模型显示了不同的专注模式是如何发挥关键作用的。首先，我们通过收集各种各样的相关信息来做思想准备，然后我们在专注问题和自由思想游荡之间交替。当我们沉浸在各种输入时，这些活动可转化为警惕，对于与手头问题相关的任何事情保持警惕;选择性专注于特定的创造性挑战;开放的意识允许我们的思想自由地联系，并自发地产生解决方案。(这就是为什么人们在淋浴或外出散步或跑步时会有那么多新鲜的想法出现。)
The dubious gift of systems awareness 系统意识的可疑天赋。
If people are given a quick view of a photo of lots of dots and asked to guess how many there are, the strong systems thinkers in the group tend to make the best estimates. This skill shows up in those who are good at designing software, assembly lines, matrix organizations, or interventions to save failing ecosystems—it’s a very powerful gift indeed. After all, we live within extremely complex systems. But, suggests the Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (a cousin of Sacha’s), in a small but significant number of people, a strong systems awareness is coupled with an empathy deficit—a blind spot for what other people are thinking and feeling and for reading social situations. For that reason, although people with a superior systems understanding are organizational assets, they are not necessarily effective leaders.
如果让人们快速浏览一幅有很多点的照片，并让他们猜出有多少个点，那么群体中强大系统思考者往往会做出最好的估计。这种技能体现在那些擅长设计软件、组装线、矩阵组织或拯救失败生态系统的干预措施的人身上——这确实是一个非常强大的天赋。毕竟，我们生活在极其复杂的系统中。但是，剑桥大学的心理学家(萨夏的表兄)认为，在为数不多但重要的人中，，强大的系统意识与同理心的缺失永相随——是其他人在思考、感受和阅读社会状况的一个盲点。由于这个原因，尽管具有较好的系统理解能力的人是宝贵人才，但他们不一定是有效的领导者。
An executive at one bank explained to me that it has created a separate career ladder for systems analysts so that they can progress in status and salary on the basis of their systems smarts alone. That way, the bank can consult them as needed while recruiting leaders from a different pool—one containing people with emotional intelligence.
一家银行的高管向我解释说，该银行为系统分析师们创建了一个独立的职业规划，这样他们就可以基于系统智能基础上取得地位和薪水的进步。这样，银行就可以在需要的时候咨询他们，同时从不同领域招募领导者，其中包括高情商者。
Putting It All Together 结合
For those who don’t want to end up similarly compartmentalized, the message is clear. A focused leader is not the person concentrating on the three most important priorities of the year, or the most brilliant systems thinker, or the one most in tune with the corporate culture. Focused leaders can command the full range of their own attention: They are in touch with their inner feelings, they can control their impulses, they are aware of how others see them, they understand what others need from them, they can weed out distractions and also allow their minds to roam widely, free of preconceptions.
对于那些不想结束类似划分的人来说，信息是明确的。一个专注的领导者并不是专注于一年中最重要的三个优先事项的人，或者是最杰出的系统思考者，或者是与企业文化最合拍的人。专注的领导人可以让自己全身心专注:他们与内心的感受交流,他们可以控制自己的冲动,他们知道别人如何看待他们,他们理解别人的需要,他们可以剔除干扰,也让他们的思想四处漫游,没有偏见。
Primal Leadership 先决领导
Emotional Intelligence Feature 情商特征
Your mood can drive (or inhibit) your company’s bottom line.
你的情绪可以推动(或抑制)公司的底线。
This is challenging. But if great leadership were a paint-by-numbers exercise, great leaders would be more common. Practically every form of focus can be strengthened. What it takes is not talent so much as diligence—a willingness to exercise the attention circuits of the brain just as we exercise our analytic skills and other systems of the body.
这是具有挑战性的。但是，如果伟大的领导能力是一种数字绘画训练，伟大的领导者就会更加普遍。几乎每一种关注形式都可以得到加强。它所需要的不是天赋，而是勤奋——只要我们锻炼我们的分析技巧和其他身体系统，就能自发锻炼大脑的注意力回路。
The link between attention and excellence remains hidden most of the time. Yet attention is the basis of the most essential of leadership skills—emotional, organizational, and strategic intelligence. And never has it been under greater assault. The constant onslaught of incoming data leads to sloppy shortcuts—triaging our e-mail by reading only the subject lines, skipping many of our voice mails, skimming memos and reports. Not only do our habits of attention make us less effective, but the sheer volume of all those messages leaves us too little time to reflect on what they really mean. This was foreseen more than 40 years ago by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon. Information “consumes the attention of its recipients,” he wrote in 1971. “Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
在大多数情况下，注意力和卓越表现之间的联系是隐蔽的。然而，注意力是领导技能最重要的基础——情感、组织和战略情报。从来没有遭受过更大的攻击。不断涌入的数据会导致草率抄捷径——通过只阅读主题，跳过语音邮件，略读备忘录和报告，来分类邮件。我们的注意力习惯不仅降低了我们的效率，而且大量的信息让我们没有时间去思考它们真正的含义。这是40多年前诺贝尔经济学奖获得者赫伯特·西蒙所预见的。信息“消耗了接受者的注意力”。他在1971年写道。“因此，大量信息造成了注意力的匮乏。”
My goal here is to place attention center stage so that you can direct it where you need it when you need it. Learn to master your attention, and you will be in command of where you, and your organization, focus.
我的目标是把注意力集中在舞台中心，这样在需要的时候你就可以把注意力放在你需要的地方。学会掌控你的注意力，这样你就能掌控你和你所在的组织的焦点。
Link: The Focused Leader
