Daniel Goleman: It’s Not IQ Part 2: Use the Triple Focus Approach to Education, An excellent synthetic article (presenting a book) to make coherent the passage from school to the corporate world http://www.danielgoleman.info/daniel-goleman-its-not-iq-part-2-use-the-triple-focus-approach-to-education-2/
Once you are in a job, most everyone at your level has more or less the same cognitive power. But some may be more confident, more disciplined, more empathic, more socially adept (e.g., a persuasive team member) or all of these. Those are the kinds of competencies that organizations find distinguish star performers from average.
So let’s reverse engineer competence models to see what we should be including in education for our kids. All the academic subjects stay: these are the baseline abilities everyone needs. But in addition, there are three major abilities kids need for success at work and in life.
- Focus on yourself. This means self-awareness, which shows up on competence models in such abilities as realistic confidence, and self-management: staying cool under pressure, striving toward your goals despite setbacks, and self-motivation, among others. The underlying neural ability here is “cognitive control,” which a 30-plus year follow up of school kids found predicted their adult financial success better than did their IQ or their parents’ socioeconomic standing.
- Focus on others. This talent for empathy, communication, persuasion, and teamwork is crucial to the competencies of star performers.
- Focus on systems. This allows understanding the dynamics of an organization, an economy, an industry or technology – and lets leaders come up with a vision. Kids also love to learn how the systems lens applies to their own interactions and to their families and schools.
So why don’t we teach kids the skills they will need to thrive in life?