Emotional Intelligence (or EQ) is a new term being used among Human Resources departments and is making its way into America's Board Rooms. EQ is a set of competencies demonstrating the ability one has to recognize his or her behaviors, moods and impulses and to manage them best according to the situation or person they are dealing with. Someone with high Emotional Intelligence can manage their own emotional impulses, can communicate with others effectively, can manage change well, problem solves, uses humor to build rapport, has empathy and remains optimistic even in the face of adversity.

The credit goes to Daniel Goleman for popularizing the concept of EQ in his book Emotional Intelligence (1995). In it, he identified five major characteristics of Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy and Social Skill. Self-Awareness is "the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives, as well as their effect on others." Self-Regulation is "the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods" and "the propensity to suspend judgment" to think before acting." Motivation is "a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status" and "a propensity to pursue goals with energy and persistence." Empathy is "the ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people" and "skill in treating them according to their emotional reactions." Social Skill is "proficiency in managing relationships and building networks" and "an ability to find common ground and build rapport." The qualities of EQ are easily recognized as "street smarts" but what most people don't realize is that it is a bona-fide characteristic, one that can be recognized, measured and increased.

Goleman (Ph.D. and professor at Harvard), when conducting validity and reliability studies, found that EQ proved to be twice as important as IQ and technical skills for jobs at all levels. Moreover, EQ can account for the entire advantage in positions of higher responsibility. . The best news about EQ is that it can be learned. Unlike IQ, which stays constant after the late teens, EQ is a set of competencies one can develop, much like a technical skill.

There is a correlation between high EQ and success in life. EQ is not the measurement of one's personality, it is not a way to predict one's career and it is not static. EQ can change over time and it is correlated to maturity: there is typically an increase in one's EQ over the course of his or her lifetime. In the past, training on topics like "stress management" and "assertiveness skills" were relegated to a soft skills training program, treated as a luxury and only offered after the training budget paid for technical training or hard skills. In reality, these are critical success factors that should not be dismissed as mere 'nice-to-haves'. For example, the Hay Group states one study of 44 Fortune-500 companies found that salespeople with high EQ produced twice the revenue of those with average scores. In another study, technical programmers demonstrating the top 10% of Emotional Intelligence competency were developing software three times faster than those with lower competency. What these studies point out, is that Emotional Intelligence is directly related to the bottom line, and is anything but "soft".

The best way to increase organizational EQ is to include the critical success factors as part of the core competencies that employees need to have. Individuals responsible for interviewing and hiring need to be educated on how to discover EQ skills, and how to measure the competency levels of current employees in order to target training to identify and provide training in opportunities for growth. You may just see your old soft skills training in a whole new light.


PUTTING IT TO WORK...

Daniel Goleman, author of Working with Emotional Intelligence.