Listening and communication skills.“Emotional intelligence matters twice as much as technical and analytic skill combined for star performances… And the higher people move up in the company, the more crucial emotional intelligence becomes.”
“People are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that we need another sort of skill to survive—and certainly to thrive—in the increasingly turbulent job market of the future. Internal qualities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, and adaptability are taking on a new valuation.”
In a nutshell
In the vast majority of fields, what makes a star performer is the ability to deploy exceptional emotional intelligence.
In a similar vein
Robert Bolton People Skills (p 32)
Howard Gardner Frames of Mind (p 116)
Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence (see the commentary in 50 Self-Help Classics) was a surprise hit, selling over five million copies worldwide. Inspired by a couple of obscure academic papers by John Mayer and Peter Salovey linking the emotions with intelligence, Goleman combined journalistic flair (he was a writer for The New York Times) with his academic psychology background (as a Harvard PhD) to produce a popular psychology work of unusual impact.
Though Emotional Intelligence attracted the general reader, Goleman was also surprised by the strong response from the business world. Many people contacted him with their stories, usually along the lines of, “I wasn’t at the top of my class in college, far from it, but here I am running a large organization.” Emotional intelligence (EQ) seemed to explain why they had been successful while other, more intellectually gifted, colleagues had not done as well.
Most follow-ups to bestselling titles fail to meet expectations, but Working with Emotional Intelligence is as fascinating a read as its predecessor. Dividing the book into five parts, Goleman attempts to define 25 “emotional competencies” that can determine whether we move ahead or lag behind in our career, and provides a rationale for why we should be attempting to create emotionally intelligent organizations.
Goleman begins by describing how much the rules have changed in the world of work. Job security no longer exists. Once, what sort of job we ended up in depended on how well we did in college or our technical skills. But now, academic or technical ability is simply the threshold requirement to gain entry to a career. Beyond this, what makes us a “star” is our possession of abilities such as resilience, initiative, optimism, adaptability to change, and empathy toward others. Very few employers give as a reason for hiring someone that they are “emotionally intelligent,” but it will often be the decisive factor. Other terms such as character, personality, maturity, soft skills, and a drive for excellence might be used in its place.
Goleman lays out the reason emotional intelligence matters to companies now and why they want to increase it among their staff: because in competitive industries, growth from new products is limited. Companies do not compete just on products, but on how well they utilize their people. In a challenging business environment, it is emotional intelligence skills that will take a company further.
Goleman reveals research done at 120 companies, in which employers were asked to describe the abilities that made for excellence in their workforce; 67 percent of these were emotional competencies. That is, two out of three were generic behavioral skills beyond IQ or expertise requirements. Specifically, employers wanted in their staff:
Listening and communication skills.
Adaptability to change and ability to get over setbacks.
Confidence, motivation, wish to develop one’s career.
Ability to work with others and handle disagreements.
Wanting to make a contribution or be a leader.
In 1973, Goleman’s mentor David McLelland published a celebrated paper in American Psychologist arguing that traditional academic and intelligence testing was not a good predictor of how well a person would actually do in a job. Instead, people should be tested for “competencies” that were important to the job. This marked the beginning of competency testing, now widely used to select from applicants or create teams, in addition to the conventional consideration of academic skills and experience. Today, McLelland’s concept is almost conventional wisdom, but at the time it was groundbreaking. Goleman took McLelland’s ideas further, presenting 25 emotional competencies based around the following core five:
Awareness of our own feelings and the ability to use them as a guide to better decision making. Knowledge of our own abilities and shortcomings. The sense that we can tackle most things.
Being conscientious and delaying gratification in order to achieve our goals. Ability to recover from emotional distress and manage our emotions.
Developing an achievement or goal orientation, so frustrations and setbacks are put into perspective and qualities such as initiative and perseverance are refined.
Awareness of what others are feeling and thinking, and in turn the ability to influence a wide range of people.
Handling close personal relationships well, but also having a sense of social networks and politics. Interacting well with people and the ability to cooperate to produce results.
Emotional intelligence can make the most of whatever technical skills we have, Goleman notes. Scientists want the rest of the world to know what they are doing. Programmers want people to feel that they are service oriented and not just “techies.” Most tech companies have well-paid troubleshooters who can liaise with clients to get things done. They are just as smart and often as skilled as the regular technical staff, but they also have the ability to listen, influence, motivate people, and get them collaborating.
Emotional intelligence, Goleman points out, is not about “being nice” or even expressing our feelings—it is learning how to express those feelings in an appropriate way and at appropriate times, and being able to empathize with others and work well with them.
IQ explains 25 percent of job performance, Goleman argues, which leaves a full 75 percent for other factors. In most fields, a reasonable degree of cognitive ability or IQ is assumed. So are basic levels of competence, knowledge, or expertise. Beyond these, it is emotional and social competencies that separate the leaders from the rest.
Goleman observes that the more senior we are in an organization, the more “soft skills” matter for doing the job well. At the top leadership level, technical skills are of no great import. What matters, in addition to the obvious factors such as the desire to achieve and the ability to lead teams, are:
Capacity for “big-picture” thinking; that is, the ability to chart future directions accurately from the mass of current information.
Political awareness, or having a picture of how certain people or groups interact and influence one another.
Confidence. Psychologist Albert Bandura coined the term “self-efficacy” to describe a person’s belief in their potential and ability to perform, aside from actual ability. This belief alone is an excellent predictor of how well you actually do in your career.
Intuition. Studies of both entrepreneurs and top executives discovered that intuition is at the heart of their decision-making processes. They need to provide “left-brained” analyses to convince others of their view, but it is the subconscious analysis that brings them to correct decisions.
It is instructive also to look at executive failure, and Working with Emotional Intelligence mentions several studies of executives who were working at a high level but who were then fired or demoted. According to the well-known “Peter Principle,” such people “rise to the level of their incompetence” and go no further. Goleman believes that they are held back by shortcomings in the key emotional intelligence competencies. They are either too rigid, unable or unwilling to make changes or adapt to change, or have poor relationships within the organization, alienating those who work for them.
The executive search firm Egon Zehnder found that executives who failed were usually high in both IQ and expertise, but often had a fatal flaw such as arrogance, unwillingness to collaborate, inability to take account of change, or overreliance on brainpower alone. In contrast, the most successful managers stayed calm in crises, took criticism well, could be spontaneous, and were perceived to be strongly concerned for the needs of those they work with.
Goleman mentions possibly the most important difference between IQ and emotional intelligence: Whereas we are born with a certain level of native intelligence that does not change much after the teenage years, emotional intelligence is largely learnt. Over time we have the chance to improve our ability to manage our impulses and emotions, to motivate ourselves, and to be more socially aware. The old-fashioned terms for this process are “character” and “maturity”; unlike native intelligence, their development is our responsibility.
A fair amount of controversy has swirled around the concept of emotional intelligence. John Mayer and Peter Salovey, the psychologists who originated it, have stated that Goleman’s delineation of what constitutes emotional intelligence (including words such as zeal, persistence, maturity, and character) goes far beyond, and distorts, their original definition. They have also noted their unease with Goleman’s thesis that EQ can be a predictor of success in life. Yet Goleman notes the considerable research on emotional competencies, going back 30 years, plus studies done in over 500 organizations. The weight of this research suggests that IQ is secondary to emotional intelligence as a predictor of how well someone will do in a job.
There is still plenty of debate about whether emotional intelligence exists at all. Many of its attributes, some argue, are simply facets of personality, while other psychologists maintain that IQ is still the most reliable indicator of likely work success. Yet Goleman’s argument has been distorted. Nowhere does he say that IQ does not matter. He says that, all things being equal (intelligence level, expertise, education), people who work well with others, are far sighted, are empathic, and are aware of their emotions will go a lot further in their career. This thesis will make sense to anyone who has begun work and discovered that their ability to “get ahead” depends little on what they learnt in training school or university.
The second two-thirds of Working with Emotional Intelligence simply fill out what was said in the first, but it is fascinating to read Goleman’s examples from corporate life. Though the specific references to late 1990s companies will inevitably date, the book is a blueprint for how an emotionally intelligent organization should operate, and it may change your views on how things should be done where you work.
Daniel Goleman grew up in Stockton, California and went to Amherst College. His doctorate in psychology from Harvard University was supervised by David McClelland.
For 12 years Goleman wrote a column for The New York Times in the behavioral and brain sciences, and he has also been a senior editor at Psychology Today. He has a Career Achievement award for journalism from the American Psychological Association. In 1994 he co-founded the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which seeks to promote social, emotional, and academic learning to enhance children’s success at school and in life. Goleman is currently co-chairman of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University.
Other books include The Meditative Mind (1996), Primal Leadership (2002, with Richard Boyatsis & Annie McKee), and Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama (2003).