DEVELOPING YOUR LEADERS’
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
TO IMPROVE ORGANIZATIONAL
PERFORMANCE
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true or false?
Smart people (high IQ) will generally be more
successful than their peers, because IQ is the
best predictor of career success.
If you’re like me, you probably answered “True.”
I know I did, and I held steadfastly to that belief
for many, many years of my academic and professional lives. The problem with my long-held
belief is that it turns out to be incorrect.
IQ can be important, but it’s not the great predictor of success I always believed it to be. Emotional intelligence, or “EQ”, turns out to be the
difference maker for most truly successful people.
What exactly is “emotional intelligence”?
Emotional Intelligence
EQ DEFINED
Here’s how the term is defined by the psychology profession.
Reuven Bar-On defines the term as “an array of non-cognitive
capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one’s ability
to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures.” SOURCE: Bar-On Emotional Quotient (EQ-i) Inventory Technical Manu-
Emotional intelligence is the “something” in each of us that is
a bit intangible. It affects how we manage behavior, navigate
social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve
positive results. Even this definition poses challenges for those of us passionate
about employee learning and development, or for those of us
passionate about our own professional development.
al (Toronto: Multi-Health Systems Inc., 1997)
The experts who coined the term in its modern context, Peter
Salovey and Jack Mayer, say EQ is “the ability to perceive
emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist
thought, to understand emotions and emotional meanings, and
to reflectively regulate emotions in ways that promote emotional and intellectual growth.”
SOURCE: Mayer, J.D., P. Salovey, and D. Caruso, Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Tests (MSCEIT) User’s Manual (Toronto: MultiHealth Systems Inc., 2002)
Is it any wonder the term is routinely misunderstood?
Here’s a definition I like from Travis Bradberry, author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Bradberry says:
If EQ is an intangible “something”, how can we really understand
it and then develop or learn it? And, if it’s something intangible,
is it even really that important?
Emotional Intelligence
IT ’ S RE ALLY IMP ORTANT!
Think back over the course of your career and visualize those
really smart people, those “top of the class” types, who just never quite had the type of professional success their high intellect
and academic success indicated might be in their futures. We’ve
all seen them, and we all know them.
TalentSmart tested emotional intelligence alongside 33 other important workplace skills, and found that emotional intelligence
is the strongest predictor of performance, explaining a full 58%
of success in all types of jobs.
Of all the people we’ve studied at work, we’ve found that 90%
of top performers are also high in emotional intelligence.
They are in every organization, too. Now think about a different
person. Someone who seems to find success at just about every
turn. But this same person wasn’t at the top of the class.
This is stunning, and what’s more the data tells us that people
with average IQ’s outperform people with high IQ’s 70% of the
time. So – it’s all about EQ.
In fact their academic performance wasn’t much above average,
but they seemed to have lots of friends. This person just seemed
to “connect” with people in just about every situation.
Intuitively, we’ve probably known this a long time. We’ve all observed colleagues and friends with great “people skills” whose
successful careers we can’t really explain other than attributing
it to doing well with, well, people. Which leads to the inevitable
question of whether emotional intelligence can be developed
and/or improved.
The odds are just about certain you are recalling a person with
a high level of emotional intelligence, and it’s not a surprise that
this person is a successful professional in the field of their choice
or passion.
In fact, according to research cited by Bradberry in the Forbes
article,
The great news in all of the research is that the answer is a resounding “yes.”
Key Components of Emotional Intelligence
There are a ton of great resources about emotional intelligence in the workplace. Two recommended books are, Emotional Intelligence
2.0, by Travis Bradberry and The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success, Third Edition, by Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book.
Bradberry’s approach is a bit more strategic, so let’s start there for a quick overview of the elements or components of EQ. According
to Bradberry, emotional intelligence includes a blend of personal competencies and social competencies he breaks down into two areas:
what we see and what we do. The are four core skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.
PERSONAL COMPETENCE
WHAT A PERSON SEES
Self-Awareness
WHAT A PERSON DOES
Self-Management
SOCIAL COMPETENCE
Social Awareness
Relationship Management
SELF-AWARENESS
The ability to perceive our
own emotions and remain
aware of them in situations.
SELF-MANAGEMENT
The ability to apply our
awareness to be flexible and
engage in positive behaviors.
SOCIAL AWARENESS
The ability to perceive the
emotions of others and understand situations.
RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT
The ability to apply social
awareness to management
interpersonal interactions effectively
Key Components of Emotional Intelligence
In The EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success, Stein and Book go a bit deeper into more specific behaviors and skills that
reflect emotional intelligence. They suggest five different “realms” with each containing 3 subsections or scales.
SELF PERCEPTION
STRESS MANAGEMENT
This realm includes emotional self awareness, self
regard which is defined as the ability to feel good
about strengths and weaknesses, and self actualization which is defined as a dedication to continuous
improvement.
This realm covers the ability to be flexible
and tolerate stress. It includes flexibility,
stress tolerance and optimism.
SELF EXPRESSION
This realm includes emotional expression which is the
ability to express feelings, assertiveness which is defined as the ability to constructively express thoughts
and beliefs, and independence which is defined as
self-direction and self control.
INTERPERSONAL
This realm is the “people skills” aspect covering interpersonal relationships, empathy and social responsibility which is defined as the ability to be a
cooperative and contributing member of a group or
community.
DECISION MAKING
This realm is about problem solving and
making good choices. It includes impulse
control, reality testing which is defined as
the ability to see things as they really are,
and problem solving.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
VIDEO SERIES TO
CHECK OUT!
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Developing Self-Awareness
Developing Self-Regulation
Developing Self-Motivation
Developing Empathy
Developing Effective
Relationships
• Emotional IQ and DISC
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Development Plan: Self-Awareness
There are a wide variety of ways we can improve our self awareness along
multiple dimensions.
Personal and Emotional
Assessments can help us gain insights into our behaviors and preferences,
particularly how we behave in stressful situations. Be cautious using most of
the popular assessments. Most of them have dubious scientific validation, so
you have to take the results at face value.
For instance, if you take a DISC assessment, and the results read like a stranger
took the assessment, it’s likely the results aren’t a good match to your actual preferred behaviors. But if you choose to take an assessment, it’s best to
answer honestly and with your first impulse. Most of the assessments that
are well-crafted can provide some helpful insights into some aspects of your
behaviors.
For most of us, reflective and thoughtful self assessments usually work best.
There are a wide variety of excellent self-assessment guides and tools available, and the two books we recommended, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and The
EQ Edge: Emotional Intelligence and Your Success, each contain some excellent tools.
Here are three tips to guide your participation
in any self-assessment tool you might choose
to use:
Be honest with yourself. The objective of any
such exercise is to help you understand yourself a little bit better. The only way to do that
is to face your strengths, weaknesses, likes
and dislikes with candor and truthfulness.
Take time to think. None of the well-crafted
exercises are designed to be “quick fix” tools.
Set aside some quiet time for yourself.
Follow instructions. I like shortcuts – who
doesn’t? But the secret to really understanding your own strengths, weaknesses, motivations, etc. is to take the time needed to really
develop the information you need. There is no
shortcut to self-awareness.
Suggested Exercise: Peak Experiences
The following Peak Experiences exercise will help develop a high
level of self-awareness and self-management.
describe the skills you use, and use the same term to describe the
same skill in different tasks.
Step One
I start by writing down 5 to 7 peak experiences. I define a peak
experience as an experience that gave me a strong sense of
personal or professional satisfaction. For instance, experiences I’ve used range from coaching youth baseball to university
teaching.
Step Four
Make a list of ALL of the skills you wrote out in Step Three. (It’s
very helpful to use a program like Apple’s Numbers of MS Excel
so you can sort by a column. Pivot tables are also wonderful!)
Step Two
For each peak experience, I write out every single thing I had to
accomplish, do or finish to deliver the experience. This list might
be as short of 5 things for some experiences, or the list could
be as long as 20 things for more complex experiences. Examples range from developing a curriculum for a course to managing
practices for 10-year olds.
Step Three
For every single thing I list in Step Two, I write out the skill I applied to accomplish that task. Now – and this is important – you
have to make sure you are careful with your vocabulary. Let me
use the university courses as an example. Communication skills
are important for that experience. But – communication skills to
do what exactly? To persuade? Inform? Be provocative? Instruct?
Explain? Make sure you are as granular as possible in the way you
Step Five
Evaluate the skills that appear across ALL experiences and ALL
tasks the most frequently. What you MOST likely have is a very
clear set of your core strengths. And you developed this list in a
relatively objective manner.
Step Six
Repeat Steps 3 through 5 for the tasks. What will emerge will be
a less well-defined set of tasks that truly motivate you, but you
will probably see a pattern emerge.
What you will end up with is a pretty good picture of your passions, your strengths and the things you do best. Therefore, these
turn into superb situations to think about to see illustrations of
all of the facets of EQ. How do you rate? Where might you need
improvement?
Emotional Intelligence Matters
It matters a lot. It’s also something we can learn and grow. Start with expanding upon your level of self-awareness. It’s the foundation of EQ. All of the
other facets, skills and competencies related to EQ begin with self-awareness.
Once you’ve established a solid foundation of self-awareness, the remaining
aspects of EQ as described by Bradberry can be developed – self management, social awareness and relationship management.
More importantly, think about critical business skills and how much more effective you will be with higher levels of EQ:
• Leadership
• Customer Service
• Sales
• Management
• Teamwork
• Decision-Making
• Change Leadership
We can name just about any critical business or professional skill without exception. Everything we do touches other people, and EQ is all about improving the way in which we interact with other people. That’s why it’s central to
professional and personal success.
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