Emotional intelligence (EI) is a term that was first introduced back in the 1960’s although it wasn’t until 1995 and the publication of Daniel Goleman’s book, ‘Emotional Intelligence’ that the world started to pay more attention. Many of us have only started hearing about EI in the last 10 or so years, and it doesn’t form a part of many leadership programmes.
What is emotional intelligence?
Peter Salovey and John Mayer define EI as “the ability to monitor one’s own and other people’s emotions, to discriminate between different emotions and label them appropriately, and to use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour”. This definition was later broken down and refined into four proposed abilities: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing emotions.
Put simply, people with a high degree of emotional intelligence know what they’re feeling, what their emotions mean, and how these emotions can affect other people.
Is EI more important than IQ?
There isn’t a straightforward answer to this question but it makes a good conversation starter! According to research, your IQ only accounts for 20% of your success in life. A level of IQ is needed in order to reach your goals, however if perhaps due to a limited EI, you don’t have those around you to support you in your goals, your success may be limited.
It has been said that your IQ can land you a job, but your lack of EI can get you fired. What are your thoughts on this?
I love this quote by Richard Branson:
“In short, I think being emotionally intelligent is more important in every aspect of life – and this includes business. Being a good listener, finding empathy, understanding emotions, communicating effectively, treating people well, and bringing out the best is critical to success. It will also help you build a business that really understands people and solve their problems, and it will make for a happier and healthier team too.
If I had let my IQ and my school grades determine my success I certainly wouldn’t be where I am today, so I hope that nobody lets a standardised test result get in the way of a good idea.”
What is really interesting is that when we are 18 or 19 our IQ levels off, and although we can work on ways of maintaining it, it won’t further develop. Our emotional intelligence can continue to be developed throughout our lives.
Why is EI so important for leaders?
EI has been linked to greater psychological empowerment, improved mental health & wellbeing, and increased job performance.
For leaders, having emotional intelligence is essential for success. After all, who is more likely to succeed – a leader who shouts at his team when he’s under stress, or a leader who stays in control, and calmly assesses the situation?
The risk to our mental health has never been so high given the challenges of the pandemic and the continued pressures we face with inflation, changes to how we work, war and politics, to name just a few things. We are seeing a significant rise in depression and anxiety across all age groups, globally, but sadly many of these symptoms start in children as young as 5 or 6. Our own self-awareness and ability to manage our emotions is vital to us staying well and there is more work happening in schools to help build emotional literacy and techniques such as mindfulness, gratitude & resilience.
All of the pressures we face in life emphasise the importance of our managers and leaders to enable us to thrive at work. Never have they had such responsibilities in terms of supporting their teams and with the added challenge of hybrid or remote working this can be tricky without development of essential skills around communication and emotional intelligence.
Many organisations are now recognising the importance of EI and include questions or assessments as part of the recruitment process to measure levels of EI. This might not be make or break, as we know EI can be learned and developed, but demonstrating a good level of empathy and compassion for others at interview will definitely go in your favour!
Where do we start if we want to build our EI?
Daniel Goleman identified 4 (recently updated from his original 5) key components for emotional intelligence:
Self awareness is the first component as without this it is difficult to develop in the other areas effectively. His research has found that those scoring low on self-awareness typically can only develop in 1 or 2 other areas.
Once we have a good level of self-awareness we increase our chances of building effective and lasting interpersonal relationships.
Building self-awareness
There’s plenty of ways to do this and much of this is about self—discovery and development as much as team training and coaching. A great starting point is to factor in time for reflection. This could involve:
- Reading and learning about the topic of emotional intelligence
- Keeping a record of how you are feeling, your warning signs of stress and how these manifest, how you then behave when under stress and the impact on others
- Completion of psychometric profiling tools to gain insight into your behaviours and preferences
- Completion of an online Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) course to build awareness of thought patterns and your responses
- Practicing mindfulness to learn how to be in the present moment and aware of yourself and your feelings
- Comparing your own answers to questions about yourself to someone who knows you very well. The smaller the gap – the more self-aware you are likely to be!
What can organisations do?
Companies invest a lot of money into leadership development, quite rightly. The focus is often on communication skills, conflict resolution, performance and change management, and running effective meetings. But it doesn’t matter what you teach people, how well you teach it, how well the learner absorbs the information, or even how well they do in a role play scenario, if their underlying emotional intelligence is not sufficiently developed, they won’t have the willingness or ability to use those skills in real, potentially difficult, or conflictual situations.
With that in mind, skills to build self-awareness and EI would ideally form the basis of all effective leadership development programmes.
Organisations can support their leaders by bringing in experts to deliver workshops that enable individuals to explore the components of EI together as a group, develop practical strategies they can utilise day to day and enhance their awareness of each other to improve communication, team-work, wellbeing and performance.
Psychometric assessments are a really engaging and fun way to build awareness of self and others within a team. They allow a common language to break down barriers and improve communication.
There are lots of tools out there – but often it is good to keep things simple. Something that can be easily rolled out to everyone ensures consistency. You can then build on this over time to deepen everyone’s understanding. Don’t forget to use a specialist trained in the tool to avoid misinterpretations / backfiring!
To find out more about team development, leadership workshops, and psychometric assessments get in touch today!