You Have The Talent. How About Your Emotional Intelligence?

Golam Kibria <Kibria_iba@yahoo.com>

Have you ever thought why the best student at university is not the best one in
family life or in profession? Why he is not the best father or best spouse??

Anyone who has begun his/her working life might discover soon that his/her ability
to 'get ahead' depends little on what they learned in training school or university.
So, what’s the mantra of success??

…It’s probably the emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to
monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s
thinking and action.

Ever since the publication of Daniel Goleman’s first book on the topic in 1995, emotional intelligence has become one of the
hottest buzzwords in corporate world. For instance, when the Harvard Business Review published an article on the topic in
1998, it attracted a higher percentage of readers than any other article published in that periodical in the last 40 years. When
the CEO of Johnson & Johnson read that article, he was so impressed that he had copies sent out to the 400 top executives in
the company worldwide.

Once, what sort of job you ended up was depended on how well you did in college or your technical skills. But now, academic
or technical ability are simply the threshold requirements to gain entry to a career. Beyond this, what makes you a 'star' is your
ownership of things such as resilience, initiative, optimism, adaptability to change and empathy towards others. Very few
employers will give as a reason for hiring someone that they were 'emotionally intelligent', but it will often be the decisive
factor. Other terms might be used like character, personality, maturity, soft skills and a drive for excellence. One needs a
relatively high level of IQ merely to get admitted to a graduate program at a top ranked university. But once you are admitted,
however, what matters in terms of how you do compared to your peers has less to do with IQ differences and more to do with
social and emotional factors. To put it another way, if you’re a student of business administration, you probably needed an IQ
of 120 or so to get a job. But then it is more important to be able to persist in the face of difficulty and to get along well with
colleagues and subordinates than it is to have an extra 10 or 15 points of IQ.

Are you emotionally competent?

In 1973, David McLelland published a celebrated paper in American
Psychologist which argued 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' which would be important
to the job. This marked the beginning of competency testing, now widely
used in the private sector 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. Daniel Goleman described five core emotional competencies
as the base of emotional intelligence:
Self-awareness: Awareness of your own feelings and using them as a guide to better decision making. Awareness of abilities
and shortcomings. The sense that you can tackle most things.
Self-regulation: Being conscientious and delaying gratification in order to achieve goals. Ability to recover from emotional
distress and manage one's emotions.
Motivation: Developing an achievement or goal orientation, such that frustrations and setbacks are put in perspective and
qualities such as initiative and perseverance are refined.
Empathy: Awareness of what others are feeling and thinking, and in turn to be able to influence a wide range of people.
Social skills: Handling close personal relationships well but also having a sense of social networks and politics. Interacting
well with people; the ability to cooperate to produce results.

Emotional intelligence can make the most of whatever technical skills you have. If you are a scientist, you want the rest of the
world to know what you are doing. If you are a programmer, you want people to feel you are service oriented and not just a
‘techie’. 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 techies, but also have the ability to listen, influence, motivate people and get them
collaborating.
Emotional intelligence is not about 'being nice' or even 'expressing our feelings' – it is learning how to express feelings in an
appropriate way and at appropriate times, and being able empathize with others and work well with them.

IQ explains 25 per cent of job performance which leaves a full 75 per cent for other factors. In most fields, a reasonable level
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.

It is also important to look at executive failure. Though not so frequent, some times we see that executives who were
previously working at a high level but fired or demoted afterward. According to the 'Peter Principle', such people 'reach 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 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 or with 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, and over-reliance 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.

Final word
Possibly the most important difference between IQ and emotional intelligence is: whereas we are born with a certain level of
intelligence, and it does not change much after the teen years, emotional intelligence is largely learned. 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' or 'maturity'; unlike native intelligence, their development is our
responsibility. Now it would be absurd to say that IQ does not matter at all. The point is that, all things being equal
(intelligence level, expertise, education), the person who works well with others, is far sighted, empathic and is aware of their
emotions will go a lot further in their career.