Feelings About Emotional Intelligence
Sometimes a new scientific model changes the way we view the world. Sometimes it just reaffirms our common sense. It’s intriguing that the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) does a bit of both. In the future, it could have a major impact on things like training, leadership development, employee assessment and recruitment. Before it does, however, it must survive a number of challenges, not least of which is a high degree of media and business hype.
In essence, EI is the ability to recognize and manage emotions, both in ourselves and in others. For business people, the attraction of EI is that it might play a major role in determining people’s success in the workplace. Daniel Goleman, author of Working with Emotional Intelligence and the person most responsible for popularizing EI, claims that emotional intelligence accounts for job success better than IQ (an assertion that is a matter of scientific debate). He believes EI represents a “new paradigm for business” and says that, with a growing knowledge of EI, businesspeople increasingly are and will be judged as much by their emotional smarts as by their job training, expertise and IQ.
Of course, it can be argued that there’s nothing new about this, that we’ve long known that people skills are essential to organizational success. In fact, some traditional assessment centers try to identify management traits that look a lot like some of the emotional competencies touted by Goleman and other EI experts. But there is a certain rigor about EI that is appealing because it is a model that is being tested and revised as we learn more about how the human mind works. As a recent Fast Company article reports, EI may help close the gap between so-called hard skills and soft skills “to produce a unified view of workplace performance.”
Right now, the danger is that EI and its more practical counterpart -- emotional competence training and assessment -- might be overhyped, packaged and sold as a panacea for whatever ails companies, from poor leadership to discrimination claims. Eventually, this could harm the reputation of a sound principle because measuring and managing emotional competencies can’t possibly solve all of today’s complex corporate problems.
Nonetheless, programs focused on emotional competencies have shown some success in the workplace. Perhaps the best-known case comes from American Express Financial Advisors (AEFA). In the early 1990s, the firm investigated why only 28% of AEFA’s customers purchased life insurance. It found that the answer had more to do with the emotions of the clients and of AmEx financial advisors than with policy coverage and cost. The result was new training programs for financial advisors, at first focusing on stress management and then recast as emotional-competence training. The training focuses on five domains of EI: self-awareness, self-management, interpersonal effectiveness, social skills and empathy. AmEx found that the group of workers who had undergone the training was able to make more sales than those who had not. The samples were too small to be statistically significant, but the results suggested that teaching emotional competencies affected the bottom line. Today, AEFA financial advisors are required to undergo eight hours of such training, and hundreds of high-potential managers from various parts of AmEx have voluntarily participated in a five-day course.
The U.S. Air Force has also benefited from using the EI model, this time for assessment purposes. In an attempt to reduce the number of recruiters it had to dismiss each year, it gave the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) to 1,200 recruiters and found that its best recruiters outscored the worst recruiters on 14 of 15 EQi competencies. The Air Force subsequently decided to use the EQi as a screening tool, requiring all new recruiters to achieve a score of “good” or “excellent” on the profile. In one year, the turnover among new recruiters dropped from 100 to 8.
Such success stories should be tempered by the fact that the tools for measuring EI are still being perfected. A case in point may be the experience of Tony Schwartz, a contributing editor at Fast Company. He took two different tests designed to judge emotional intelligence: the EQi, designed by emotional intelligence pioneer Reuven Bar-On, and the Emotional Competency Inventory, developed by Goleman and Richard Boyatzis for The Hay Group. One test showed him scoring high in EI while the other showed he had a fairly low EI. On the plus side, both tests revealed many of the same relative emotional strengths and weaknesses.
It’s hard to predict EI’s future. If the rigor of the EI model and the predictive ability of the assessment instruments grow in strength, it may well become a powerful business concept, shaping the way we view both group dynamics and individual competencies. Some experts even predict that a new generation of EI training and assessment tools based on computer simulations could spring up. On the other hand, EI could eventually lose rather than gain credibility in the business world - - especially if it is overhyped -- and turn out to be a relatively short- lived management consulting fad.
====================================================
A very readable Fast Company article on EI can be found at
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/35/emotion.html.
For more information on EI, including guidelines for best practices, see
http://www.eiconsortium.org/
For a short EI quiz that shouldn't be taken too seriously, see
http://www.utne.com/azEq2.tmpl
An article called "American Express Taps into the Power of Emotional
Intelligence" can be found by searching http://www.workforce.com/
In essence, EI is the ability to recognize and manage emotions, both in ourselves and in others. For business people, the attraction of EI is that it might play a major role in determining people’s success in the workplace. Daniel Goleman, author of Working with Emotional Intelligence and the person most responsible for popularizing EI, claims that emotional intelligence accounts for job success better than IQ (an assertion that is a matter of scientific debate). He believes EI represents a “new paradigm for business” and says that, with a growing knowledge of EI, businesspeople increasingly are and will be judged as much by their emotional smarts as by their job training, expertise and IQ.
Of course, it can be argued that there’s nothing new about this, that we’ve long known that people skills are essential to organizational success. In fact, some traditional assessment centers try to identify management traits that look a lot like some of the emotional competencies touted by Goleman and other EI experts. But there is a certain rigor about EI that is appealing because it is a model that is being tested and revised as we learn more about how the human mind works. As a recent Fast Company article reports, EI may help close the gap between so-called hard skills and soft skills “to produce a unified view of workplace performance.”
Right now, the danger is that EI and its more practical counterpart -- emotional competence training and assessment -- might be overhyped, packaged and sold as a panacea for whatever ails companies, from poor leadership to discrimination claims. Eventually, this could harm the reputation of a sound principle because measuring and managing emotional competencies can’t possibly solve all of today’s complex corporate problems.
Nonetheless, programs focused on emotional competencies have shown some success in the workplace. Perhaps the best-known case comes from American Express Financial Advisors (AEFA). In the early 1990s, the firm investigated why only 28% of AEFA’s customers purchased life insurance. It found that the answer had more to do with the emotions of the clients and of AmEx financial advisors than with policy coverage and cost. The result was new training programs for financial advisors, at first focusing on stress management and then recast as emotional-competence training. The training focuses on five domains of EI: self-awareness, self-management, interpersonal effectiveness, social skills and empathy. AmEx found that the group of workers who had undergone the training was able to make more sales than those who had not. The samples were too small to be statistically significant, but the results suggested that teaching emotional competencies affected the bottom line. Today, AEFA financial advisors are required to undergo eight hours of such training, and hundreds of high-potential managers from various parts of AmEx have voluntarily participated in a five-day course.
The U.S. Air Force has also benefited from using the EI model, this time for assessment purposes. In an attempt to reduce the number of recruiters it had to dismiss each year, it gave the Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) to 1,200 recruiters and found that its best recruiters outscored the worst recruiters on 14 of 15 EQi competencies. The Air Force subsequently decided to use the EQi as a screening tool, requiring all new recruiters to achieve a score of “good” or “excellent” on the profile. In one year, the turnover among new recruiters dropped from 100 to 8.
Such success stories should be tempered by the fact that the tools for measuring EI are still being perfected. A case in point may be the experience of Tony Schwartz, a contributing editor at Fast Company. He took two different tests designed to judge emotional intelligence: the EQi, designed by emotional intelligence pioneer Reuven Bar-On, and the Emotional Competency Inventory, developed by Goleman and Richard Boyatzis for The Hay Group. One test showed him scoring high in EI while the other showed he had a fairly low EI. On the plus side, both tests revealed many of the same relative emotional strengths and weaknesses.
It’s hard to predict EI’s future. If the rigor of the EI model and the predictive ability of the assessment instruments grow in strength, it may well become a powerful business concept, shaping the way we view both group dynamics and individual competencies. Some experts even predict that a new generation of EI training and assessment tools based on computer simulations could spring up. On the other hand, EI could eventually lose rather than gain credibility in the business world - - especially if it is overhyped -- and turn out to be a relatively short- lived management consulting fad.
====================================================
A very readable Fast Company article on EI can be found at
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/35/emotion.html.
For more information on EI, including guidelines for best practices, see
http://www.eiconsortium.org/
For a short EI quiz that shouldn't be taken too seriously, see
http://www.utne.com/azEq2.tmpl
An article called "American Express Taps into the Power of Emotional
Intelligence" can be found by searching http://www.workforce.com/