Boost Your Emotional Intelligence, fast and Forever

You've probably heard of emotional intelligence, a concept that was popularized by Daniel Goleman with his 1995 book of the same name.

Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) quickly grabbed the interest of scientists, academics and business leaders. For scientists, it presented a welcome counterbalance to the intelligence quotient (IQ). For companies and their leaders, it offered another way to succeed, seeming to quantify and define the "It" factor that made some leaders so much more successful than others.

It didn't take long before opposition arose, pointing to the weaknesses, shortcomings and limitations of EQ. Debate among scientists and academics continues to rage over the validity and importance of emotional intelligence. Adam Grant, a Wharton professor, is one notable and vocal critic.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

While they may not agree on its importance, experts mostly agree that emotional intelligence is made up of three primary elements:

• Perceiving emotions
• Understanding emotions
• Regulating/managing emotions

So, executives with a high EQ will typically exhibit:

• Self-awareness - Recognizing and understanding their emotions, motivations, values and strengths.
• More acute perception of others.
• Self-control - Managing or redirecting their emotions and talent to adapt to different social situations, including those that are difficult or negative.
• Social skills to build and manage relationships and harness emotions in an intended direction.
• Empathy - The ability to understand other people's emotions and feelings.

One of the arguments about EQ is that it needs to be redefined as "social" rather than "emotional" and "skills" rather than "intelligence". After all, EQ has a social component and can, like other skills, be learned and developed.

But moving away from academic debates, what practical reason is there for executives to care about EQ? How is EQ relevant to Jeff, founder and CEO of a startup, and Sally, an executive at a large corporation? Put simply, a higher EQ will enable them to more effectively communicate with and lead their team, division or company, particularly in challenging times.

Where Emotional Intelligence Matters Most

When we think about EQ as another skill or set of skills for dealing effectively with people, it's pretty clear that EQ is important for leaders and managers, but is it critical for all jobs and industries? Interestingly enough, EQ is more necessary in sales, client service, public relations, politics, front office and people management.

Leaders like Jeff and Sally, and managers dealing directly with people, need to have strong social skills for interviewing candidates, reviewing performance, influencing, motivating and inspiring their people to reach higher levels, and generally for managing, organizing, or making decisions about people.

Jobs that have a lower need for EQ include such things as: accounting, banking, coding, engineering, quality control, clerk, financial analyst, and many others with a strong technical content.

Yet even for these more technical jobs, where working with data is primary and a specific skill set is used, emotional intelligence applied sparingly from the team leader can positively impact the effectiveness of the team as a whole. Like with so many things, when you are dealing with people management emotional intelligence is needed in different doses depending on the situation.

Developing Your Emotional Intelligence

As mentioned earlier, EQ is made up of skills, and skills can be learned and improved, but how?

A quick Google search returns pages of links on how to develop your EQ. These posts, articles and downloads can be frustratingly vague: "pay attention to your emotions throughout the day" "cultivate self-awareness" and "be empathetic." While it's certainly beneficial to work on self-awareness, these suggestions can be overly simplistic and don't offer any objective information about people's behavior, emotions and performance. Toiling away with these self-help methods is slow, too, even when one is intentional about improving.

In contrast, with an assessment like the GRI - a suite of robust online tools, management techniques and practical training based on a proven, reliable behavioral assessment - you get refined and detailed data that helps jumpstart your understanding of others, which builds social skills more quickly.

The GRI enables people to go beyond their perceptions of others, giving them the tools to:

• Refrain from judging people too fast
• Challenge a "gut" feeling
• Develop the discipline of thinking positively about others
• Engage in more productive and efficient interaction

For leaders like Jeff and Sally, the information provided by the GRI offers a way to quickly and effectively enhance their social and interpersonal skills: during the interviewing process, when managing people day-to-day, or when growing the organization.

GRI Expression of Emotional Intelligence

With the GRI, the behaviors and skills found in EQ are indicated with a higher Factor 2, which is a measurement of how one is motivated to socialize and connect with others versus remain task oriented and analytically distant. This holds true regardless of the other three factors measured by the GRI. They are evidenced in the GRI Natural profile, which shows one's natural, unaffected tendency to behave consistently and reliably in a certain way over time. For Jeff, who naturally has a high EQ, his Factor 2 in his Natural will be on the high side.

Those behaviors are also evidenced in the GRI Role profile, which shows how one perceives the need to adapt and behave in a specific way in specific situations. Both Natural and Role will reflect in the GRI Effective profile: how one effectively conveys those behaviors into the job as experienced by others. For Sally who is low on her Factor 2 in the Natural, a higher Factor 2 in the Role impacts her effective EQ as shows in her Effective Profile.

Emotional intelligence may still be hotly debated in academic circles but leaving the science to the scientists, it is clear that a higher level of social skill and awareness is critical to surviving and thriving in the uncertain and changing world of business. Improving and enhancing EQ is possible, and improvements are faster and easier with the help of the GRI.

For those who "Speak" GRI, please go to our blog for a deeper dive.