Emotional Intelligence, Right Now

I'm delighted to share with you matters close to my heart, ideas that I find stimulating, and some practical tips and leads that you might find useful. At the core, of course, you’ll find emotional intelligence. But my interests also go far beyond; you’ll get a taste of that range here. PLUS news you can put to use in your life or work – or in both. Please join me each month.

First, a couple of announcements...

Join me for two special talks online, December 14 and 15:  

What Makes a Leader: Emotional Intelligence and the Keys to High Performance

• The four parts of emotional intelligence - and how they are key to leading yourself and others
• Understanding the 12 crucial EI competencies and their role in high-performance leadership

Building an Emotionally Intelligent Organization 

• How emotional intelligence boosts organizational performance 
• Building EI in your organization through recruitment, onboarding, and leadership development – and going to scale

Sign up here.

AND...

I am launching a podcast with Key Step Media! Called First Person Plural: EI & Beyond, this podcast promises to go beyond the theory of emotional intelligence, presenting an array of stories that illuminate how emotional intelligence is being put into action. Key Step Media has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to help cover the production costs for the first season, which will serve as a resource to those experiencing heightened levels of stress and uncertainty. Please consider donating. There are only twelve days left to meet the goal!

and now...

Emotional Intelligence: 25 Years

Bring to mind someone you’ve worked for who you really liked – someone you enjoyed working for. That’s your favorite boss.

When I’ve asked folks to do this, and to name one outstanding characteristic of that boss, I get a list that looks very, very familiar: that boss is emotionally intelligent.

We know this intuitively, but now research confirms our gut instinct: The greater a leader’s EI, the more satisfied their direct reports are with their job, and the lower their turnover rate.  

Low turnover rates, in turn, are connected with better business outcomes like return on investment, return on assets, and profit.

Yet an Accenture survey found that younger employees – think Millenials and Gen Z – value for their career success tech skills above so-called “soft skills” like emotional intelligence.  But seasoned executives see it the other way around: success as a leader depends to a large degree on your emotional intelligence. (After all, the higher you go in an organization, the more you lead people. And leadership can be seen as the art of getting the best effort out of other people.)

Do you know someone who has yet to wake up to the importance of EI for life and career success? A gentle prod: give that person the book Emotional Intelligence as a holiday gift.

The 25th-anniversary edition was just released with a new intro. The new edition will go up on Amazon as soon as Monday, December 14th. Keep your eye out for this cover...

Next Up...

FIVE MYTHS ABOUT EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

In the years since Emotional Intelligence was first published, some persistent myths about the concept keep popping up. The most persistent:

1: “Emotional Intelligence always matters more than your IQ.”

Wrong. 

This is a misreading of the subtitle of my book. EI can sometimes matter more than IQ – in romance, for example, or for leadership. But certainly not when it comes to academic achievement.

2: “Emotional intelligence accounts for 80 percent of career success”

Wrong.

This mistake comes from a misinterpretation of data I cited in Working with Emotional Intelligence: that IQ may account for up to 20 percent of career success. That other 80 percent is NOT all emotional intelligence, but a host of factors like the wealth of your family of origin, luck, connections, and other forces in one’s success.

3: “Being emotionally intelligent just means you are nice.” 

Wrong.

But the way a person with emotional intelligence confronts someone else would not be with anger and rage (nor with passivity). It would be with an assertive and firm, but calm, declaration of fact, viewpoint, or whatever else the moment calls for.  I like the Dalai Lama’s idea of a “muscular” compassion, where the confrontation of injustice, corruption, and the like comes in a strong form but without hostility.

4: I invented ‘emotional intelligence.’

Wrong.

The first time I saw the term was as the title of an article in an academic journal (obscure then and now extinct) by Peter Salovey, then a junior professor at Yale and now President of that university, and his then-grad student John (Jack) Mayer, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire.  I just made the idea more famous. At the time I was on the science desk at the New York Times, and my job was to scour such journals to find research that was new and of general interest – like emotional intelligence.

5:There are five parts to emotional intelligence.

Wrong.

In my original model (e.g., in my 1995 book) I did parse EI into five parts. But two of these – self-motivation and self-regulation – have long since been combined into one: self-management. My most recent work focuses on 12 competencies that fold into the four parts of EI.

next up...

Competence of the Month: Adaptability

Each month, I will be covering one of the twelve emotional intelligence competencies. This month: Adaptability. I’ve asked Elizabeth Solomon to share how coaches like her use emotional intelligence tools with their clients.

Here is a clip from her most recent article, Adaptability: Cultivating Resilience in and Beyond 2020

Adaptability: Cultivating Resilience in and Beyond 2020

“Do not judge me by my success,” said Nelson Mandela, “judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”

In the words of Winston Churchill: “If you're going through hell, keep going.”

What these men are talking about is resilience—a term found everywhere right now in studies, articles, and courses across social justice, psychology, community health, and the entire sphere of leadership development.

No surprise really. 

In 2017, the World Health Organization cited resilience as a top priority—crucial to the wellbeing of individuals, communities and systems. Between early December and late March of 2020—in the first weeks of the COVID pandemic—Google searches for the term more than doubled. 

Clearly, the world is looking for strategies to cope with change. After all, almost every admirable figure in history has demonstrated resilience. Their words bring us hope. Their stories tell us that it’s possible to survive through upheaval and the unknown.

But I wonder: now that resilience has become a buzzword, how many people have mistaken it as a single skill? What does it take to recover quickly from setbacks? What are the conditions of rolling with the tide?

In Daniel Goleman’s framework of Emotional Intelligence, ADAPTABILITY is one of the competencies associated with resilience. One of four self-management competencies, it refers to how well we manage complexity and how skillfully we respond to change. 

{For the full post, which includes tips for building this competency on your own and through coaching, go here. }

by Elizabeth Solomon

You may also want to check out these primers on the twelve competencies of Emotional Intelligence.

to close...

A conversation on Emotional Intelligence with Dr. Michele Rucchiuto at Allstate. Learn how Allstate works with their employees to enhance emotional self-awareness and regulation, influence, conflict management, problem-solving, and resilience.