Emotional Intelligence
On a bright, clear morning, Mohab Saleh, Creative Software
Developer at a respectable software company, was rushing through
Cairo's crowded streets to make it to the monthly employee
meeting. He made it just on time to hear that he was being
promoted to head the CRM software division at Raya. "Incredibly
bright", "highly skilled", "top of his field", were few of the
qualities of the well-educated engineer who earned the highest
GPA in his class. Two months later, the Senior Vice President at
Raya started receiving complains regarding Saleh's behavior with
his subordinates. The common complain was, "Mr. Saleh is an
incredibly respected manager and highly experienced, but..." In
this case, the "but" was that subordinates and colleagues
refused to work with him either individually or in teams as he
was unreasonably demanding and demeaning. He was known for
berating them both privately and publicly, asking questions that
challenged the legitimacy of their expertise, treating them in
such a rigidity that insulted the hardness of the office walls.
Even though he was one of the best at what he did, he was an
inadequate manager, an ineffective leader. The main reason
behind this was his deficiency of a very precious element
nowadays that can predict up to 90% of success in business and
life. This element is emotional intelligence. Emotional
Intelligence: Defined Emotional Intelligence is about managing
your emotions and directing them towards something productive,
motivating your self and those around you, developing productive
relationships, and understanding the inner minds of people and
working cooperatively with them to reach organizational goals
effectively and efficiently. It is defined as "a combination of
emotional and interpersonal competencies that influence our
behavior and interaction with others". The purpose of emotional
intelligence is to aid the development of the one's emotional
literacy and self-knowledge in order to produce socially
acceptable objectives and satisfy individual self-actualization
needs. The concept had many keywords enlisted in our society
like personality, character, or just being nice! But emotional
intelligence is not about niceness or being wimpy, it is an
emerging science and an important branch of managerial
psychology. The terms "Emotional Intelligence" and "Emotional
Quotient (EQ)" were first coined by Dr. Daniel Goleman in his
worldwide best-selling book "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can
Matter More Than IQ". Goleman argued that there is a shift in
the paradigm, a redefinition of being smart, and that success is
longer about IQ alone but about having emotionally intelligence
skills to backup your knowledge, technical skills and
experience. According to Primal Leadership, productive
performance in organizations is driven by three capabilities:
Technical Skills- knowledge and proficiency in a
certain field Cognitive Skills- ability to think and
conceptualize about complex situations Emotional
Intelligence Skills- traits like self-control, self-management,
empathy and social skills (249). Before Emotional Intelligence,
technical and cognitive skills, which resemble IQ, were
traditionally the mere method to predict success in business and
life. Therefore, in the 80s and 90s there was a trend of people
getting MBAs and post-graduate studies and for a time, it was
good. It helped them advance their careers, but now since you
can get an MBA online sitting on your leather chair drinking
latte, the market is saturated and the variance in the levels of
knowledge among employees is negligible, especially at the
higher levels of the organization. This led to other form of
skills to emerge as the human edge, the new competitive
advantage in the dynamic business environment, whilst careers
that rose on analytical skills and cognitive skills had a
difficult time adjusting to that change. This shift in the
paradigm caused measures of success to shift from IQ to EQ-based
competencies as a more effective predictor of success. According
to the studies conducted by Goleman, it was found that IQ can
only predict 10 - 20% of a person's potential for success, while
EQ predicted from 80% up to 90% of his/her potential for
success. EQ vs. IQ Why do smart people fail? Why people with a
high EQ succeed while those with merely a moderate IQ
considerably fail? First we need to understand that the
emotional quotient (EQ) is not the opposite of the intelligence
quotient (IQ); EQ is actually complementary to IQ resembled in
academic intelligence and cognitive skills, and studies actually
show that our emotional states affect the way our brain
functions as well as its processing speed (Cryer qtd. in
Kemper). Studies have even shown that Albert Einstein's superior
intellectual ability may have been linked to the part of the
brain that supports psychological functions, dubbed the
amygadla. The natures of EQ and IQ differ however in the ability
to learn and develop them. IQ is a genetic potential that is
established at birth and happens to be fixed after a certain age
(pre-puberty) and can not be developed nor increased after then.
EQ on the contrary can be learned, developed and improved at any
age, and studies have actually shown that our ability to learn
emotional intelligence increases as we get older. Another
difference is that IQ is a threshold capability that can only
show you the road to your career and gets you working in a
certain field but it is EQ that walks through that road and gets
you promoted in that field. Therefore, striking a balance
between IQ and EQ is an important element of managerial success.
For some extent, IQ is a driver of productive performance;
however IQ-based competencies are considered "threshold
abilities" i.e. the skills needed for you to do an average job.
On the other hand, EQ-based competencies and skills are by far
more effective, especially at higher levels of organizations
where IQ differences are negligible. When a comparative study
matched star performers against average ones in top
organizational levels, 85 % was attributed to EQ-based
competencies rather than IQ (250). Dr. Goleman says that even
though organizations are different, have different needs, it was
found that EQ contributed by 80-90% of predicting success in
organizations in general (251). EQ vs. IQ: Case Study To better
illustrate the value-added of EQ competencies relative to IQ, we
refer to the case, which was conducted by Dr. Goleman and two
renowned EQ researchers, to analyze how EQ competencies
contributed to profits in a large accounting firm (251). First,
the participants' IQs and EQs were tested and analyzed
thoroughly, then they were organized in work teams and each work
team was trained on one form of EQ competency like
self-management and social skills; however they left one team
with participants with a high IQ to act as a control for the
study. Then when they evaluated the economic value-added of EQ
competencies and IQ, the results were remarkable. The team with
high social skills scored a 110% incremental profit, while the
self-control partners scored a massive 390% incremental profit
which was valued at