The origin of the term emotional intelligence is from a book by Daniel Goleman in 1995 and this book has made it one of the hottest subjects to be discussed in corporate America. This led to an article in the Harvard Business Review two years ago, and that attracted more readers than all articles published in the magazine during the last 40 years. This had such an effect on the CEO of Johnson & Johnson that he sent out the article to all 400 executives in the company. (Emotional Intelligence: What it is and why it Matters)
In the book, Goleman had divided the subject as consisting of five emotional competencies and these were to identify and name the emotional states of the person and to understand its link to emotions thought and action; to manage one’s emotional states and thus to control emotions or to change unwanted emotional states into ones that could tackle the situation better; to get into emotional situations which were more likely to be connected with the drive to achieve and be successful; to read, be sensitive and thus influence emotions of other people; and finally to be able to start and maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships.
In the theory of Goleman, these emotional competencies are built in a hierarchy, and one has to be able to find them out so that they can be managed. One of the important aspects is to be able to achieve drive to achieve emotional states. These abilities lead the person to the situation where he can achieve the objective of reading and influencing the emotions of other people in a positive manner. It is not that emotions do not exist and there are always feelings in our minds.
This is not appreciated by organizations who value being rational, but not having emotional management. Emotional intelligence: Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia) It is not enough to have the old fashioned cognitive intelligence to be successful at work, but it also needs the capacity in the person to stop negative emotions like anger and non-belief in one self. Instead the person should be capable of concentrating on congeniality and confidence. This is the belief of a new group of psychologists. This concept was first highlighted by Daniel Goleman in his book “Emotional Intelligence why it can matter more than IQ”. He is still continuing on his work and the new book is “Working with Emotional Intelligence”.
In the book his concentration is on the use that emotional intelligence can be put at work and that is supposed to be managed more by intelligence than feelings. It has been seen that all types of people need emotional intelligence, and even the bosses who have to deal with a lot of people also need it a lot. (Does ’emotional intelligence’ matter in the workplace? ) This is also not like IQ which does not change much for the person, but this factor can be learnt, and probably some types of failures help build it up. As an example, one can take the case of J. K. Rowling who is the author of Harry Potter.
She has certainly learnt a lot through experience as she was first divorced and then had to live separately with her children in Edinburgh. On top of that the first book that she had written, out of the ten books now, was rejected by the publishers. (Succeeding with Emotional Intelligence) Her experience certainly gave her a lot of emotional stress bearing capacity, and permitted her to wait enough to be able to finally bring out her best. So far as we are concerned, let us now take the case of a person who has just been appointed as a trainee manager and is very hot headed. This is most often an emotional intelligence problem.
Let us find out how he can be guided to be a better manager. At the outset, one has to understand that emotional intelligence is a very difficult quality for evaluation. In school we have girls who are smart, well organized and industrious. She is also caring about other students in the class, but she is not liked by her classmates and her name is left out of all invitations. She gets to hear of the lunch plans, but is not invited. This trend continues even when she is working. Boys may have a similar situation and be so smart that they are liked by all the moms and dads in the area.
He may be even smart enough to merit special schools, but is not able to continue. Finally he is compelled to take up menial jobs for survival. These examples tell us clearly not to depend on our emotions, as we are taught to believe that emotions are not “life” and give us a distorted view of life. When any question of emotions come up, it is viewed as being childish and the individual is thought of being a baby. When another child runs to help the afflicted child, we call the other child as being a baby. One can say clearly that our lives are determined by our intellectual capacity in our minds, but that is often not true in real life.
We pride our capacity to memorize and solve problems, spell words and calculate mathematically. These capacities are reflected in the report card and decide the grades that we get. (Emotional Intelligence Training) When an individual is not able to perform well in these measures, he is considered to be “brainless”, but that does not mean that all of them have no success in life later. This is not true for companies which today test the emotional intelligence of their employees, and many companies are already doing it. It is also true that different types of jobs require different types of emotional intelligence.
A sales man requires the capacity to be able to judge the moods of the potential customers, and based on that, he has to decide when to try and sell and when to just keep quiet. On the other hand when a person is trying to become a painter or a professional tennis player, they have to gather up the capacity for a lot of self discipline and motivation. It is also seen that women have different capacities from men on certain emotional traits, and this information is based on large scale assessments of EQ. (Does ’emotional intelligence’ matter in the workplace? )
It is seen that, in general women have better measures of empathy and social responsibility but a lot less on self confidence and tolerance of stress. This requires women in many organizations to learn self confidence through the use of meditation, yoga and jogging. On the other side, the men have to learn listening to other workers and the customers, and thus understand their moods and gain their trust.
These are also very important qualities of being a leader, being able to work in a team and maintain good relations with other workers. (Does ’emotional intelligence’ matter in the workplace? It is thus clear that the disability of our trainee manager is due to his being a “smart” boy and thus not learning enough of emotional qualities for being a successful manager. We can also see that this is not unusual among male managers. At the same time, it requires a lot of cognitive ability for any person to get admitted into a course of science. The high ability is required for just an admission into a course for any renowned school like Berkeley, but the question here is that once the admission process is over, then it becomes a question of keeping up with the other students in the course.
That does not require a high IQ but requires more of a suitable social and emotional build up in the individual. This can be viewed in another way and that is a scientist probably requires an IQ of 120 or thereabouts to get a doctorate and then a job. At the same time, the individual should have the capacity to be able to get along with the colleagues and juniors, and that is probably as good as having another 10 or 15 points higher of IQ. (Emotional Intelligence: What it is and why it Matters) A somewhat similar situation exists for managers.
It is not that they require a high intellectual capacity, but they have to have the capacity to get along well with others, and a manager without that capacity is likely to fail as a manager. To solve this problem in the trainee that we are talking about, an actor was put among the group of managers being trained. As a part of their training, the managers were given the task of jointly deciding on the bonus to be given to the subordinates for a particular period. The actor was the person among the group who spoke first and gave the future managers the initial ideas of solving the problem.
Within the group with the problematic trainee, the actor projected a lot of cheer and enthusiasm, along with warmth about the employees. This brought about the transmission of a similar feeling to the group, including the trainee. This led good emotions among the group, and improved the cooperation, spirit of fairness and better group performance. This attitude among the managers led to a fairer distribution of money among the people and thus was of use to the organization. This activity also continued for some time, in other similar activities, and similar results were seen.
In terms of emotional intelligence the required quality can be called empathy, and this has been known by the psychologists to contribute a lot to the success of individuals. (Emotional Intelligence: What it is and why it Matters) Let us look at the case of Aaron Feuerstein, and his Malden Mills Polartec factory, which was totally destroyed by fir in 1995. He personally paid the salaries of the workers for three months while the factory was rebuilt. (Succeeding with Emotional Intelligence) The importance of this quality was found out more than twenty years ago at Harvard by Rosenthal and others.
They said that people who were good at identifying emotions of other people were more successful in work as also in the social aspects. This aspect was also found important among apparel sales representatives as their quality of empathy was given value by the retail sales buyers. It was reported in a survey that the buyers wanted representatives who could listen to them with patience and comprehend their difficulties and requirements. (Emotional Intelligence: What it is and why it Matters) It is important to understand that emotional competence refers to personal and social skills and those qualities lead to a better level of work.
The capacity to understand the feelings of another person enables the first to develop a certain amount of influence on the second person. At the same time, people who are able to control or regulate their own emotions ultimately find it easier to develop qualities like Initiative or achievement drive. The entire concept of emotional intelligence has been developed over a long period of time. The development was through research and theoretical discussions on personality and social reactions, as well as psychology. This view was also accepted by Goleman.
He has said clearly that that the abilities linked with emotional intelligence have been a part of the psychologists for a long period of time. (Emotional Intelligence: What it is and why it Matters) The manager’s and the supervisors’ behavior as also their treatment of their sub-ordinates ultimately determine whether they stay or they leave. They have to look after the individual needs, wants and expectations of these people every day. That in turn affects the attitudes, performances and satisfaction of the employees.
It involves great stress in leading so many people and meeting their needs and expectations all the time, while at the same time performing up to the requirements of the top management. It is said that two-fifths of the departures of people from an organization are due to an effective relationship among the employees and their immediate bosses. If there is no trust between them, then the performance is naturally inferior. All employees want support and care from the supervisor and manager, who at the same time has their best interests in mind.
It is with this view that team leaders and project managers are viewed as being responsible for the environment at work where different types of people come to work, to achieve success on diverse jobs in a short period. The continuation of working in the political environment of organizations can lead to a lot of difficulties for the individual – frustration, anxiety, suspicion, resentment. This lets production fall behind schedule, and ultimately people leave the organization. (Who Needs Emotional Intelligence Skills)