Emotional Intelligence

For years many people in HR have preached the gospel that leadership ability shouldn’t be measured by just “what” someone did, but also by “how” they got things done. Hitting or exceeding the numbers wasn’t admirable, if that leader left a trail of dead bodies in his/her wake. For his work in emotional intelligence (EI) Daniel Goleman should become a prophet, if he isn’t already.

“We are being judged by a new yardstick; not just how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other.”
Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence

Below is a primer on EI and it’s impact on the bottom line.

Emotional Intelligence (EI)
An emotional competence is a learned capacity based on emotional intelligence that results in outstanding performance at work. For superior performance in jobs of all kinds, emotional competence matters twice as much as IQ, plus technical skill combined. EI can be broken down into two competency clusters, personal competence and social competence.

Personal Competence: How We Manage Ourselves

• Self-Awareness: Knowing one's internal states, preferences, resources, and intuitions.
  Emotional awareness: Recognising one's emotions and their effects.
  Accurate self-assessment: Knowing one's strengths and limits.
  Self-confidence: A strong sense of one's self-worth and capabilities.
  
• Self-Management: Managing ones' internal states, impulses, and resources
  Emotional Self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
  Transparency: Maintaining integrity, acting congruently with one’s values.
  Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change.
  Achievement orientation: Striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
  Initiative: Readiness to act on opportunities.
  Optimism: Persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks.

Social Competence: How We Handle Relationships

• Social Awareness: Awareness of others feelings, needs, and concerns
  Empathy: Sensing others' feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns.
  Organisational awareness: Reading a group's emotional currents and power relationships.
  Service orientation: Anticipating, recognising, and meeting customers' needs.
  
• Relationship Management: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others
  Developing others: Sensing others' development needs and bolstering their abilities.
  Inspirational leadership: Inspiring and guiding individuals and groups.
  Influence: Wielding effective tactics for persuasion.
  Change catalyst: Initiating or managing change.
  Conflict management: Negotiating and resolving disagreements.
  Teamwork & Collaboration: Working with others toward shared goals. Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.

Effective Leadership
Effective leadership development is the key to helping people deliver the results necessary for organisations to sustain results over time. Studies reveal that a tremendous amount of money is wasted on training and development programs that are not tailored to the organisations' needs and include the necessary components to be successful. As a result, top talent is leaving in droves and the cost and effort of replacing them is increasing.

More than 70 percent of all change initiatives fail due to an insufficient focus on people. Research shows that lack of proper attention to people in times of change will lead to increased spending, higher employee turnover and lackluster results. The time lost on inefficient planning related to people issues leads to tremendous losses that cannot be recovered.

With effective leadership, the value of employees' actions can be optimised to realise higher growth, greater shareholder value, and sustainable competitive advantage. The ultimate goal? To create an organisation that can adapt to changing business conditions. Incorporating EI into change management differs from traditional change management approaches, which often fail because they undervalue the importance of people.

EI’s Bottom Line Impact
Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important as IQ plus technical skills. Emotional intelligence is more than 85 percent of what sets star performers from the average.

The higher the level of a job's complexity and authority, the greater the impact of outstanding performance on the bottom-line. Top managers can add or destroy economic value, and the higher the level, the higher the leverage - so the higher the impact. We are talking about "hard" results such as improved profitability from higher productivity, increased sales and lowered costs as well as "softer" results as increased morale and motivation, greater cooperation, lower turnover and loss of talent.

The Value of Emotional Intelligence

Level of Job Complexity	Impact of Emotional Intelligence
Low complexity jobs (like machine operators or clerks)	The top 1 percent produce 3 times more output than the bottom 1 percent
For medium complexity jobs (like sales clerks or mechanics)	The top 1 percent is 12 times more productive than the bottom 1 percent
For high complexity jobs (like insurance sales people, account managers, physicians)	The added value to the top 1 percent is 127 percent greater than the average

From GLNow