Daniel Goleman: Understanding Emotional Intelligence

  "Anyone can get angry, that's easy. But to be
  angry with the right person to the right degree
  at the right time for the right purpose and
  in the right way, that's not so easy."

This quote from Aristotle implies that intelligence involves being intelligent with our emotions.

Exploring emotional intelligence through painting

Research Into Emotional Intelligence

There has been increasing research into 'emotional intelligence' during the 20th century and recently the focus has been on trying to understand why society, particularly in America, seems to have so many social problems among young people.

The questions that sociologists and psychologists have been asking are, 'What makes people behave in the way they do?' and more importantly 'How might we be able to improve the way they behave?'

Answers to these questions have all sorts of tangible applications in society such as:

• How we educate young people
• How we treat people with mental illnesses
• How we counsel people who have suffered trauma
• How we deal with people in the prison system

Implications For Business

Increasingly in the last few decades there has been an additional application for the research, which is to look at how we organise the workplace to help people and their businesses perform better. This has come from business people determined to explore any ways they can find to give them a competitive edge.

They have asked the following questions:

• If lack of emotional intelligence damages people's lives and harms the whole fabric of our society so extensively, is it possible that it is limiting my business without me knowing it?
• What might we achieve if we were somehow able to increase our collective emotional intelligence?
• What would an emotionally intelligent organisation, full of emotionally intelligent teams, consisting of emotionally intelligent people look like?
• How would such an organisation be performing?

Data is emerging from business which is producing a growing number of examples suggesting that the intelligence with which individuals manage the emotional side of their work seems to be the key to their success in a given situation - the factor which marks them above the rest.

Qualifications As The Threshold Requirement

At the heart of this work is the idea that while your expertise and your qualifications are important to success, they are not the whole story, but they are simply threshold requirements for entry into a certain line of work.

In any given field you are unlikely to be considered for a job unless you have:

• This qualification
• This level of expertise
• And, by implication a certain IQ

However, what the concept of emotional intelligence says is that once through the door your qualifications count for little. Everyone has achieved the required threshold. Something else comes into play in determining success.

That 'something else', consists of a range of emotional competencies, will help you to perform well, to get the best out of yourself, and crucially, out of other people.

It is the core proposition of the emotional intelligence school that life success requires a combination of an average level of traditional intelligence for your profession combined with above average levels of emotional intelligence.

It is your level of emotional intelligence which makes the difference between success and non-success amongst people with equal or similar IQ, qualifications and expertise.