{"id":10,"date":"2021-12-22T00:01:13","date_gmt":"2021-12-22T00:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mackellarconsultinggroup.com\/?p=10"},"modified":"2021-12-22T21:51:15","modified_gmt":"2021-12-22T21:51:15","slug":"what-exactly-is-emotional-intelligence-and-why-should-i-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mackellarconsultinggroup.com\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"What Exactly is Emotional Intelligence and Why Should I Care?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

You may have heard the term \u201cemotional intelligence\u201d or EQ and wondered what exactly do we mean by it?   In addition, you may have wondered is it really important, or just the latest fad in leadership literature? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over 25 years ago, in his groundbreaking work Emotional Intelligence \u2013 Why It Can Matter More than IQ,<\/a> Daniel Goleman defined EQ as \u201cthe ability to identify, assess and control one\u2019s own emotions, the emotions of others and that of groups\u201d.  He then went on to share his findings of how these \u201csoft skills\u201d were better predictors of success than IQ or technical skills.  He followed this up in 1998 with an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled \u201cWhat Makes a Leader<\/a>\u201d.  In it he shared that truly effective leaders are also characterized by having a high degree of emotional intelligence.  It\u2019s not that IQ and technical skills are not important \u2013 they are often the \u201ctickets to entry\u201d in many organizations.  However, you need more than just IQ and technical skills to advance in the world of work.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can probably all think of individuals who were experts in their field but were volatile and could not interact well with others.  As a result, they had suboptimal performance and were less successful than they might have been.  Goleman, in fact, found in studying nearly 200 large, global companies that emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as technical skills and IQ in predicting job success at all levels in organizations.  When looking at senior leadership positions, the criticality of emotional intelligence was even more pronounced.  Goleman shares that \u201cwhen I compared star performers with average ones in senior leadership positions, nearly 90% of the difference in their profiles was attributable to emotional intelligence factors rather than cognitive factors.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goleman then went on to describe what some of these emotional intelligence factors consisted of:<\/p>\n\n\n\n