Are your co-workers always bothering you? They may have low 'emotional intelligence'

Daniel Goleman has an outspoken warning for job seekers in 2022 and beyond: It’s not enough to just be smart.

Dr Goleman, an American writer and psychologist, has spent decades touting the importance of ’emotional intelligence’ in the workplace and other areas of life.

And it seems that companies and organizations have caught up with him.

“[In the mid-1990s] someone said to me, ‘you know, you can’t use the word emotion in a business context’. Today, it’s very, very different,” he told ABC’s RN’s Future Tense.

But what exactly is emotional intelligence or EI? And is it just talking about future work or ‘must-have skills’?

What is emotional intelligence?

There are several definitions of emotional intelligence, but it boils down to understanding your emotions, understanding the emotions of those around you, and acting accordingly.

Dr Goleman, who put the term on the map with his 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, says it has four main components.

Dr Daniel Goleman says we can all exercise our emotional intelligence. (Getty Images: Daniel Zuchnik)

First, self-awareness. Or as Dr Goleman puts it: “Knowing what you feel, why you feel it, how it makes you think and want to act, how it shapes your perception.” So, for example, being able to label emotions like anger and find out the causes behind them.

The second part is “using that information to manage your emotions, positively. To stay motivated, stay focused, adapt and agile, instead of being rigid and locked in.

The third part involves connecting with other people’s emotions — practicing empathy. This is “understanding how other people feel without them telling you with words, because people don’t tell us with words, they tell us with tone of voice and facial expressions, and so on”.

And finally – relationship management or “put it all together to have an effective relationship”.

Dr Goleman also makes a key point: It’s not just about being nice.

“There is a difference between being good and become type. And that is very important to understand. You may be good just not to make waves and hang out – but that doesn’t mean that you have to help.”

Why is that important?

Amol Khadikar is a program manager at the Capgemini Research Institute and is based in India.

“[Emotional intelligence] increasingly seen as a very valuable thing, and its importance has only increased in recent years,” Khadikar said.

Khadikar and his organization tried to measure this with a survey that asked 750 executives and 1,500 non-supervisory employees worldwide about emotional intelligence.

It found 74 percent of executives and 58 percent of non-supervisory employees believed that EI would be a “must have” skill.

Khadikar said EI will become more important in the coming years due to one continuous development — as automation and AI see more manual or routine jobs being replaced by machines, jobs involving interpersonal skills will be the dominant occupations in the future.

“We [already] seeing more and more people demand to have skills that require relationship building, the more work clients are facing,” he said.

“And [the survey] found that the demand for emotional intelligence skills will double on average about six times over the next three to five years.”

AI and automation are constantly changing the types of work we humans do.(Unsplash: Israel Andrade)

Khadikar and his team also built a financial model to assess the potential benefits of investing in emotional intelligence training — looking at outcomes such as revenue, costs, productivity, and reductions in the workplace.

“We clearly find that there is basically a upside, we find that an investment of about $3 million in the average organization has the potential to generate an additional profit of about $6.8 million over the next three years … And this is a conservative scenario.”

He also cites a study conducted by French personal care company L’Oreal that found that employees with high EI skills sell more than any other sales force annually by about $91,000, resulting in an increase in net income of more than $2.5 million.

Supported by training?

Dr Goleman said when he wrote his book in 1995, there was little, if any, data around the benefits of high emotional intelligence.

“Now we know it’s clear,” said Dr Goleman.

“In the workplace, it turns out that emotionally intelligent workers perform better, they are more engaged in what they are doing. Emotionally intelligent leaders get better productivity from people, and people like to work for them,” he said. .

But when it comes to precise how concept espoused, it’s more than a patchwork.

“Most organizations will support some interest in [emotional intelligence] — some do well, some don’t,” says Dr Goleman.

He said while “I think in [an executive level]many people have the luxury to train [on emotional intelligence]training is not widespread beyond executive roles.

This is a point that Pak Khadikar supports.

“[In our study] we actually found that only about 17 percent of organizations do emotional intelligence training for their non-supervisor employees and only about 32 percent do it for middle management employees,” he said.

And Dr Goleman says at worst, some organizations are just lip service to the idea: Promoting EI but not putting it into practice.

“It’s the same with ‘greenwashing’, where a company or a spokesperson for a company will say, ‘yes, we do this, we advocate emotional intelligence’… But if you look at their actual track record, you realize it’s BS, That is not true.”

EI at work post-COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional workplaces and as cases spike across Australia, some employers are advising their staff to work from home once again.

So what does emotional intelligence look like in a connected workplace via Teams or Zoom? Or more broadly, in an increasingly digital and fragmented professional environment?

Dr Goleman says the workplace needs to ensure one-on-one time is still available, as our emotional well-being can take a hit if we are all completely isolated from one another.

“But one-on-one can be digital too. The idea is that it’s personal, you talk to the person about themselves, not just about the task at hand, which tends to happen in group calls,” he said.

“So I think it’s important to balance isolation, the specialization that can take place in digital media, with having people-to-people. [time] either in person or online.”

How do you increase your emotional intelligence?

Dr Goleman says that we can all increase our emotional intelligence.

Read more from Future Tense

“It’s really about changing habits,” he said.

He says the most common manifestation of low emotional intelligence in the workplace is listening badly, so, for example, interrupting people or taking over conversations too quickly.

“If you want to change it, it’s a habit. You’ve practiced it a thousand times.”

Dr Goleman said: “First of all, note that this is a moment I can change. Second, you have to have a different repertoire — a new habit to replace it. [Then] practice it at every opportunity that occurs naturally.”

“When you do that kind of learning, it changes the brain, the circuitry for that sequence of behaviors, picks up new habits, and you do it automatically after a while,” he says.

“It does take a little work, it takes a little persistence, but our data shows it’s very possible.”

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