Daniel Goleman has a stark warning for job seekers in 2022 and beyond: It’s no longer enough to be smart.
Dr. Goleman, an American author and psychologist, has spent decades promoting the importance of “emotional intelligence” in the workplace and other areas of life.
And it seems that companies and organizations have caught up.
“[In the mid-1990s] someone said to me: ‘you know, you can’t use the word emotion in a business context’. It’s very, very different today,” he tells ABC RN’s Future Tense.
But what exactly is emotional intelligence or EI? And is it just more work talk or “a must-have skill” of the future?
What is emotional intelligence?
There are various 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 work on our emotional intelligence. (Getty Images: Daniel Zuchnik)
First, self-knowledge. Or as Dr. Goleman says, “Knowing what you feel, why you feel it, how it makes you think and want to act, how it shapes your perceptions.” So, for example, being able to label an emotion like anger and knowing the causes behind it.
The second part is “to use this information to manage emotions, in a positive way. To stay motivated, to stay focused, to be adaptable and agile, instead of rigid and closed off.”
The third part involves connecting with other people’s emotions: practicing empathy. It’s “understanding how another person feels without them telling you in words, because people don’t tell us in words, they tell us in their tone of voice and facial expressions and so on.”
And finally, relationship management or “putting it all together for effective relationships.”
Dr. Goleman also makes a key point: It’s not just about being nice.
“There’s a difference between being nice and being nice. And it’s really important to get along. It might be nice not to make waves and get along, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily helping.”
Why does it matter?
Amol Khadikar is a Program Director at the Capgemini Research Institute and is based in India.
“[Emotional intelligence] it is increasingly seen as something very valuable and its importance has only increased in the last couple of years,” says Khadikar.
Khadikar and his organization tried to measure this with a survey that asked 750 executives and 1,500 non-supervisory employees around the world about emotional intelligence.
It found that 74% of executives and 58% of non-supervisory employees believe that EI will become a “must-have” skill.
Khadikar says EI will become more important in the coming years due to an ongoing development: As automation and AI see more manual or routine jobs replaced by machines, jobs that involve interpersonal skills will dominate. of the future
“We [already] We see more and more demand for people to have skills that require relationship-building, more customer-oriented work,” he says.
“I [the survey] found that the demand for emotional intelligence skills will increase sixfold on average in the next three to five years.”
AI and automation continue to change the types of jobs humans do. (Unsplash: Israel Andrade)
Khadikar and his team also created a financial model to assess a potential benefit of investing in emotional intelligence training, looking at outcomes such as revenue, costs, productivity and workplace attrition.
“We clearly found that there is essentially an upside, we found that an investment of about $3 million in an average organization can result in an incremental gain of about $6.8 million over the next three years … And this was a conservative scenario.”
He also cited a study by the French personal care company L’Oreal that found that employees with high EI skills outsold other salespeople by about $91,000 annually, resulting in a net increase in revenue of more than $2.5 million.
Do you have a trained backup?
Dr. Goleman says that when he wrote his book in 1995, there was little, if any, data on the benefits of high emotional intelligence.
“Now we know it’s clear,” says Dr. Goleman.
“In the workplace, it turns out that workers with emotional intelligence perform better, are more engaged in what they do. Leaders who have emotional intelligence get better productivity out of people, and people like working for them “, he says.
But when it comes to how exactly the concept is adopted, it’s much more of a patchwork.
“Most organizations will show some interest [emotional intelligence] – Some do well, some don’t,” says Dr. Goleman.
He says as I “think about [an executive level]many people have the luxury of being coached [on emotional intelligence],” training is not widespread outside of executive roles.
It is a point supported by Mr. Khadikar.
“[In our study] In fact, we found that only 17% of organizations provide emotional intelligence training for their non-supervisory employees and only 32% do so for middle management employees,” he says.
And Dr. At worst, Goleman says, some organizations only pay lip service to the idea: promote EI but not practice it.
“It’s the same as with ‘greenwashing,’ where a company or a spokesperson for a company will say, ‘yes, we do this, we stand for emotional intelligence’… But if you look at their actual track record, you realize that it’s BS, it’s not true.”
EI in a post-COVID workplace
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional workplaces, and as cases rise in Australia, some employers are advising their staff to return to working from home.
So what does emotional intelligence look like in a connected workplace via Teams or Zoom? Or, more broadly, in increasingly digitized and fragmented professional environments?
Dr Goleman says workplaces need to make sure that individual time still exists, as our emotional well-being can suffer if we’re all completely isolated from each other.
“But one-on-one can also be digital. The idea is that it’s personal, you’re talking to the person about themselves, not just the task at hand, which tends to happen in group calls,” he says
“So I think it’s important to balance the isolation, the specialization that can happen in digital media, with having a person-to-person. [time] is that in person or online.”
How do you improve your emotional intelligence?
Dr. Goleman says we can all improve our emotional intelligence.
Read more about Future Tense
“It’s really about changing habits,” he says.
He says the most common manifestation of low emotional intelligence in the workplace is poor listening, for example, interrupting people or taking over a conversation too soon.
“If you want to change that, that’s a habit. You’ve practiced it thousands of times.”
Dr. Goleman says, “First, keep in mind that this is a time I can change. Second, you have to have a different repertoire, a new habit to replace it. [Then] practice it at every opportunity that naturally occurs.”
“When you do that kind of learning, it changes the brain, the circuitry of that sequence of behavior, you get the new habit, and you do it automatically after a while,” he says.
“It takes a little bit of work, a little bit of persistence, but our data shows that it’s very possible.”
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