Emotion sickness
Has the Emotional Intelligence business spun out of control?Emotional Intelligence, or EI, has been a sacred cow in HR since the idea took flight with Daniel Goleman’s seminal book on the subject in 1995.
Everybody can be smart in different ways, Goleman soothes, and emotional intelligence is ‘people smart’. And when Goleman talks, people listen – he is the eighth most followed thought leader on LinkedIn, with two million followers. You know you’ve made it when you have more followers than Barack Obama.
Emotional Intelligence, it’s argued, makes you a conflict resolver, a teamwork creator, an understander of human problems. EI and its technical measurement, EQ, are equal to, even superior, to IQ. A better predictor of job success. Relationship success. Happiness. Hell, people with higher EQ are just about better in every way.
EQ skyrocketed into mainstream acceptance because it satisfied a mainstream grievance: that people who work with words and people are somehow less intelligent than those who work with equations and slide rules.
Here are four beliefs that you can find in pretty well any discussion about EQ:
- Having a high EQ means you are a kind and social person
- You can develop and raise your EQ at any time
- Testing for EQ is a useful metric in candidate assessment
- Having high EQ makes you more likely to succeed than other qualities
Most people generally accept all or the majority of these claims. However, the evidence for each of them is less than perfect, as we’ll see later.
So, what is it?
Emotional Intelligence can perhaps best be summed up as the understanding of emotions. A person high in EI will be able to recognise their own emotions and those of others, be able to keep their emotions in check, and be able to relate to the emotions of others. Essentially, EI is empathy with a slice of self-awareness on the side.
This is as much as EI covers. It does not incorporate a sunny disposition and a steadfast determination, contrary to what many seem to claim.
Using this definition to guide us, we can look at those commonly held beliefs about EQ and try to pry the truth from the fiction.
Having a high EQ means you are a kind and social person
EQ is a measure. Having a high IQ does not automatically make you a good person, and the same is likewise true of EQ.
Indeed, having high EQ gives you greater scope to manipulate others to your own ends. A good liar will have a high EQ, for example, and women with a high EQ actually tend to display higher levels of ‘delinquent behaviour’ – recorded arrests, injuries through misadventure, drug use, and so on.
You may also possess a high EQ and be depressed and lonely. Having a high EQ protects you from some sources of stress, but it can just as easily give you more sources of stress – for example, you might find the behaviour of others more affecting.
EQ can help with sociability, of course. Socialising goes more smoothly when you understand the emotions of others, and being social in general means you are happier and in better mental health. There have also been tentative links drawn between high EQ and the development of moral attitudes in young people.
But while a person with high EQ may rarely put a foot wrong at a soirée, it is not a guarantee that they’re actually a nice person – just that they’re a person who knows how to act nice.
You can raise and develop your EQ at any time
In many ways this is the crux of the issue. Consultants around the world make varying claims as to what having a high EQ will do for you, but all insist that you can actually raise your EQ if you try hard enough.
Travis Bradberry is the President of TalentSmart (the largest EI training agency in the world) and co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0. He told us:
There’s a great deal of research that shows emotional intelligence scores improve with training. We’ve seen first hand how individuals who go through emotional intelligence training programs increase not just their emotional intelligence, but also their job performance.
He directed us to research by Richard Boyatzis into possible long-term gains in EQ after training.
We followed the lead, and Boyatzis’ preliminary studies do indeed suggest that in the short term you can raise your EQ quite effectively. These changes can persist over time – in perfect conditions, improvements can survive for up to seven years. Boyatzis, however, concludes that in general improvement deteriorates a lot faster than that.
The elephant in the room is that most of the leading lights in Emotional Intelligence have built careers and even businesses around the concept. They are on a worldwide circuit of leadership conferences and co-operative book publishing – Richard Boyatzis included.
This doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. But it does mean we should keep our sceptical hats firmly on our heads. EQ is more than just a psychological theory. It’s also a product, and it is sold in packages to organisations for substantial amounts of cash.
Yes, it can’t be denied that aspects of human behaviour can be changed through therapy and coaching. CBT, or Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is one example, and mindfulness training is another.
But these examples focus on defeating ingrained thought patterns and creating coping strategies for problems, and require constant maintenance to succeed. EQ training is usually a short-term course, and often taught by people without qualifications.
Perhaps the best solution is to treat EQ as a skill. It can be refined, but unlike most skills a poor environment can quickly erode it. And you naturally tend to revert back to your baseline EQ over time.
Anybody considering employing EQ training should note that improvement shown will be temporary. And remember that, as yet, there is a significant lack of relevant research into what increases your EI and why. It should also be borne in mind that not everybody can receive such improvements: some people are just more able to be coached than others.
Testing for EQ is a useful metric in candidate assessment
The fact that narcissists and sociopaths can score as incredibly empathetic undermines the claim that EQ tests make good assessment tools.
The only thing needed to pass many of these tests is an understanding of what people want to hear, or over-confidence in your own good attributes. You’ll often hear it stated that 90% of “top” CEOs were measured as having a high EQ. The only surprising thing in that statistic is that 10% of the CEOs actually took the test honestly.
As anyone who has ever regretted anything at all will know, knowing the right thing to do is a million miles from doing it. Nearly all of us know enough about living well and how to be nice to be beatified as actual saints if we followed through. But we don’t, of course.
There are several different varieties of EQ test, but they all rest on a core of self-assessment questions: how would you act in a certain situation, how do you feel about this, is this an appropriate response to this situation, and that sort of thing. Unlike an IQ test that involves problems that you either can or cannot solve, EQ tests rely on honesty and rote knowledge.
This makes the deployment of candidate EI testing a risky strategy. You possibly do want candidates with high EQ, but the tests themselves may not be the best way of identifying them. If a candidate answers a test with complete honesty and scores well, but another similarly qualified candidate lies through their teeth and scores perfectly – you will be drawn to the latter. But really, you want the honest candidate.
Assessments may be useful extra information but they are no replacement for in-depth and in-person interviewing.
Having high EQ makes you more likely to succeed than other qualities
Finally, the most pervasive claim about EQ is that it is a predictor of success in one’s job.
This seems to make sense, based on casual assumptions. It’s always been who you know, not what you know. Being well liked serves you better than being a smartarse.
Statistics advertising how much of your success it predicts vary wildly, though. Some sources claim it to be an eye-watering 80%.
According to Gerald Matthews, a professor of experimental psychology:
Recent research has made important strides towards understanding the usefulness of EI in the workplace. However, the ratio of hyperbole to hard evidence is high, with over-reliance in the literature on expert opinion, anecdote, case studies, and unpublished proprietary surveys.
Supporting this contention, there are a number of highly contradictory studies on what matters most in predicting job success. You can read that salespeople high in EQ more than doubly outperform their low EQ counterparts, and that L’Oreal have found that employees with higher EQ are worth it (sorry) because they sell better and turnover less regularly.
Yet other studies have also shown salespeople with high EQ and low IQ underperform in comparison to salespeople with low EQ and high IQ. A large-scale meta-analysis of EI and workplace success found a correlation of less than 1% between success and high EI.
So what’s going on? How can tests and studies ostensibly measuring the exact same thing keep coming up with completely opposite results?
Well, as we said at the start, EI is defined fluidly outside academic circles. Since it is sold as something of a magical cure-all elixir, many measurements of it throw in a few ingredients such as confidence, motivation, and optimism in order to beef up study results.
Emotional Intelligence will probably help job success in certain fields, especially those that involve relating to other human beings regularly.
But in other jobs, it may actually detract. A soldier with high emotional intelligence isn’t ideal, nor is it for any job that requires firm focus without much human interaction.
It’s a complete nonsense to apply a percentage as to how helpful EQ is to your success – that’s just a sales tactic. Consider EI the WD40 of the workplace: slightly useful for a thousand little problems and greasing the wheels of human interaction. However in the end, it’s no silver bullet, and not any kind of replacement for IQ or technical skills.
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