Executive Summary

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Defining 'intelligence' in terms of IQ is now an outdated concept, largely because in many realms, IQ is not a predictor of effectiveness and success.

Science's attention has turned from defining "how smart we are" to "how we are smart."

In answer to this, Howard Gardner's research identified that the Human Brain has distinct and descrete processing centres - two of which define Emotional Intelligence:

1. Logical-mathematical (IQ)
2. Verbal-linguistic (IQ)
3. Spatial (IQ)
4. Intrapersonal (Emotional Intelligence)
5. Interpersonal (Emotional Intelligence)
6. Bodily-kinaesthetic
7. Musical
8. Naturalistic
9. Spiritual

Why is Emotional Intelligence important?

Intrapersonal Intelligence is what we need for effective management of ourselves.

Interpersonal Intelligence is what we need for effective management of relationships.

Since everything an organisation needs to do to succeed involves either their employees managing themselves or being effective in relationships with other employees, customers or suppliers, EI is a significant contributor to competitive advantage.

Therefore, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences give people significant advantages in realms where such abilities make the most difference, like sales, management and leadership:

The good news for organisations and their employees is that these intelligences:

1. are changeable, i.e. they can be developed;
2. are measureable, i.e. we can diagnose what needs developing;
3. correlate with performance, i.e. when they are developed, performance increases.

The studies below illustrate these three facets of EI:

Studies

The following is a sample of five studies in the public domain that illustrate the correlation between Emotional Intelligence development and performance:

• Dan Goleman’s research in over 200 companies Worldwide showed that Emotional Intelligence was twice as important as IQ in predicting performance.

• In a study by Yale University, teams with high levels of Emotional Intelligence outperformed teams with low Emotional Intelligence by a margin of two to one.

• American Express took a group of their sales people and developed one aspect of their Emotional Intelligence – emotional resilience.  After six months the trained group had outperformed the control group adding ten percent to the bottom line with the same staff overhead.

• For 515 senior executives analyzed by the search firm Egon Zehnder International, those who were primarily strong in emotional intelligence were more likely to succeed than those who were strongest in either relevant previous experience or IQ. In other words, emotional intelligence was a better predictor of success than either relevant previous experience or high IQ. More specifically, the executive was high in emotional intelligence in 74 percent of the successes and only in 24 percent of the failures. The study included executives in Latin America, Germany, and Japan, and the results were almost identical in all three cultures.

• When two of our Principal Consultants worked with Skandia Group's L&D team to develop the Emotional Intelligence of managers from departments across the business, Skandia's own measures showed between 10 and 32 percent increase in the effectiveness of those managers over the three month programme. (The Skandia Group shared their findings with the general public during the CAEI Conference in 2006).

Related links

> Emotional Intelligence and Business
> Individual EI Development
> Team developement
> Organisational development