What's Your EQ? Smart Skills for Leaders

I once had a boss whose IQ must have been off the charts-- he was brilliant technically-- yet he didn't have a single relationship that he hadn't shredded.  I felt like my job was to prevent others from having contact with him or to clean up afterwards.  It was in this job that I truly began to appreciate what is known as emotional intelligence (EI).

Although the idea of emotional intelligence goes back to Charles Darwin, I first remember hearing the term in 1995 when Daniel Goleman authored the internationally best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence.

Daniel Goleman's model focuses on EI as a wide range of competencies and skills that drive leadership performance. Goleman's model outlines five main EI constructs:

1. Self-awareness – the ability to know one's emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values and goals and recognize their impact on others while using intuition to guide decisions.
2. Self-regulation – involves controlling or redirecting one's disruptive emotions and impulses and adapting to changing circumstances.
3. Social skill – managing relationships to move people in the desired direction
4. Empathy - considering other people's feelings especially when making decisions and
5. Motivation - being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement.

Goleman asserts that people are born with a general emotional intelligence that determines their potential for learning emotional competencies to manage anger, fear and grief, for example.   Although Goleman's model of EI has been criticized as "pop psychology," it's hard to deny these skills are important in relationships and as a leader. Many of the components appear in OPM's leadership competency model under Flexibility, Resilience, Integrity, Service Motivation, Cultural Awareness, Team Building, Conflict Management, Influencing/Negotiating, Political Savvy, Interpersonal Skills, and Accountability.

Goleman also developed the argument that non-cognitive skills can matter as much as I.Q. for workplace success in Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998, Bantam Books), and for leadership effectiveness in Primal Leadership (2001, Harvard Business School Press). Goleman's most recent best-seller is Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (2006, Bantam Books).

Also see "What Makes A Leader" by Daniel Goleman, best of Harvard Business Review 1998.