Greater EQ is more desirable than Higher IQ
Greater EQ is more desirable than Higher IQ
January 20, 2021 1 Comment on Greater EQ is more desirable than Higher IQBefore anyone goes guns blazing at me, this blog’s context keeps in mind today’s need for organizations to hire for leadership roles. If you want to remain a task-oriented individual contributor in your role, then perhaps your IQ, dedication, and ability to meet deadlines would further you in your career. However, if you see yourself as a potential leader managing small or large teams, you may want to deep dive into your emotional intelligence.
Research shows that a stronger EQ, as opposed to a higher IQ, is an indicator of your leadership success. While the jury is still out on whether one can improve one’s IQ through practice, EQ can be developed with deliberate practice. Many business and leadership gurus advocate that one should start working on their emotional intelligence early on in their careers.
Here’s what the experts say:
“Organizations give Emotional Intelligence (EI) tremendous importance. There is the widespread usage of Psychometric tools as a part of the talent acquisition process for evaluating EI. Ultimately, it’s all about the personality match between the employer and a potential candidate… EI has been inevitable, especially for leadership roles. Remember, skills are easy to acquire, but behavior/attitude is tough to mold.”
NEERU MADAN, MANAGING DIRECTOR AND GENERAL MANAGER, CLINICAL TRIALS DIVISION, THERMO FISHER SCIENTIFIC
“In today’s world when there is uncertainty at every step, the need to hire individuals who can adapt themselves in an agile manner, and develop themselves with the organization, has become all the more important. Typically organizations run assessment and psychometric tests for EQ. There are other methods like behaviour event interviews for these assessments. We look at self-awareness, emotions, self-management, awareness of strengths and weaknesses, social skills, and social awareness by giving situational questions. Often it is ‘how we manage ourselves’ that impacts how we perform at work. EQ today is one of the most important traits to be assessed in any individual at the time of hiring.”
PAROMITA DEB ARENG, SENIOR HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER, ROCHE
What is EQ:
The ability to recognize, understand and manage our own emotions, clubbed with the ability to recognize, understand, and influence others’ emotions. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, who worked extensively in this field, defined emotional intelligence through these five elements:
- Self-awareness
- Self-regulation
- Motivation
- Empathy
- Social skills
At the time of hiring, various assessment frameworks evaluate you for most of the above-listed emotional intelligence aspects.
Below is a 5 steps EQ boosting plan that you can practice:
I have worked towards enhancing my EQ throughout my career. Some of it was through the training interventions, but most parts were deliberate practice.
Self Awareness: We bottle up a lot of emotions without realizing that we are doing it. These bottled up emotions end up reflecting in our everyday behaviour. The best way to recognize this is to consciously be aware of them as we experience these emotions.
As the first step to emotional intelligence is to aware of your own emotions. Check-in with your emotions every day; if it helps you, check in every couple of hours. You may maintain a diary to write down how you feel, and examples could be 2:00 pm angry – 4:00 pm calm – 6:00 pm excited. This would make you aware of the emotions you may have experienced in one day, whether there were many or one emotion throughout the day.
Identifying Emotional Triggers: As you check-in with your emotions, you must write down the reason, even if briefly, against each of the moods. Like:
2:00 pm angry (Team missed the deadline)
4:00 pm calm (Had a satisfactory client call)
6:00 pm excited (Was called into work on a new project)
These reasons would help you identify your trigger points against each mood. You must be most aware of those that trigger negative emotions or emotional outbursts in you. For an emotionally intelligent individual, it is important to understand what incites strong emotions within them.
Recognizing and Accepting your Emotions: Once you have mastered the art of self-awareness you would want to reflect on what these emotions mean to you. This will equip you to recognise your own emotional state and preempt any trigger points during the day.
One of the biggest gifts you can give yourself is to accept your emotions. This will dramatically improve your relationship with yourself. You would know why are you happy, sad, angry, thoughtful, reflective, excited, and a multitude of things at any given point in time. Being aware your own self empowers you to work towards the other aspects of emotional intelligence.
Empathy: Do you like to speak with someone or unburden your worries in the company of someone who understands what you are going through? I do.
Empathy is one of the most sought after skills in leaders, and empathy is a huge part of being emotionally intelligent. I believe that the first step is to be empathetic with self. Some of us over-achievers hold ourselves to impossibly high standards. While I believe it is important to always look forward to improving oneself, I also strongly believe that we need to know when we are being unfair to ourselves. This will help us preserve our mental and emotional health.
Understanding others’ point of view or state of mind is imperative to an evolved emotional intelligence. This will happen once you start looking at actions and reactions, including a shift in performance from the individual’s perspective in question. Ask the why. Understand why would a team member suddenly be disconnected or have problems in performance. Practice empathizing with self and others.
Understanding Body Language and Non-verbal communication: After tuning-in to your own emotions, triggers and being able to be empathetic with your and others’ emotions, you must start noticing body language and non-verbal communication. There is a lot of content online to help you with understanding the nuances of these. We must be aware of the importance of these subtle indicators that may defy the words that someone is speaking with you.
The ability to understand these nuanced non-verbal signs could take some time and effort, but it is definitely worth the investment.
Respond, don’t react: We all react to situations. Especially those that hit our sore points. Now that you are armed with some of the best tools to improve your EQ. The next time you are in a tricky situation, take a moment, check-in with your emotion, check for any triggers, empathize with yourself and the opposite person, check for those subtle signs and then respond. As you reach this step, you are equipped to manage your emotions. This is the most important trait of strong leaders. Leaders with high EQ manage their emotions and choose not to blow their tops off when things go against their plan. They are considerate, deliberate, and ultimately calm enough to offer a solution.
All leaders are meant to lead. Teams are looking up to them to find solutions. A leader with a high EQ will lead a secure, motivated, and agile team. Due to the lack of structured training and awareness about this much-needed skill, many leaders struggle with understanding the nuances of leading people. Many organizations have identified this gap and are developing programs to address this need to develop stronger leadership.
1 Comment
Very appropriate article