The EQ Edge

Emotional Intelligence and Your Success

Steven J. Stein, Howard E. Book

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780470952641
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Leadership

REVISED AND UPDAT ED WITH NEW RESEARCH INTO EQ AND PERSONAL AND CAREER SUCCESS

What is the formula for success at your job? As a spouse? A parent? A Little League baseball coach or behind the bench of a minor hockey team?

What does it take to get ahead? To separate yourself from the competition? To lead a less stressful and happier existence? To be fulfilled in personal and professional pursuits?

What is the most important dynamic of your makeup? Is it your A) intelligence quotient? or B) emotional quotient?

If you picked "A", you are partly correct. Your intelligence quotient can be a predictor of things such as academic achievement. But your IQ is fixed and unchangeable. The real key to personal and professional growth is your emotional intelligence quotient, which you can nurture and develop by learning more about EQ from the international bestseller The EQ Edge.

Authors Steven J. Stein and Howard E. Book show you how the dynamic of emotional intelligence works. By understanding EQ, you can build more meaningful relationships, boost your confidence and optimism, and respond to challenges with enthusiasm-all of which are essential ingredients of success.

The EQ Edge offers fascinating-and sometimes surprising-insights into what it takes to be a top law-enforcement officer, lawyer, school principal, student, doctor, dentist or CEO. You will learn what the top EQ factors are across many different kinds of jobs, from business managers and customer service representatives to HR professionals and public servants.

The EQ Edge will help you determine which personnel are the right fit for job opportunities and who among your staff are the most promising leaders and drivers of your business. And because all of us have other roles-parent, spouse, caregiver to aging parents, neighbor, friend- The EQ Edge also describes how everyone can be more successful in these relationships.

"Finally, a practical and usable guide to what emotional intelligence is all about. This book peels the onion on what EQ really is and teaches the reader to assess their own EQ and how to increase it. This is the holy grail for career success."— Michael Feiner, Professor, Columbia Graduate School of Business and author of The Feiner Points of Leadership

Part I

The EQ Explosion

Chapter 1

Exploring Emotional Intelligence

Redefining Intelligence and Achievement

Do you remember your high-school valedictorian? How about the class brain, who got straight As and seemed destined to follow a path of uninterrupted triumph? Chances are, you don't know what happened to these youthful academic achievers, but you can probably name one or two classmates who went on to chalk up major (and maybe highly unexpected) success. Perhaps they created and now head companies of their own or became prominent and well-respected leaders in their communities. But who'd have thought it at the time? Back then, they were busy socializing, playing guitar in the basement, or tinkering with mysterious spare parts in the garage. Maybe they just squeaked through school with passing grades. Their stars shone brightly only when they went out into the real world.

It is scarcely a revelation that not everyone's talents fit the school system's rather restrictive model for measuring achievement. History is full of brilliant, successful men and women who failed miserably or underachieved in the classroom, and whose teachers and guidance counselors relegated them to life on the margin. But despite this convincing body of evidence, society has persisted in believing that success in school equals success in life—or, at the very least, in the workplace. Now that assumption is being overturned.

Most of us know in our bones that there's a world of difference between school smarts and street smarts—between braininess and general savvy. The first has its place, but the second, while more intangible, is much more interesting. It's the ability to tune in to the world, to read situations and connect with others while taking charge of your own life. Now, thanks to the EQ-i, undeniable evidence has shown a close link between this ability—which has relatively little to do with intellect per se—and long-term success.

What is success? Let's define it as the ability to set and achieve your personal and professional goals, whatever they may be.

That sounds simple, but of course it's not. An individual's definition of success will quite naturally ebb and flow over time. We want different things and pursue different goals simply because we age, accumulating experience and shouldering responsibilities. Youthful idealism makes room for mature reality and the need for compromise; different imperatives or ingredients assume different intensities, depending on the particular role we're attempting to fill—for example, that of worker, spouse, or parent. What is our main concern at any given moment? To advance our career, to enjoy a happy marital relationship, or to offer loving support and guidance to our children? Perhaps we're faced with a serious illness, beside which all else pales in comparison, and success becomes a matter of survival. So much for supposedly simple definitions. But the basic aim on which most of us would agree—to succeed on our own terms (or on terms acceptable to us) in a wide variety of situations—remains a constant.

That's more than can be said for society's ideas of success, which are changing as we speak. Driven by the hot pursuit of science and technology, 20th-century culture long emphasized cognitive intelligence as the cornerstone for progress—just as financial reward has long been considered the primary result of that intelligence. The trouble is that sometimes this equation hasn't worked out as planned, as seen in the question: if you're so smart, why aren't you rich? Only in recent years have we begun to appreciate the powerful links between emotional intelligence and a greater, more satisfying, and more well-rounded definition of success which embraces the workplace, marriage and personal relationships, social popularity, and spiritual and physical well-being.

If you stop to think about your friends and family members—in fact, about your co-workers and the people you encounter in all sorts of day-to-day settings—whom do you consider to be the most successful? Who seem to enjoy the fullest and happiest lives? Are they necessarily the most intellectually or analytically gifted of individuals?

More likely they have other characteristics, other skills, which underlie their capacity to achieve what they desire. The more emotional and social sense you have, the easier it is to go efficiently and productively about your life. After decades of working in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, we've concluded that it's at least as important to be emotionally and socially intelligent as it is to be cognitively or analytically intelligent.

What Are the Differences between IQ and EQ?

Simply put, IQ is a measure of an individual's intellectual, analytical, logical, and rational abilities. As such, it's concerned with verbal, spatial, visual, and mathematical skills. It gauges how readily we learn new things; focus on tasks and exercises; retain and recall objective information; engage in a reasoning process; manipulate numbers; think abstractly as well as analytically; and solve problems by the application of prior knowledge. If you have a high IQ—the average is 100—you're well equipped to pass all sorts of examinations with flying colors, and (not incidentally) to score well on IQ tests.

All that's fine, yet everyone knows people who could send an IQ test sky-high, but who can't quite make good in either their personal or working lives. They rub others the wrong way; success just doesn't seem to pan out. Much of the time, they can't figure out why.

The reason why is that they're sorely lacking in emotional intelligence, which has been defined in several different ways. Reuven Bar-On called it “an array of non-cognitive capabilities, competencies, and skills that influence one's ability to succeed in coping with environmental demands and pressures.”1 Peter Salovey and Jack Mayer, who created the term “emotional intelligence” (as it applies today), describe it as “the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional meanings, and to reflectively regulate emotions in ways that promote emotional and intellectual growth.”2 In developing the EQ-i 2.0, emotional intelligence has been defined as “a set of emotional and social skills that influence the way we perceive and express ourselves, develop and maintain social relationships, cope with challenges, and use emotional information in an effective and meaningful way.”3

In other words, it's a set of skills that enables us to make our way in a complex world—the personal, social, and survival aspects of overall intelligence, and the elusive common sense and sensitivity that are essential to effective daily functioning. In everyday language emotional intelligence is what we commonly refer to as “street smarts,” or that uncommon ability we label “common sense.” It has to do with our capacity to objectively assess our strengths, as well as be open to viewing and challenging our limitations, mistaken assumptions, unacknowledged biases, and shortsighted/self-defeating beliefs. Emotional intelligence also encompasses our ability to read the political and social environment, and landscape them; to intuitively grasp what others want and need, what their strengths and weaknesses are; to remain unruffled by stress; and to be engaging and the kind of person others want to be around.

A Brief History of Emotional Intelligence

How did emotional intelligence evolve? Plainly, it evolved along with humankind; the need to cope, to adapt and to get along with others was crucial to the survival of the early hunter-gatherer societies. The human brain reflects this undeniable fact. Sophisticated mapping techniques have recently confirmed that many thought processes pass through the brain's emotional centers as they take the physiological journey that converts outside information into individual action or response.

On the one hand, then, emotional intelligence is as old as time. In the 1870s, Charles Darwin published the first modern book on the role of emotional expression in survival and adaptation.4 However, to gain a practical perspective, we'll focus on the development in the 20th century of the concept of EQ. Back in the 1920s, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike talked about something he called “social intelligence.”5 Later, the importance of “emotional factors” was recognized by David Wechsler, one of the fathers of IQ testing. In 1940, in a rarely cited paper, Wechsler urged that the “non-intellective aspects of general intelligence” be included in any “complete” measurement.6 This paper also discussed what he called “affective” and “conative” abilities—basically, emotional and social intelligence—which he thought would prove critical to an overall view. Unfortunately, these factors were not included in Wechsler's IQ tests, and little attention was paid to them at the time.

In 1948 another American researcher, R.W. Leeper,7 promoted the idea of “emotional thought,” which he believed contributed to “logical thought.” But few psychologists or educators pursued this line of questioning until more than 30 years later. (One notable exception was Albert Ellis, who, in 1955, began to explore what would become known as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy—a process that involved teaching people to examine their emotions in a logical, thoughtful way.8) Then, in 1983, Howard Gardner of Harvard University wrote about the possibility of “multiple intelligences,” including what he called “intra-physic capacities”—in essence, an aptitude for introspection—and “personal intelligence.”9

By this time Reuven Bar-On was active in the field and had contributed the phrase “emotional quotient” or EQ.10 The term “emotional intelligence” was coined and formally defined by John (Jack) Mayer of the University of New Hampshire and Peter Salovey of Yale University in 1990.11 They expanded on Professor Gardner's concept, settled on the definition of emotional intelligence cited earlier in this chapter, and—with their colleague David Caruso—have since developed an alternative test of emotional intelligence that, unlike the EQ-i (Emotional Quotient Inventory), is not self-reporting but ability-based. This test, called the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test) has generated a considerable amount of research over the past nine years.12 We have worked with them in the development of this test in the hope that looking at the phenomenon of emotional intelligence from two different perspectives will shed even more light on this important capacity. Some of the findings are presented later on in this book.

What About Cognitive Intelligence?

During the past 100 years cognitive intelligence and the means by which it's measured—that is, IQ and IQ testing—have dominated society's view of human potential.

In 1905 the French psychologist Alfred Binet, together with his colleague, the psychiatrist Theodore Simon, developed the first formal intelligence test.13 Binet had been asked by the Parisian school commission to come up with a way children could be categorized according to ability. The aim was somewhat less than benign: to weed out the “feeble-minded,” those who would not benefit from a publicly funded system. Binet had long believed that intelligence was an interlocking process which involved judgment, problem solving, and reasoning. Now he could put his theories into practice. He and Simon completed and published an IQ test—administered, at first, to children—that enabled him to obtain performance standards for different age groups. These formed the basis of what became known as “mental ages.” The results of a test would give the mental age of a person in relation to average levels of growth and intellectual development.

In 1910 the Binet-Simon test migrated to the United States, where the educator and psychologist Henry Goddard14 founded his own school for the “feeble-minded” in New Jersey. Later the test was modified and standardized for a wider American population by Lewis Terman at Stanford University, began to be administered to both children and adults, and became known as the Stanford-Binet test.15

At this time, the ability to measure cognitive intelligence assumed new importance. Not only could it identify and sidetrack the “feeble-minded” who would benefit only marginally from education, it could pick out those who scored high and could be expected to pu...