Emotional Intelligence Predicts Job Success: Do You Have It?
The
best salespeople and leaders have a high EQ. Daniel Goleman, the man who coined
the term, pulls apart the aspects of emotional intelligence.
Let's
say you work at a place that's saturated with smarts. If all of your colleagues
were always the brightest person in the room growing up, then what makes you
stand out? Your emotional intelligence.
Consider
cosmetics giant L'Oreal, which has started to factor emotional intelligence in
their hiring process for salespeople. Those who were recruited for their
high EQ outsold their peers by over $90,000. On top of that, the high-EQ employees had
63% less turnover than the typically selected sales folk. As this and other studies show, emotional
intelligence predicts success for people and the companies they work for.
But
EQ isn't fixed: it can change over time. As University College London Tomas
Chamorro-Premuzic notes on Harvard Business Review, your level of EQ is
"firm, but not rigid." While most EQ increases happen with age, you
can train yourself to have a higher EQ, by being mindful of your mindfulness, more agile with emotions, or taking the dive into coaching.
Daniel Goleman, the psychologist who coined the term
emotional intelligence, recently talked to the Huffington Post about the
many characteristics of emotional intelligence. Lets go over a few here, so
that we can know what to train in.
Do
you ask a lot of questions when you meet someone? Do you actually listen to
their answers? Then you might be a highly empathic person, someone attuned to
the needs and feeling of others, and you may also mark high on openness to
experience--a trait correlated with creativity.
To
be emotionally intelligent, Goleman says, you need to have confidence. To have
confidence, you need to know your strengths and weaknesses. Then you work from
that framework.
As
Arianna Huffington told us, you can't make
connections if you're distracted. Additionally, the ability to remain
focused--and not carried away by texts and tweets--predicts not just the
ability to form strong relationships and cultivate self-knowledge, Goleman
says, but also your financial success.
"Your
ability to concentrate on the work you're doing, and to put off looking at that
text or playing that video game until after you're done," he tells the Huffington Post. "How good you are at that in childhood turns out to
be a stronger predictor of your financial success in adulthood than either your
IQ or the wealth of the family you grew up in."
If
you have high emotional intelligence, Goleman says, you can avoid unhealthy
habits and otherwise discipline yourself--which also allows for
relationship-nourishing, success-engendering non-distraction.
Folks
with a high EQ acknowledge emotions as they come rather than repressing them or
misattributing their causes. You could also call this emotional agility.
There
are neuroscientific reasons for trusting your gut: they're markers for what to do next. Part of having a high EQ is learning when to trust them.
By Drake
Baer
http://www.fastcompany.com/3023335/leadership-now/emotional-intelligence-predicts-job-success-do-you-have-it?partner
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