Emotional Intelligence

Expanding on our previous podcast & blog where we’ve looked at emotions in coaching, here we explore a topic that might come into coaching, which is emotional intelligence.

It’s unlikely that anyone’s ever going to turn up and say that they’d like to talk about emotional intelligence, but there are elements of emotional intelligence that people might want to talk about. And, within an organisational context, people might be asked to have some coaching around improving their emotional intelligence. Communication style might be mentioned, which could lead in to the topic of emotional intelligence.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

EQ has come to be shorthand for emotional intelligence. Obviously, this label comes from IQ. IQ means Intelligence Quotient. If MENSA was measuring your intelligence in some way, they would use IQ; it is quantifiable or measurable. But you can’t measure emotion, so there is no real emotional quotient.

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand and manage our own emotions and recognise, understand and respond to the emotions of others.

Note: We can’t manage other people’s emotions. But being able to respond effectively to someone else’s emotions is where we have some agency.

The History of Emotional Intelligence

• The term was coined by Wayne Payne in a dissertation he wrote in 1985. That was a much narrower idea of emotional intelligence than we think of now.
• Peter Salovey and John Mayer were the first academics to really study it from 1990.
• Daniel Goleman was the one that bought it to popular attention. He wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence in 1994 and that was when it became more commonly talked about and organisations latched onto it. Everyone wanted their people to be emotionally intelligent.
• Reuven Bar-On developed his own model in 1997.

So , there are competing models and competing theories around the subject, but they’re all more or less talking about the same thing.

Daniel Goleman’s model is the most popular emotional intelligence model.

Back in 1994 it started off with five different domains. Self awareness, self management, motivation, empathy and social skills. Since 2013, he’s narrowed it down to just be four domains. Self awareness, self management, social awareness, and relationship management. But if we dig below the surface of that, he’s now got 12 different competencies that sit underneath those four areas. He’s tried to simplify it, but made it far more complex.

Let’s Explore the Competencies Within Each Domain

There’s one competency that spans all of the four domains and that’s what he calls focus, but he quite often refers to it as attention. It’s probably Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi‘s concept of flow. Let’s look at each domain in turn, and the competencies that sit within them.

Self-awareness:

Apart from Focus, the only competency here is self-awareness. Not general self-awareness, but emotional self-awareness. This is your ability to recognise and understand your own emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviours. Understanding why you do the things that you do, think the way you think, and feel the way you feel. That’s all going to affect you and how you navigate the world and it will also impact on other people. Part of the work we do as coaches is asking questions that increase our coachee’s self-awareness, so in terms of emotional intelligence in the coaching room, that’s going to be part and parcel of our coaching anyway.

Self-management:

• Emotional balance: This is the ability to regulate and manage your emotions. Improving emotional intelligence, in this domain, can help us to keep some emotional stability and wellbeing even if we’re facing challenging times or stress. Again, that’s part of our coaching offer, we can and will help people to navigate stress, and look after their own wellbeing.
• Adaptability: This is the ability to adjust your thoughts, behaviours and emotions as your circumstances change and new information comes up, or new challenges come along.
• Achievement orientation: refers to the drive to set and achieve goals with a focus on excellence. Continuous improvement and personal growth are in there as well as part of that achievement orientation. So that’s definitely something we could be working with in the coaching room.
• Positive outlook: This is the ability to remain optimistic and have a constructive perspective.

Social awareness:

• Empathy: Social empathy is understanding perhaps why a group of people might think and feel the way they do, so their emotional response to something that’s going on.
• Organisational awareness: this is the ability to understand and navigate the organisational dynamics. That would include the culture, the politics, the motivations, the values, and the purpose of the organisation and being able to communicate with people around that in an effective manner. We might want to think instead about social or systemic awareness, because emotional intelligence isn’t just important in organisational settings; being aware of the environment and being aware of the social, cultural influences that your environment has on you.

Relationship management:

This is the ability to manage interactions and relationships and has five competencies:

• Influencing: the ability to shape the decisions, behaviours and attitudes of others and fostering cooperation, respect and shared goals. That would include persuasion, negotiation, trust building, inspiring and motivating others, and maintaining healthy relationships.
• Coaching and Mentoring: Within his model it’s recognised that both coaching and mentoring can play an important role in fostering emotional intelligence, helping people. In an organisational setting, if you were training people around emotional intelligence, you might teach them to coach and mentor as well. Within relationship management the skills you learn when you’re learning to coach will most probably help: listening to understand, asking good open questions, being comfortable with silence.
• Conflict management: the ability to navigate disputes, disagreements, in a constructive way and maintaining positive relationships, which again, all stems from an organisation wanting everyone to get along and play nicely and collaborate together.
•  Teamwork: Effective teamwork, building strong collaborative relationships, being productive, positive and supportive of others in your team.
•  Inspirational leadership: The ability to inspire and motivate others to achieve a shared vision.

You can see that this model really relates to organisations. This model is talking to organisational learning and development people that are sold on that concept that EQ is more important than IQ.

What’s odd is that no one ever talks about emotions. It’s always about stress and conflict management. When we talked about emotions on the podcast/blog previously, we said one of the things you could do to help improve your relationship with emotions and therefore effectively your emotional intelligence is to understand all the different types of emotions that there might be, and the nuances; having some emotional literacy. And yet this doesn’t seem to be included at all in this model.

Remember our regular chant here: all models are wrong and some are useful.

It is a useful model and if you strip it back to basics:

If we’re going to be emotionally intelligent, we need to be aware of our responses, our reactions and be able to self-manage. Plus, having social awareness, some empathy, but also some awareness of cultural differences, of personality differences and within an organisation awareness of political dynamics. And then to be able to manage relationships. A lot of coaching work is about relationships and how people are struggling with relationships.

All of this can be helped by coaching.  And lots of the approaches that we cover on our transformational coaching diploma will have some connection with emotional intelligence and helping clients to navigate and improve it for themselves.

We talk more about the different approaches and how they might be useful in the coaching room in relation to emotional intelligence in our podcast episode on the same subject. You can listen in here.

To find out more about our Doctors’ Transformational Coaching Diploma click through here