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    Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Competence?

    18/05/11 14:21 Filed in: Thoughts
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    Emotional Intelligence (EI) has finally arrived as a mainstream concept in New Zealand organisations, and there’s now a growing demand for training on the topic. Prior to last year I was already regularly covering the concepts of EI in various courses (e.g. Dealing with Difficult People, Leading Teams, Assertiveness) but I was rarely asked for Emotional Intelligence training as such. This year, however, I'm not only delivering a series of public EI courses, but I'm also getting regular enquiries about in-house courses. The term Emotional Intelligence now seems to have majority 'name recognition' among course participants and many people are able to give a pretty good potted definition if asked. Interestingly, though, I have found that some people react negatively to the concept.

    To some of these,     intelligence is a word they associate with cognitive ability and they think it's wrong to apply it to the messy and subjective realm of emotions. I understand where this objection comes from, but when it comes up in courses I generally deflect it to lunch break or post-course discussion, otherwise things get far too interesting and more appropriate to a linguistics or psychology seminar than a time-limited training session.

    Other people, however, just find the concept, or at least the phrase, demotivating. They get the comparison between EI and IQ, and their own experience tells them that some people are more emotionally 'smart' than others, but the very success of this analogy makes them sceptical about the usefulness of EI training. Most people know that there's not much you can do to boost your IQ, which remains pretty stable over your lifetime. So, they reason, if your emotional life is also dependent on a kind of intelligence, surely there's not much you can do about that either.

    To deal with this second reaction I'm finding it more useful to emphasise     Emotional Competence (EC) during my training programs, at least after the introductory session. Most people are already familiar with the idea that people can learn to manage emotions better, from concepts like anger-management and stress-management. They also accept that, although some people might have a head-start in emotion management (e.g. they are more phlegmatic or resilient), all of us can improve in these areas through effort and practice.

    Emotional Competence seems, to me, a better term for what EI pioneer John Meyer and his colleagues are referring to when they define Emotional Intelligence as: "an ability to recognize the meanings of emotion and their relationships, and to reason and problem-solve on the basis of them." (download PDF article     here). Meyer refers to the four branches of Emotional Intelligence, which actually look very much like competencies:
    • Perceiving emotions
    • Facilitating emotions
    • Understanding emotions
    • Managing emotions
    Daniel Goleman, whose bestselling book Emotional Intelligence is many people's introduction to the subject, also focusses on Emotional Competence in Working with Emotional Intelligence. Goleman defines EC as: "A learned capability based on emotional intelligence that results in outstanding performance at work." Goleman identifies 25 competencies, which he splits between Personal Competence and Social Competence. Karen Hamilton has a nice summary of Goleman's competencies here.

    So, just to be clear, if you're coming along to one of my EI courses expecting an in depth debate about the meaning of intelligence, you might be disappointed. To me, it's all about competence.

    - Will Moore

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