Emotional intelligence: a definition
Emotional intelligence (الذكاء العاطفي) is the ability to recognise emotions, both one’s own and those of other people, to understand the effect those emotions have on behaviour, and to use that understanding in managing one’s conduct and one’s relationships.
The definition covers two directions at once: the emotions a person feels, and the emotions of the people around them. In both directions it goes further than noticing an emotion. It includes understanding how the emotion bears on what is then done, and putting that understanding to use in how the person conducts themselves and in how they deal with others.
The four components of emotional intelligence in one model
One model divides emotional intelligence into four components:
- Self awareness. Knowing what one feels while one is feeling it, and not only after having acted on it. Awareness that arrives once the action has been taken comes too late to shape that action.
- Self management. Separating the feeling from the response, so that the response is the one that is chosen. The feeling is not the part a person chooses; the response is.
- Social awareness. Reading the state of other people, including what has gone unsaid in the room. It takes in what people leave unspoken as well as what they put into words.
- Relationship management. Putting the three preceding components to use in persuasion, in disagreement and in giving feedback. These are the occasions on which the other three are applied in dealings with other people.
The order in this model is deliberate. It places awareness of oneself and management of oneself as the foundation for the two social components, so that social awareness and relationship management rest on what the first two provide.
The division into four describes one model of emotional intelligence. It is not a final definition of the concept.
Why emotional intelligence concerns HR
Part of what is asked of a manager is not technical, in the sense that it is not a matter of specialist knowledge of the field, and the situations that reveal this can recur in the course of the work. Three of them show the point:
- Giving negative feedback without the person who receives it losing motivation. The manner in which the feedback is given is what this situation tests.
- Communicating a decision the manager did not make. The manager is the one who conveys it to the team, although it was taken elsewhere.
- Managing a disagreement between two people the manager needs. Neither of the two is someone the manager can do without.
Situations like these are weighed as much by control of one’s reactions as by knowledge of the procedure. Knowing the right procedure for giving feedback, conveying a decision or handling a disagreement is one part of what each of them requires. Keeping one’s own reaction under control while carrying out that procedure is the other part.
That is why the concept appears in behavioural competencies and in the criteria used to select managers. In both settings, managing relationships is counted as part of the role itself, alongside the technical content of the role.
Where emotional intelligence stops: competence and measurement
Two limits of emotional intelligence need to be stated:
- Emotional intelligence does not replace competence in the work. A manager who reads the room well but does not know what to decide produces a team that is at ease and lost at the same time. The team is at ease because the manager deals well with people, and it is lost because no decision gives it a direction. The concept is an addition to specialist skill, not a substitute for it. Emotional intelligence bears on how the manager deals with people, and specialist skill bears on what the manager decides.
- Emotional intelligence is hard to measure, and the instruments used for it can be misread. The questionnaires are self reports: the person answers questions about themselves, in a setting where a decision follows from the answers. They may therefore measure a person’s awareness of the concept rather than their possession of it. A person who knows what emotional intelligence is supposed to look like can describe themselves in its terms, and the questionnaire records that description. That is why emotional intelligence is inferred from behaviour observed in real situations, following the method of behavioral interview questions, and not from a score on a test. What is observed then is what the person did in an actual situation, not what they report about themselves.
Can emotional intelligence be learnt?
In practice, emotional intelligence is approached as something that can be developed rather than as a fixed attribute. The reason is that what is worked on in it is behaviour, not a trait. Two examples of that behaviour are pausing before responding, and feedback on the effect a person’s conduct actually had, as distinct from the effect it was meant to have.
Both are things a person does, or receives, in the course of the work. A pause before a response is an action that can be repeated on the next occasion. Feedback on the actual effect of a piece of conduct tells the person what that conduct produced in the people around them.
This describes what practice does with emotional intelligence. It is not a judgement on how much emotional intelligence changes through that practice.
For that reason, developing emotional intelligence is closer to practice accompanied by feedback than to a training course. The behaviour is worked on where it takes place, and the feedback describes what the behaviour did there.
How emotional intelligence differs from psychological safety
Psychological safety at work is a property of an environment. The question it answers is whether an employee can speak up without that being counted against them. Emotional intelligence is a property of a person.
The manager’s behaviour is where the two meet. The team takes that behaviour as an indication of what will happen if one of its members speaks up: whether speaking up will be heard, or counted against the person who did it.
So the two concepts meet in practice and differ in where each resides: psychological safety in the environment, and emotional intelligence in the person.
This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.
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