Researchers call this emotional know-how Emotional Intelligence, or EQ. Emotional Intelligence is a set of skills that include one’s ability to recognize their own impulses and moods and the ability to read situations accurately and respond most appropriately depending on the situation or person they are dealing with. You’ve probably heard it called “soft skills”, “people smarts”, “social savvy”, or “street smarts”. EQ is all of this and more.

The credit goes to Daniel Goleman for popularizing the concept of EQ in his book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995). In it, he identified five major characteristics of Emotional Intelligence: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy and Social Skill.

Our firm uses these five characteristics along with five additional ones and assists organizations in strategically applying them to leadership initiatives: interviewing and selection, succession planning, performance coaching, and learning & development.

The qualities of EQ are easily recognized as street smarts but what most people don’t realize is that it is a bona-fide characteristic, one that can be recognized, measured and increased.

There is a correlation between high EQ and success in life. EQ is not the measurement of one’s personality, it is not a way to predict one’s career and it is not static. EQ can change over time and it is correlated to maturity: there is typically an increase in one’s EQ over the course of his or her lifetime.

Goleman (Ph.D. and professor at Harvard) when conducting validity and reliability studies found that EQ proved to be twice as important as IQ and technical skills for jobs at all levels. Moreover, EQ can account for the entire advantage in positions of higher responsibility. The best news about EQ is that it can be learned. Unlike IQ, which stays constant after the late teens, EQ is a set of competencies one can develop, much like a technical skill.

Being strong in technical skills creates value for the organization, but at some point, those who lack Emotional Intelligence fail to achieve the results they need to within their departments, from their peers or in themselves. Some will hit a plateau in their career, some will change jobs frequently and some are forced to step down from management responsibility.

Having EQ is contagious, acting as a catalyst to enhance the work experience for everyone. Therefore, developing Emotional Intelligence in one often benefits a whole team. And because EQ is a collection of skills that can be learned, real results can be seen from increased awareness, practice and coaching.

In the past, training on topics like stress management and assertiveness skills were relegated to a soft skills training program, treated as a luxury and only offered after the training budget paid for technical training or hard skills. In reality, these are critical success factors that should not be dismissed as mere ‘nice-to-haves’. For example, the Hay Group states one study of 44 Fortune-500 companies found that salespeople with high EQ produced twice the revenue of those with average scores. In another study, technical programmers demonstrating the top 10% of Emotional Intelligence competency were developing software three times faster than those with lower competency. What these studies point out, is that Emotional Intelligence is directly related to the bottom line, and is anything but soft.

The best way to increase organizational EQ is to include the critical success factors as part of the core competencies that employees need to have. Individuals responsible for interviewing and hiring need to be educated on how to discover EQ skills, and how to measure the competency levels of current employees in order to target training to identify and provide training in opportunities for growth. You may just see your old soft skills training in a whole new light.