Emotional Intelligence
What is my emotional intelligence?
Your emotional intelligence is a measurement of your emotionality or emotional responses to given situations in your life.
Why might an employer look at my emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is quite often considered for management roles where you have to integrate with a lot of people, manage people effectively, there may even be customers you need to manage effectively. Emotional intelligence also indicates how you are likely to respond in certain situations.
What is an example of emotional intelligence?
An example of emotional intelligence might be where you have two very assertive managers, but one reacts in a totally different way to the same scenario as another person. What emotional intelligence measures is how they consider their responses. How empathetic are they? How good are they at stress management? How good are they at emotional management - management of their emotions themselves; not just giving their gut response, but actually considering the emotional impact that it has on somebody else first.
Would a potential employer ever look at my emotional intelligence in an interview?
More and more employers and interviewers are looking at using emotional intelligence to fill in some of the grey areas that interviews fall short on. Emotional intelligence should never be used as just one tool to make a decision for the interviewer, it should be part of a process, just like behavioural profiling, CVs, assessment centres, panel interviews, etc. So it's only one very small part of the whole process, but sometimes looking at emotional intelligence can colour in areas that are a little bit grey or a little bit void.
How is emotional intelligence judged?
Emotional intelligence is judged or measured by people completing a standard questionnaire. What the questionnaire will do is it will give you a statement and you have to agree or strongly disagree to the statement and in terms of how you would perform. It's about 150 questions, it takes about 20 minutes to complete, and by the end of it, you will be given scores on key behavioral areas or emotions. And then, from those scores, you can decide or interpret exactly how that person is likely to behave emotionally in certain situations. So, for example, if somebody scores on empathy extremely low, what is that going to look like in the work place? Similarly, if somebody scores high on emotion management, does that mean they're completely in control of their emotionality? So there are lots and lots or areas that we can look at. One of the greatest areas to look at is the whole issue of stress management in the work place, which is very, very important particularly in senior roles. We can measure how effective that person's stress management is in terms of the emotional responses that they give.
