“You can’t measure intelligence with a pen and paper”
An exuberant band of Hare Krishnas are out in force on London’s Regent Street the day People Management calls on Dr Martyn Newman, one of the world’s pre-eminent authorities on emotional intelligence. Their colourful positivity is quite a contrast with the corporate professionalism of the offices of Roche Martin, the consultancy from which Newman teaches leaders how to channel empathy and self-awareness to their advantage.
Yet perhaps the two worlds aren’t so different. As Newman explains, the tradition of self-examination has ancient Eastern roots, and what he calls the “fad” for mindfulness is merely our attempt to make Buddhist practices palatable to our busy Western lives.
Certainly, the business world finally seems ready to accept that is the way we measure performance, and intelligence in particular, is decidedly narrow-minded. And the Australian psychologist is at the forefront of putting us in touch with our true selves. In his best-selling book, Emotional Capitalists, he sketched a fascinating case for making the measurement and promotion of emotional intelligence central to business practice. And today he is working with organisations from Network Rail to Coutts. People Management asked him what HR needs to know about multiple intelligences.
Why should businesses care about emotional intelligence?
We’ve always known relationships are important, but these days there is pressure on business to be more transparent and accountable. Not only do you have to be responsible for managing the knowledge or economics inside your business, you now have to manage the emotions too.
The new generation want to work for businesses that are like them in some way, and that they like in return. And the skills you need to survive and thrive in this new climate are emotionally and socially based. Leaders are required to inspire people with a vision of what the future looks like – to address the real drivers of people’s behaviour. Those drivers are not fundamentally rational. They’re deeply emotional, which means leadership today is a deeply emotional role.
What does that mean for our traditional notions of intelligence?
There have been two dominant ideas that have shaped our ideas about intelligence. One is that it’s somehow grounded in academic ability, so we measure things like IQ through pencil and paper tests. The other is to do with memory and the capability to recall factual information. That’s all perfectly legitimate, but the rationalist tradition within psychology has given rise to the belief that IQ is somehow connected to a person’s general intelligence.
I think that’s a dangerously narrow view of intelligence because it excludes a whole range of different intelligences by which people are able to solve problems. Within a business context, academic intelligence doesn’t hinder you, and we’ve largely selected people on the basis of their performance in tests of cognitive intelligence. But as the pressure mounts to innovate and adapt to a changing environment, and manage increasingly diverse employee and stakeholder groups, it requires a further set of intelligences.
Where does emotional intelligence come in?
The idea is at least 20 years old, and it focuses on the way people process emotion to make decisions, understand ideas, manage their own behaviour and work well with other people. Emotional intelligence combines elements of managing your emotion, knowing the self, and understanding the emotions of other people and how they drive behaviour. But the real practical output is how we engage with other people and build relationships.
How would you answer social scientist (and CIPD Annual Conference keynote speaker) Adam Grant, who says there is no evidence to suggest emotional intelligence is a reliable predictor of business performance?
Ever since Daniel Goleman wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, it’s been a controversial idea in academia, largely because psychology as a discipline has prided itself on knowing more than anyone else about intelligence. When somebody comes along and offers a broader view of intelligence, it appears threatening to a 100-year tradition. But Grant’s conclusions are wrong, because of the science.
Since Goleman, there have been at least 1,200 major studies that have examined the relationship between emotional intelligence and performance. For example, our own study involving 7,000 professional people from 11 geographical regions found that those with the highest emotional intelligence were most strongly correlated to jobs that require most emotional labour, such as customer service or caring occupations.
How can you become more emotionally intelligent, and how long does it take?
The first big challenge is to suspend judgment. Examining our emotional experience can induce anxiety in any of us, because once we look inside ourselves we’re not altogether comfortable with what we find. You need to be comfortable taking the lid off and looking at your own experience and the best way to do that is with a reliable psychometric where you can benchmark your own emotions and behaviours against an international norm.
The second step is to decide what you want to achieve. Don’t ask yourself: “Do people like me?” or “Am I good, bad or ugly [as a person]?” That’s of no value. The real question to ask is: “What do people need from me that I’m not currently providing, and if I was to provide it how would that change my effective influence?” That sort of change doesn’t come easily, and it doesn’t come just by attending motivational seminars or workshops.
The emotional skills that lie at the root of effective behaviour are grounded in much deeper areas of our emotional brains and take much longer to change. The research says around 21-27 days. There are a couple of studies that suggest it’s more like 60 days of focused, repeated practice so a new skill becomes embedded in our neural pathways and becomes sustainable.
Dr Martyn Newman is organising an EQ Summit in London on 20 March 2015, featuring Dan Pink and Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch. For more information, visit eqsummit.com