Emotional intelligence (also known as emotional quotient or EQ) is the idea that being able to understand and manage your own emotions helps guide your thinking and actions and makes you better able to work with and even lead others. The concept was popularized in the 1995 book Emotional Intelligence by psychologist-turned-author Daniel Goleman.
In his oft-cited 1998 Harvard Business Review article “What Makes a Leader,” Goleman refers to a study showing that within a global food and beverage company, business divisions led by leaders with “a critical mass of emotional intelligence capabilities” outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%. Goleman boiled those capabilities down to a list of five now well-known ingredients: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill. Since then, he has consolidated those attributes into four pillars: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.
Other authors have built on Goleman’s thinking over the 30 years since Emotional Intelligence was first published, and a cottage industry of experts has arisen. If you’re a hiring manager or leader trying to determine whether a candidate has the kind of emotional intelligence you deem beneficial for your workplace and team, where do you even start?
The EQ spectrum
It makes sense to back up and ask why EQ is important in a company setting. Why is it something HR managers and leaders should be concerned with in the hiring process in the first place?
“It’s important because it enables you to collaborate and to work better as a team,” says Justin Bariso, founder of consultancy and training organization EQ Applied and author of the book EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence.
“[EQ] enables you to make better decisions in the moment. Also, to progressively learn from your decisions, pushing forward—not making the same mistakes over and over again, but being able to step back and self-assess and really develop that growth mindset,” Bariso says. Effective management and successful teamwork require all EQ pillars because both are based on relationships.
Bariso cites a Gallup survey that shows a single meaningful conversation each week between a manager and a team member will develop high-performance relationships more than any other type of leadership activity. In a separate analysis of employee engagement benefits, Gallup found decreases in absenteeism and turnover and increases in productivity and profits from engagement drivers—such as a caring manager, ongoing conversation, a sense of purpose, employee development and a focus on strengths. A team’s manager or leader alone can account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, the Gallup survey found.
Goleman’s original five components of EQ are still helpful guideposts. These are listed below:
- Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, drives, strengths and weaknesses, as well as their effects on others.
- Self-regulation is the ability to control or redirect disruptive moods and the ability to “think before acting,” contributing to environments of trust and fairness.
- Motivation involves a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status, setting the bar high and maintaining a sense of optimism.
- Empathy spans the ability to understand others and manage their emotional reactions.
- Social skill or relationship management and network building, represents the culmination of all the other components of EQ.
For Bariso, EQ is a “spectrum,” comparable to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. “Everyone is going to have a baseline emotional intelligence where they are naturally skilled at certain things, and they have weaknesses in other things,” he says. A realistic expectation for employees and leaders, then, isn’t necessarily to excel at every aspect of EQ, but rather to have the “self-awareness to identify” their own strengths, weaknesses and tendencies so they can leverage their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses.
“Almost everything is emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence is almost everything because we’re emotional creatures and emotion comes into play with every single decision we make,” Bariso says. “Emotion is good. We need emotion. Emotion helps us to motivate ourselves. But can we find that balance so we’re not letting the emotions take over, but we’re balancing the rational thought, the emotional thought and putting that together?”
Evaluating EQ in job candidates
While many organizations now use AI in the hiring process—to weed through resumes, for example—human connection is always a better tool for evaluating EQ. To be sure, an interview has the potential to give much more information about EQ than a resume, although you can certainly comb a resume to get a sense of a candidate’s history of commitment and duration at companies as well as their growth. Do they show a pattern of pursuing challenges and learning from them?
A resume can also contain some important signs of personality, Bariso notes, especially if job competitors rely on ChatGPT to write their resumes. While he says he’s not a fan of using EQ or personality tests in the hiring process, he does think that inviting candidates to spend time in an assessment center can offer opportunities for seeing how they react in different situations.
Bariso also suggests sussing out EQ qualities in an interview by asking candidates situational questions. These can reveal how they handle their emotions and interact with others. For example an interviewer could ask, “Tell me about a time where you were given critical feedback. How did you handle it? How did the person respond? How did you respond to their response?”
“Most people, under pressure, having that question thrown at them, they’re going to be honest,” Bariso says. “They’re going to tell you what they did. Even if they handled it spectacularly badly, if they were able to learn from it and talk about how now they would handle it differently, that shows emotional intelligence.” If the answer sounds like something that really happened, such honesty can also be a sign of emotional intelligence.
Other experts suggest observing a candidate’s behavior during an interview, noticing their consciousness of their own body language and emotions during the interview process, or evaluating their self-reflectiveness and the thoughtfulness of their questions and responses to the interviewers. Are they smiling? Are they aware of their own nervousness? Are they interacting in a genuine way with you?
Bariso adds “comfort with silence” as another quality to look for. If someone pauses and thoughtfully thinks through a question, “showing evidence that they’re willing to stop and think before they speak,” that’s a good sign. Translated to workplace meetings, this level of EQ can mean colleagues who will listen to each other and take each other’s ideas into consideration.
Bariso also suggests it’s helpful to look for a balance between confidence and humility in new hires. “You want them to be confident to share what they’ve learned, what they’ve seen in their previous roles…. But you also want them to be humble enough to accept other people’s opinions, to work together, to be able to adjust, to be able to acquiesce, to disagree and commit.” He quotes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s phrase that it’s better to be a “learn-it-all” than a “know-it-all.”
So, if you find a candidate who is honest in their self-assessments; up front or even self-deprecating about their failures; willing to share accolades; shows a growth mindset by having learned from their own experiences through reflection; and who energetically seeks out new creative challenges that go beyond the status quo, then by all accounts, you’ve found an employee with EQ. And, according to experts and studies, they’ll have the potential to contribute mightily to your organization.
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