Emotional Intelligence Blog

Careerbuilder released a study focused on the importance and value 2600 hiring managers and human resource professionals place on the Emotional Intelligence (EI) of external candidates for jobs and internal candidates for promotions. The results support the trend over the past 10 years that prospective employers are looking beyond IQ and technical skills. Some of the findings included:

• “71% say they value EI over IQ.
• 34% are placing greater emphasis on hiring and promoting people with good EI.
• 61% of employers are more likely to promote workers with high EI over candidates with high IQ.”

 

When these HR professionals and hiring managers were asked why EI is more important than high IQ they said Employees with high EI…

• “Are more likely to stay calm under pressure.
• Know how to resolve conflict effectively.
• Are empathetic to their team members.
• Lead by example.
• Tend to make more thoughtful business decisions.”

 

It makes sense to hire people with both high IQ and EI skills. But wouldn’t it be an even bigger benefit to businesses and organizations if they provided skill-based EI training to the leaders and managers who are managing and running their organizations right now?!

Staying calm, resolving conflict, being empathetic, etc. are important skills for everyone who works in today’s economy. Lets look at the leverage available. If a business of 2000 people hires 50 people and the business is fortunate enough that they all have good EI skills that is great. But if that same business invested in providing EI skill-building training to lets say it’s 100 supervisors, managers and leaders, imagine the impact that could have on the entire business.

The question you are probably asking yourself is, “What measured results can EI skill-building training produce?” Following is a sample of the measured benefits that a variety of organizations have achieved by learning and practicing the EI techniques taught in our Building Resilience and Agility® training programs.

Employee Commitment Survey (ECS)
A director with two teams reporting to him had us train one of the teams in February of 2005. In April the company’s ECS was administered to all employees. The trained team had an average score of 76.8 while the untrained team’s average was 75.7. Before we trained the other team in June of 2006 the director shared that the ECS scores from 2006. The untrained team’s score increase by +1.9 while the trained team’s score increased by an astounding +13.1. The director said that he thought the main reason for the dramatic increase was that the trained team used the EI techniques individually and collectively all year.

Improvements in Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Goals
Some teams and groups that we have trained have allowed us to do follow-up interviews with participants 2-3 months after the training. Following are average improvements reported by 7 groups from 5 different industries (transportation, manufacturing, information technology, education, and entertainment). Groups included IT professionals, senior executives, and high potentials. The average improvement for each goal for all 7 groups is shown below.

Those are significant average improvements. Most businesses look at dollars and cents numbers not percentage improvements in soft skills. So lets look at one way to determine the dollar value of just one of these soft numbers. Lets take the 27% increase in personal productivity.

Lets use a hypothetical organization that has 100 supervisors, managers, and directors who where trained in EI and lets assume they improve only half (13%) of the 27% average. Lets also assume that the average salary for this group is $70,000 a year. So what is the economic value of this increased productivity? The calculation looks like this…

13% improvement x $70,000 avg. salary x 100 leaders = $910,000

And that is only half of the 27% average improvement our clients reported! Twice that number would be $1,820,000? And this improvement can continue year after year! This doesn’t even take into account the time savings of more thoughtful decisions, constructive conflict resolution, increased teamwork, etc.

The point is if an organization really wants to experience a big impact from people’s Emotional Intelligence skills, don’t just hire for it, train for it in your existing leadership and workforce.