And now conquering the mind too

Do you say what you think even if it upsets someone? Do you ask people for help if a task seems too hard? Do you find it hard to enjoy life? Are you happy? At your next job interview, it might be your inner self the employer is most interested in, not what’s listed on your resume or stored in your brain. While experience and IQ opened doors in the past, organizations from Air Canada, American Express and Deloitte to the U.S. Air Force, are looking at EQ — emotional intelligence — as a key indicator of a person’s success at work. We’ve all heard of IQ, but what is EQ?
“Emotional intelligence is your ability to be aware of your emotions, to manage them, to be aware of the emotions of the people around you and to manage those to some degree as well,” says clinical psychologist Steven Stein, CEO of Multi-Health Systems Inc. The Toronto company publishes a range of psychological tests, including the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory, or EQ-I, billed as the world’s first scientific measure of emotional intelligence.
“When you have emotionally intelligent leaders, managers and people, things go better,” adds Dr. Stein.
“People with higher emotional skills are more able to get help and muster teams, they’re able to be seen more as leaders and are more likely to be put in leadership positions. They get promoted faster,” he says.
Indeed, while IQ might get a person through the door, success is largely a matter of EQ, says Dr. Stein. “People often get hired because of their IQ. But what happens once you’re hired is, the ones who do better on the job are usually the ones with the higher EQ,” he says.
Through questions like those above, the EQ-I test measures 15 specific areas of emotional intelligence: emotional self-awareness, assertiveness, self-regard, self-actualization, independence, empathy, interpersonal relationship, social responsibility, problem solving, flexibility, reality testing, stress tolerance, impulse control, optimism and happiness.
Air Canada used the EQ-I test to assess the emotional intelligence of 650 new pilots hired since 2005.
“An airline captain is, if you want to look at it in a certain way, a team leader. He’s overseeing the cockpit crew, the flight deck crew as well as the cabin crew. And he’s not only interacting with the other crew members but also with other departments within the airline,” says Capt. Dave Legge, vice-president of flight operations. “Obviously, if you have to interact well with other people, these are instruments that we can use during the selection process to identify people that have these enhanced skills,” he says. “At the end of the day, we want to have a better idea of who we’re hiring. These tools provide us with that kind of information. They tend to be more objective.”
20/08/07 Dave McGinn, Financial Post/Canada.com, Canada