Quote:Men solve far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

Cicero (106 BC -43 BC)

The setting is a corporate boardroom. Being bantered about during the meeting are words like empathy, interpersonal skills and social responsibility. Are we imagining this? No we are not. The skills formerly packaged under the heading of "Soft Skills" are getting increasing attention from the hard headed business world.
A recent recruitment advertisement for a major oil conglomerate stated that they were seeking people who were self starters with strong interpersonal and team skills. Once the domain of the helping or people professions, emotional intelligence skills are gaining new believers even in high tech fields where it was once assumed that a high level of technical expertise was the only thing that mattered. Not any more. Studies have shown that as employees rise up the ranks in organizations, skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and flexibility become increasingly important.
What is causing businesses to start paying attention to the "soft skills" is the connection with the bottom line. Employees that lack emotional intelligent skills cause friction amongst staff, decrease motivation and disrupt the quality and quantity of the work produced. Good employees end up leaving and going to work for organizations where they feel their needs will be better met. All of this in the end costs the company money.
It is simply in the best interests of an organization to hire staff with good emotional intelligence skills and promote those skills within their existing staff. One of the most effective uses of emotional intelligence testing has been in the area of recruiting.
An article in the prestigious Harvard Business Review concluded that most executives now realize that EQ or emotional intelligence is just as important to individual functioning as IQ. Since most work in organizations is done in teams, the new area of interest was in building more emotionally intelligent teams.
The really great thing about EQ was that we are able to substantially increase or levels of functioning if we want to We have always known at some level of the importance of emotional intelligence in our lives. Haven't we all known someone who got exceptionally high grades in school, was deemed to be brilliant, but had a hard time functioning in the real world? On the other hand we are all know of individuals who would not likely score high on an IQ test but have still managed to do rather well. What is it that the first person lacks and the second one has? The answer is emotional intelligence.
Social scientists and researchers have studied this area for many years. The problem was not that we didn't know that something we now call emotional intelligence existed, but how to define and quantify it in a way that we could accurately test people for it. In recent years there have been tremendous advances in this area. Tests developed that have been shown high degree of relationships between success in the workplace and high EQ scores.
Organizations, constantly looking for more effective tools to recruit new employees quickly realized the potential of this exciting new tool. Successful employees within the organization were tested to see what areas they scored high in. Part of the recruiting and interviewing process involved seeking out individuals who scored high in those same areas.
The world of emotional intelligence is a work in progress. An increasing number of companies are turning to this field to help them attract and keep the type of staff that will make them successful.

by Harvey Deutschendorf