The Overestimation of Emotional Intelligence
Have you heard? They say that your EQ counts
more than IQ for success.
In fact, they say, EQ accounts for 80% of success.
As the person who wrote Emotional Intelligence,
the book that put the concept on the map,
I can tell you that they are dead wrong.
This and other myths about emotional intelligence
constantly float around the blogosphere
and get talked endlessly by management consultants.
The misinterpretation started nearly the moment
TIME put the question, "What's Your EQ?"
on its cover when my book Emotional Intelligence
was published in 1995. And by now we are long past the time
when it should be put to rest for good.
Here are the facts. There's no question IQ is
by far the better determinant of career success,
in the sense of predicting what kind of job
you will be able to hold. It typically takes an IQ
about 115 or above to be able to handle
the cognitive complexity facing an accountant,
a physician or a top executive. But here's the paradox:
once you're in a high-IQ position,
intellect loses its power to determine
who will emerge as a productive employee
or an effective leader. For that,
how you handle yourself and your relationships
---in other words, the emotional intelligence skill set
---matters more than your IQ.
In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline,
drive and empathy mark those
who emerge as outstanding.
Companies know this. Corporate surveys find
that more than two-thirds of major businesses
apply some aspect of emotional intelligence
in their recruiting, in promotions,
and particularly in leadership development.
But that emphasis has created a mini-boom in
emotional intelligence consultants
who too often ignore what the data tells us
to make unfounded claims
that will sell their services.
One of these fanciful claims
is the often-repeated mantra that
such personal skills "account for 80%" of business success.
This particular myth may stem from
a misreading of the studies I've written about
in my books that look at how much of career success
is accounted for by a person's IQ alone.
Most researchers conclude that IQ accounts for
between 10 to 20 percent. That, as I've pointed out,
leaves room for a wide range of other factors
---everything from the family or social status
you're born into, to luck, to emotional intelligence,
to name but a few. But people seem to jump to
the conclusion that EQ alone makes up that 80% gap
---and it does not.
The wish to believe EQ offers a magical alternative
to IQ no doubt has multiple drivers.
For some, it may be a consolation for poor school grades;
for others a code for humanizing the workplace.
Still others see EQ as an argument for
more women in leadership. All those reasons may,
one day, find hard data to support them.