The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book

The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book

by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves

The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book is a concise and easy to absorb introduction to the topic. “Emotional intelligence is the product of two main skills: personal and social competence. Personal competence focuses more on you as an individual, and is divided into self-awareness and self-management. Social competence focuses more on how you behave with other people, and is divided into social awareness and relationship management.” The authors credit Daniel Goleman with introducing the four-skill model in the book Primal Leadership.

PERSONAL COMPETENCE	→	SELF- AWARENESS	SELF- MANAGEMENT
SOCIAL COMPETENCE	→	SOCIAL- AWARENESS	RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Unlike cognitive intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ) is a skill which can be learned. “Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain… The more you think about what you are feeling—and do something productive with that feeling—the more developed this pathway becomes.” There is no correlation between emotional intelligence and personality traits like introversion and extroversion.

Becoming a better listener will improve emotional intelligence. “One thing you can do to learn to listen so people will talk is become an anthropologist. Anthropologists make their living watching others in their natural state without letting their own thoughts and feelings disturb the observation. This is social awareness in its purest form.”

Emotional intelligence plays a role in decision making. The authors cite Harvard Business School professor Joseph Badaracco who wrote Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right. “When there is no right or wrong answer, emotions… are usually the deciding factor.”

The authors caution that conflicts cannot always be avoided. “Conflict results from avoiding an issue and failing to address it constructively head-on. Interpersonal conflicts, like all our problems, need to be addressed when they are big enough to see, yet still small enough to solve.”

Groups have a collective emotional intelligence. “Team emotional intelligence is a group’s style of relating to one another, making decisions, and responding to other groups in the organization… The four core team emotional intelligence skills are emotional awareness, emotion management, internal relationship management, and external relationship management.”

Based on their research with 500,000 people, the authors have developed the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal. This is an online test consisting of 28 questions that measure the four emotional intelligence skills. The book comes with an access code to take the test, but I read a copy from a library and the code must have been removed. A newer edition of the book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, has since been published.

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Bradberry, Travis, and Jean Greaves. The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book: Everything You Need to Know to Put Your EQ to Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Buy from Amazon.com

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