Emotional intelligence is a set of skills, not a personality type

Define emotional intelligence the way Salovey and Mayer do, and explain why the popular claims about it should be read with care.

Late on a Friday, a manager in a Tanjong Pagar office opens an email from a client calling her team's deliverable unacceptable. Anger hits her as she reads it, and within two minutes she has sent a reply defending every point.

In a second version of that Friday, she catches the anger as it arrives and puts a name to it: anger, with worry underneath about how her own boss will react. She leaves the email until Monday morning, then phones the client to find out what specifically missed the mark. Her character is the same in both versions. In the second one she used several skills one after another: she noticed the feeling, named it, paused, and got curious about the client's side. Each module after this one trains one of those links, through spotting your triggers, steadying yourself under pressure, seeing a situation from the other person's side, choosing how to handle conflict, running a difficult conversation, saying no, taking criticism, and recovering after a hard week.

When people talk about emotional intelligence, two claims tend to travel with the phrase: that it matters more than IQ, and that it is the secret behind every good leader. Put both to one side for now. Everything from here on deals with skills you can practise, and nobody is assumed to have or lack EI as a fixed personality.

Two psychologists, Peter Salovey and John Mayer, first defined the term in a paper published in 1990. In their definition, emotional intelligence is the ability to notice emotions in yourself and others, tell them apart, and use that information to guide your thinking and actions. They went on to sharpen it into four abilities: perceiving emotions, using emotions to help thinking, understanding how emotions change and combine, and managing emotions in yourself and in other people.

Daniel Goleman, a science journalist, published a bestselling book titled Emotional Intelligence five years after that paper. His version took in motivation, social skill and a cluster of traits close to what most people would call good character. The book turned the phrase into a familiar one, and the idea that EI matters more than IQ spread from it. Strong evidence never backed that idea, and researchers have been arguing over it since.

The research on EI remains contested. There is no agreement on how to measure it, and different EI tests often give results that do not line up with each other. Some measures overlap so heavily with personality traits such as agreeableness and emotional stability that researchers ask whether they capture anything new at all. When studies look at EI alongside job performance or leadership, the links they find are usually modest, and how strong those links look depends heavily on which test was used and which job was studied. Lesson 1.3 takes you through that evidence in detail.

None of this makes the skills imaginary. You can see them on ordinary working days: catching yourself getting defensive before you say something you regret, picking up that a colleague who says "fine" is not fine, or deciding to raise a problem calmly so it doesn't come out later as sarcasm. With practice and feedback, people get better at all of these. What the research does not support is the idea that a single score predicts your career, or that a short workshop changes who you are.

So use EI as a label for a group of skills, and judge each skill by whether it helps in the specific situation in front of you. Bring the same habit to anything sold to you under the EI name. If someone offers a test that sorts people into types, or training that promises to double team performance, ask which study they mean and what that study measured.

Before you move on, write down a recent moment at work or at home when your emotions drove what you said or did, and you later wished you had handled it differently. Note what happened just before, what you felt, what you did, and what you would want to do next time. Keep the note private and keep it honest, because you will come back to it in module 2.

Think of a recent moment when your emotions drove what you said or did. Write a few lines on it: what set it off, what you felt, what you did, and what you would do differently.

Course

• Emotional intelligence and difficult conversations