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

You will be able to define emotional intelligence in the Salovey and Mayer sense and explain why the popular claims need care.

Most people first hear the phrase emotional intelligence attached to a big promise: that it matters more than IQ, or that it is the secret behind every good leader. Both claims are worth putting down before you start, because this course is about a set of skills you can practise, not a personality you either have or lack.

The term has a specific origin. In 1990 two psychologists, Peter Salovey and John Mayer, published a paper that defined emotional intelligence as the ability to notice emotions in yourself and others, tell them apart, and use that information to guide your thinking and what you do. They later refined 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.

Five years later the science journalist Daniel Goleman wrote a bestselling book called Emotional Intelligence. Goleman widened the idea to include motivation, social skill and a cluster of traits that sound a lot like good character. His book made the phrase famous, and it is where the claim about mattering more than IQ became popular. That claim did not come from strong evidence, and researchers have argued about it ever since.

So what does the evidence say? The honest summary is that it is contested. Researchers disagree about how to measure emotional intelligence, and the different tests often do not agree with each other. Some measures overlap heavily with personality traits such as agreeableness and emotional stability, which raises the question of whether they measure anything new. Studies that link emotional intelligence to job performance or leadership find relationships that are usually modest, and the size depends a great deal on which test was used and which job was studied. You will see the details in lesson 1.3.

None of this means the skills are imaginary. Noticing that you are getting defensive before you say something you regret is a real skill. So is reading that a colleague who says fine is not fine, or choosing to raise a problem calmly instead of letting it leak out as sarcasm. These are observable behaviours, and people get better at them with practice and feedback. What the research does not support is the idea that one score predicts your career, or that a short workshop changes who you are.

That is the stance of this course. Treat emotional intelligence as a label for a group of skills, and judge each skill by whether it helps you in a specific situation. When someone sells you a test that sorts people into types, or a training that promises to double team performance, ask which study they mean and what it measured.

Here is how the skills show up at work. A manager in a Tanjong Pagar office gets an email from a client late on a Friday saying the deliverable is unacceptable. One version of her reads it, feels a jolt of anger, and replies within two minutes defending every point. Another version notices the jolt, names it as anger mixed with worry about her own boss, waits until Monday morning, and calls the client to ask what specifically missed the mark. The second version is not a nicer person. She used a few skills in sequence: she noticed the feeling, named it, paused, and got curious about the other side.

Every module that follows trains one of those links. You will learn to spot your triggers, steady yourself under pressure, see a situation from the other person's side, choose how to handle conflict, run a difficult conversation, say no, take criticism and recover after a hard week.

Before you move on, do the activity for this lesson. Write down a recent moment at work or at home where 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 it private and keep it honest, because you will come back to it in module 2.

Write a short account of one recent moment when your emotions drove what you said or did, noting the trigger, the feeling, the action and what you would change.

Course

• Emotional intelligence and difficult conversations