CHAPTER 10
What’s EQ Got to Do With a TD Career?
How much of an impact does emotional intelligence (EQ) have on your professional success? The short answer is a lot! EQ is a powerful set of skills that will help you navigate your learning curve, meet the needs of the people you will train and develop, and ensure you are able to reach your long-term career goals. A deeper understanding of how people learn and interact will be necessary whether you want to design training programs, coordinate them, train and coach people, or scale learning initiatives. Investing in your own EQ skills will boost your performance, the performance of the teams you join, and the performance of the organizations you work for.
IN THIS CHAPTER:
Discover what EQ skills have to offer TD professionals
Learn why EQ is important to anyone in an organization
Practice eight EQ strategies for guiding your own TD career
EQ skills enable you to connect with learners and guide them toward deeper insights and growth. Emotional intelligence skills will also help you face any fear or nerves you have about your career path. We all have them. Can I master public speaking? What about audiences of more than 75 people or C-suite leaders? How do I handle a skeptic, especially when everyone is watching? What if I am not creative enough for curriculum design? And how about industry challenges on the horizon, such as competing priorities, virtual and e-learning dynamics, increasing workloads, or negotiating for resources?
EQ skills can help you every step of the way if you begin your learning journey now and practice your EQ skills consistently.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
First things first. Emotional intelligence skills were introduced to the world in the mid-1990s after magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans highlighted the areas of the brain that activate as people think and feel. Suddenly people could see the emotional center of the brain light up before and during mental tasks such as decision making or communicating. The business world embraced this scientific approach to behavior, and it opened new possibilities for tackling personal and interpersonal difficulties at work. Based on 25 years of research, along with training and development efforts across industries, this chapter presents a high-level briefing on what you need to know about emotional intelligence for a training and development career.
Emotional Intelligence Versus IQ and Personality
It may seem strange to begin defining emotional intelligence by clarifying what it is not. However, it is important to start here and address two of the most common questions learners ask: Is my EQ influenced by my personality? Isn’t EQ just part of my IQ?
When you measure personality, IQ, and EQ in a single individual, each one offers unique insights into how people think and act at work (Figure 10-1).
Personality is made up of the stable “styles” that describe each of us. You may be more high energy, even-keeled, friendly, or intense, to offer a few examples. Personality traits appear early in life and remain prominent throughout adulthood. You might assume that some personality traits (for example, introversion) are associated with a lower EQ, but those who draw energy from being alone are no less emotionally intelligent than people who refuel by interacting with others. You can draw on your personality to assist in developing your EQ (and you will likely need to), but the latter isn’t dependent on the former.
Figure 10-1. EQ + IQ + Personality = You
Your intellect is your ability to learn. Think of cognitive intelligence as the rate at which you can process new or complex information. It’s not how much you know—you don’t get smarter by learning new facts or information. Your IQ, short of a traumatic event such as a brain injury, is relatively fixed from birth, and it’s the same at age 15 as it will be at age 50. EQ, on the other hand, is a flexible skill that can be learned. There is very little connection between IQ and EQ; you simply can’t predict someone’s EQ based on how smart they are.
EQ offers unique insights into how people operate at work beyond personality and IQ.
People can be intelligent but not emotionally intelligent, and people of all types of personalities can have a high or low EQ. Of the three, EQ is the most flexible and able to change. Your emotional intelligence affects how you manage behavior, navigate social complexities, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results for you, other people, and the organization where you work.
The Biology of Emotional Intelligence
An MRI is a brain scan that uses strong magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images inside the brain as people respond to stimuli. MRIs settled once and for all the notion that people can’t leave their feelings at home when they go to work. Your brain is wired to process your emotions before you even think about them. The rational area of your brain (the prefrontal cortex) can’t stop emotions “felt” by your limbic system (the emotional center of your brain), but the two areas do influence each other and maintain constant communication. The communication between your emotional and rational “brains” is the physical source of emotional intelligence.
The pathway for emotional intelligence is in the brain. Sensory information first travels along neural pathways through the limbic system, which is where emotions are processed. Then that information moves over to the prefrontal cortex, where thinking occurs. Emotional intelligence requires effective communication between the rational and emotional centers of the brain (Figure 10-2).
Figure 10-2. Sensory Information Movement Through the Brain
When Daniel Goleman (2005) introduced the concept of emotional intelligence to the business world, he was able to name a peculiar finding: People with the highest levels of intelligence outperform those with average IQs just 20 percent of the time, while people with average IQs outperform those with high IQs 70 percent of the time. This observation led researchers to look for another variable that explained success above and beyond one’s IQ. The competencies of high performers pointed to emotional intelligence as the critical factor.
Because your mind is wired to give your emotions the upper hand, your first response to an event is always going to be an emotional one. You have no control over this. However, you do control what happens next. You can shape the thoughts you have following an emotion—if you are aware of it. When something someone says or does generates an intense emotional reaction in you, it’s called a “trigger event.” It triggers you because of similar experiences you’ve had before. When your emotions escalate to the point where your brain is unable to balance your emotions with rational options, you may find yourself saying and doing things you regret. Much of emotional intelligence is about learning to become more aware of your triggers and improving your reactions to them.
The Four Core EQ Skills
Emotional intelligence is a skill set that includes recognizing and understanding emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.
Four skills make up emotional intelligence (Figure 10-3):
• Self-awareness
• Self-management
• Social awareness
• Relationship management
The first two skills, self-awareness and self-management, are more about you. The last two skills, social awareness and relationship management, are more about how you are with other people.
Figure 10-3. Emotional Intelligence Skills
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is the foundation of emotional intelligence. It includes your ability to accurately notice your own emotions in the moment and understand your patterns across time and situations. A self-aware person stays on top of their feelings about specific events, challenges, and people to quickly make sense of their reactions. Self-awareness requires tolerating some discomfort from focusing on emotions that may be negative.
Self-awareness is not about analyzing your deepest or unconscious motivations—rather, it comes from practicing a straightforward pursuit of understanding your needs, your habits, your style, and your strengths. Self-aware co-workers are remarkably clear about what they do well, what motivates and satisfies them, and which people and situations push their buttons.
Self-Management
Self-management is more than resisting explosive or problematic behavior. Self-management is the use of your awareness of your emotions to stay flexible and direct your behavior positively. This means managing your emotional reactions to situations and people. The process of self-managing includes tolerating uncertainty as you explore your emotions and options. Once you understand and build comfort with what you are feeling, the best course of action or inaction will show itself.
The biggest challenge that people face is managing their tendencies over time and applying their self-management skills across a variety of situations. Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals. Reaching such goals is often delayed, meaning that your commitment to self-manage and to tolerate waiting will be tested repeatedly.
Social Awareness
As the first component of social competence, social awareness is also a foundational skill. Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on with them. This means perceiving what other people are thinking and feeling even if you do not feel the same way. It’s easy to get caught up in your own emotions and forget to consider the perspective of the other party. Social awareness ensures you stay focused and absorb critical information.
Instead of looking inward to learn about and understand yourself, social awareness is looking outward to learn about and appreciate others. Social awareness is centered on your ability to recognize and understand the emotions of others. Tuning in to others’ emotions as you interact with them will help you get a more accurate view of your surroundings, which affects everything from anticipating what may come your way to communication and relationships.
Relationship Management
The difference between an interaction and a relationship is a matter of frequency. It is also a product of the quality, depth, and time you spend interacting with another person. Though relationship management is the second component of social competence, this skill taps into the first three emotional intelligence skills: self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness. Relationship management is your ability to use your awareness of your own emotions and those of others to manage your interactions and relationships successfully.
People who manage relationships well see the benefit of connecting with many different people, even those they are not fond of. The weaker the connection you have with someone, the harder it is to get your point across. If you want people to listen or care about you and your work, you must invest in every relationship, especially the challenging ones.
Why EQ Is Important for Anyone in an Organization
In addition to the widely accepted ideas that emotions influence people, and that organizations depend on their people, the business case for EQ continues to be supported by projections in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2020. The future for employees around the world involves major disruption and change in the workplace. Driving forces include rapid growth, uncertainty, remote and virtual learning, innovation, digital transformation, and the pursuit of inclusion, equity, health, and well-being for people at work. Because significant changes are in our future, and humans instinctually respond to change with emotion, it makes sense that emotional intelligence is central to two of the eight skill groups projected to be important. According to more than 90 percent of organizations who responded to the World Economic Forum’s survey, Working With People and Self-Management skills will continue to be important or are increasingly important (Table 10-1).
Table 10-1. Critical Skills Required by Organizations
Emotional intelligence was 11th on the list of the top 15 skills projected for 2025, which makes sense when you look through the other skills on this list. A person must be socially aware and able to manage relationships to lead others, have social influence, a service orientation, and the ability to persuade or negotiate (Table 10-2). People need self-awareness and self-management to take initiative, tolerate stress, flex to change, and be resilient.
Table 10-2. Top Skills According to World Economic Forum Survey
Top Skills for 2025 | Corresponding EQ Skills |
#5: Creativity, originality and initiative | • Self-Awareness • Self-Management |
#6: Leadership and social influence | • Self-Awareness • Self-Management • Social Awareness • Relationship Management |
#9: Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility | • Self-Awareness • Self-Management |
#13: Service Orientation | • Social Awareness |
#15: Persuasion and Negotiation | • Self-Awareness • Self-Management • Social Awareness |
Some of the most challenging and stressful situations that people face are at work. Beyond workload or the pressure of deadlines, what can make tough times feel so challenging are the difficult emotions involved, such as feeling angry, resentful, disappointed, anxious, frustrated, overwhelmed, or disrespected. When people passively avoid problems at work—which typically happens if they lack the skills needed to initiate a direct yet constructive conversation—conflicts tend to fester. Emotional intelligence offers everyone the personal and social competence skills they need to self-manage and work with people through many nuanced interactions.
Can EQ Be Trained?
Let’s review 17 years of research. While a single study exploring the trainability of EQ could never be definitive, looking at different studies across time, settings, and population can offer an emerging answer. Mattingly and Kraiger (2019) conducted a meta-analytical investigation of 76 published and unpublished research studies from between 2000 and 2016 on training for emotional intelligence skills. In their review, they found that 56 samples used a pre-post measurement design with 2,136 participants, and 28 samples from 26 more studies used a treatment-control group design with 2,176 participants. In all, the 4,312 participants in these studies included managers, nurses, police officers, sales professionals, teachers, and retail staff. In addition, the researchers reviewed student samples from undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs, with the most common being MBA students. EQ training in all cases was officially sanctioned by host organizations or academic programs and none of the participants were student volunteers for research credit. Both pre-post and treatment-control group designs showed a moderate, positive effect of training on the emotional intelligence scores of participants, regardless of gender. The effect was robust across emotional intelligence self-report measures. Overall, EQ training increased EQ scores, and the researchers concluded that EQ was trainable.
Progress Is Possible Within a Year
At TalentSmartEQ, we have investigated this question further. Hundreds of thousands of learners measure their baseline EQ using the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal, practice the EQ skills they need to improve, and then measure their progress. Learners in our databases see, on average, a seven-point increase in their EQ scores in a three-to-six-month timeframe (Figure 10-4). The average increase in scores grows to nine points for those who keep practicing several more months and then take a retest in the seven-to-10-month timeframe, which represents a marked increase in EQ skills in less than one year. This is more than double the increase anyone can expect from improvements and growth in their EQ over the normal course of life experience in similar periods of time.
Figure 10-4. Average Baseline EQ Score Versus at Average Retest Score
Seasoned working professionals frequently say they wish they’d learned about emotional intelligence earlier in life. For midcareer professionals and beyond, the wonderful news is that it is never too late to get started. People who are over 40 years old see an eight-point increase in their EQ score, on average, after practicing EQ strategies for six to nine months.
Understanding When Scores Don’t Increase
Not everyone sees an increase. Among our data sets from working and student populations, 80 percent of learners see some type of increase, 3 percent see no change, and 17 percent find their EQ scores decrease.
Two possible reasons for the retest score to drop:
• If the person is engaged, they’ll understand the importance of emotional intelligence and be more aware of the moments they slip back into low-EQ habits. Thus, when they take the retest, they rate themselves more realistically than the first time or hold themselves to a higher EQ standard.
• They may also hit a rough patch in life and discover that their high-EQ behaviors are less frequent than before.
Better EQ Takes Repeated Practice and Time
Your emotional habits have already been well exercised, so replacing them with high EQ habits will take repeated practice and time. You can’t expect to change every facet of EQ within months, but you can work to change specific behaviors over several months. The length of time will vary. If you’re attempting to reduce how often you interrupt people, you will likely have hundreds of opportunities to practice every month. If your EQ challenge is handling conflict or negotiating with confidence, you’ll be able to practice EQ strategies only when the situation arises. It may take you a year or several years to master some EQ challenges. The goal is to keep at it, even after the inevitable setbacks that occur when you slip into an old habit or hit a rough patch in your career. Measuring your EQ scores periodically gives you an appraisal of how much progress you are making in your efforts to master emotional intelligence skills.
Develop Your Own EQ Skills
Would your EQ skills increase even if you never made an effort to develop them? It’s likely that you would acquire constructive insights and behaviors that improve your work performance and relationships. Every training participant who completes an EQ assessment finds that they have some EQ strengths and other EQ development needs. The advantage of getting intentional about developing your EQ skills early in your career is that you will get farther, faster. You will also feel supported by proven EQ practice strategies. Following are eight of the 66 actionable EQ strategies from Emotional Intelligence 2.0, specifically applied to a TD career. They were selected to help you with the emotions, people, and situations you will encounter as a training and development professional. You will also find a tool to help you develop your skills on the handbook website at ATDHandbook3.org.
Develop Self-Awareness Skills
A training and development career places you in a front-row seat to watch and help people at work become more self-aware. Begin a similar process for yourself so you can speak authentically about the experience of becoming more aware of both painful and rewarding insights about how you operate at work.
You will soon discover that self-awareness is a pursuit that involves remaining open to learning about and observing yourself as objectively as possible as you interact with other people, face challenges, and experience the range of emotions that flow through you at work. You will never finish becoming self-aware because it is a continuous journey. Getting in touch with your emotions and tendencies takes courage. Be patient and give yourself time and credit for even the smallest steps forward. Noticing things about yourself that you weren’t previously aware of (even insights you aren’t always going to like) means you are making progress.
Table 10-3. Self-Awareness Strategies for TD Professionals
Quit Treating Your Feelings as Good or Bad (Self-Awareness Strategy 1) | Your emotions and feelings are signals. It’s as simple as that. They’re neither good nor bad. For example, frustration can play a constructive or destructive role in your words and actions, depending on how well you notice and manage it. Tell yourself now that you will quit labeling your feelings as good or bad, and instead, begin listening to your feelings to understand what they are trying to tell you. |
Seek Feedback (Self-Awareness Strategy 14) | Asking those around you for feedback, both people you respect and those who are your critics, will provide the greatest leaps in self-awareness. Anticipate that it will likely sting. Give yourself adequate time to absorb and think through whatever they have to say, and then make your own decisions about what to do with their advice. |
Adapted from Bradberry and Greaves (2009)
Develop Self-Management Skills
Everyone seems to think self-managing means learning to contain their emotions when they are about to explode or to refrain from saying or doing what they really want to say and do. It’s true that self-control in these situations can be the best choice, but there is far more to self-management. Self-managing includes pushing through discomfort to speak up constructively or take action when you really would rather not.
Remember, you will experience emotions before you think or act on them. Self-management takes two steps to read your feelings accurately and then act on them constructively for both your benefit and the benefit of others. This is what sets the best self-managers apart. The self-management strategies recommended here will help you in the moment, over time, and over the course of your career.
Table 10-4. Self-Management Strategies for TD Professionals
Breathe Right (Self-Management Strategy 1) | Take deep breaths to allow your mind to begin calming down, lowering your heart rate and blood pressure. Breathe in slowly through your nose. Fill your chest and relax your belly to fill that too. Then slowly release all the air through your mouth before beginning again slowly. You’ll get better on the second and third time. Apply liberally throughout your career and life. |
Take Control of Your Self-Talk (Self-Management Strategy 9) | Turn your ear inward to hear the messages you are telling yourself. Are they kind and supportive? Or are they critical and self-defeating? The more situation-specific and encouraging you can be internally, the more you can keep trying when the going gets tough. Jot down more supportive phrases and practice saying them to yourself repeatedly until they replace your old negative self-talk. |
Adapted from Bradberry and Greaves (2009)
Develop Social Awareness Skills
If you are working in the field of training and coaching others, you are already stretching your social awareness muscle to focus on the development of others. The question becomes, are you stretching and building this muscle to maximize the outcomes required of you? Take every opportunity to observe learners in all kinds of situations. You may watch a training participant fidgeting or looking lost, or you may be right in the middle of a coaching conversation feeling resistance from the person sitting across from you. Pick up on these types of body language, facial expressions, postures, and tones of voice. Looking outward isn’t just about using your eyes and ears; it means tapping into all your senses. You can absorb deeper information through that sixth sense, your emotions. Your emotions can help you notice and interpret cues other people send you. These cues will give you some help in putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.
Emotions, facial expressions, and some types of body language translate across cultures (Ekman 1971). These are mobilized by the biological aspects of emotions (such as sweating while feeling nervous and micro-expressions that appear on our face). How we express our feelings and body language is also driven by cultural norms, and this does vary depending on whether the culture is that of a team, department, company, or region of the world. Fidgeting while bored may not be visible if self-management skills are uniformly well exercised in the culture you are working in. You can use your social awareness skills across cultures if you work to understand the cultural norms you are operating in. The lens you look through must be clear, so you are able to read what is really going on, not just what you think is going on.
Table 10-5. Social Awareness Strategies for TD Professionals
Clear Away the Clutter (Social Awareness Strategy 7) | Clearing away the clutter means removing all the distractions in your head so you can be present and give your full attention to another person or a group. For a content developer, this means designing learning content for all learning styles, not just your own; or thinking through the rhythms of breaks needed to avoid learner fatigue. For trainers and coaches this means quieting your self-talk and refraining from forming your own response while the other person is still speaking. Shifting your head or body to focus more intently on a person’s face and words can help. |
Catch the Mood in the Room (Social Awareness Strategy 17) | In training and coaching spaces, absorbing the energy and emotions of learners requires seeing and hearing cues such as body language, sound, and tone levels. Notice how many people are participating, as well as their movements and volume, and be sure to tap into how you are feeling as a result. These signals will tell you when to speed up, slow down, take a break, or check in with what is really going on in the learning space. |
Adapted from Bradberry and Greaves (2009)
Develop Relationship Management Skills
All relationships require an investment of attention and energy, even those that seem effortless. Thankfully, relationship management skills can be improved with practice, and they tap into the three other EQ skills. Your self-awareness skills help you notice your feelings and decide if your needs in the relationship are being satisfied. Your self-management skills help you communicate your feelings constructively and act accordingly to benefit the connection. Finally, your social awareness skills help you tune in to the other person’s needs and feelings to better understand where they are coming from and how to meet their needs.
In the end, relationships are essential to fulfilling your career goals—guiding classrooms of people for a day or two; contributing on a team that is developing e-learning content, programs, or job aids; consulting with clients; or virtually coaching people. Because you are half of any working relationship, you have half the responsibility for building and deepening your working relationships over time. Here are two relationship management strategies that will help.
Table 10-6. Relationship Management Strategies for TD Professionals
Take Feedback Well (Relationship Management Strategy 5) | Feedback stings and learning how to absorb it, process it, and do something about it is one of the more important strategies for developing and deepening your relationships. When you receive feedback, consider the source, ask clarifying questions, and ask for examples to fully understand. Thank the person whether you agree or not. Take time to sort out your feelings and thoughts so you can decide what to do about the feedback. |
Acknowledge the Other Person’s Feelings (Relationship Management Strategy 10) | This strategy disarms the people who are skeptical or even resistant to you and your approaches at work. Lean through your discomfort with their skepticism or resistance, and instead acknowledge it with a statement such as, “I see how you’re feeling this way,” or “I want to understand more.” Simple acts like this acknowledge their views or feelings as legitimate without making them a big deal or agreeing with them. |
Adapted from Bradberry and Greaves (2009)
Final Thoughts
People operating with a high emotional intelligence take accountability for their thoughts, feelings, needs, and actions while also doing their part to understand and respond constructively to those of the people around them. Imagine if everyone in an organization was skilled in emotional intelligence. Resilience, adaptability, stress management, difficult conversations, change tolerance, and conflict resolution begin to read as reasonable expectations for everyone. Most people just need help understanding and managing the emotions that will surface along the way. That is where you come in. You play an important role in this TD profession by helping working people expand their EQ skills, know-how, and so much more as they help their organizations grow.
About the Author
Jean Greaves, PhD, has more than 25 years of experience as an author, speaker, master facilitator, and executive coach specializing in emotional intelligence in the workplace. She is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and co-developer of the Emotional Intelligence Appraisal suite of assessments and TalentSmartEQ’s Mastering Emotional Intelligence training programs. Additional books include Leadership 2.0 and The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book. Her next book, to be released in 2022, was a team effort among the subject matter experts at TalentSmartEQ on team emotional intelligence skills and strategies. Jean holds a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology and a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University. Questions for Jean can be sent to [email protected].
References
Bradberry, T., and J. Greaves. 2009. Emotional Intelligence 2.0. San Diego: TalentSmartEQ.
Ekman, P. 1971. Universal and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Goleman, D. 2005. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. New York: Random House.
Mattingly, V., and K. Kraiger. 2019. “Can Emotional Intelligence Be Trained? A Meta-Analytical Investigation.” Human Resource Management Review 29(2): 140–155. doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2018.03.002.
Sault, S. 2021. “Davos Agenda: What You Need to Know About the Future of Work.” World Economic Forum, January 24. weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/davos-agenda-2021-society-and-the-future-of-work-skills-gap-jobs-of-tomorrow-diversity-inclusion-worker-well-being.
World Economic Forum. 2020. The Future of Jobs Report 2020. Cologny, Switzerland: World Economic Forum.
Recommended Resources
Bradberry, T., and J. Greaves. 2009. Emotional Intelligence 2.0. San Diego: TalentSmartEQ.
Goleman, D. 2005. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, 10th anniversary ed. New York: Random House.
Harvard Business Review. 2015. 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
TalentSmart EQ. “Articles.” talentsmarteq.com/articles.
TalentSmart EQ. “EQ Trends.” talentsmarteq.com/EQtrends.