Emotional Intelligence

How Do You Feel?

"Emotional intelligence" is starting to find its way into companies, offering employees a way to come to terms with their feelings -- and to perform better. But as the field starts to grow, some worry that it could become just another fad.

From: Issue 35| June 2000 | Page 296 By: Tony Schwartz Illustrations by: Cynthia Von Buhler

Appreciation, apprehension, defensiveness, inadequacy, intimidation, resentment. Twenty midlevel executives at American Express Financial Advisors are gathered in a room at a conference center outside Minneapolis. Each has been asked to try to convey a specific emotion -- by reading a particular statement aloud. The challenge for listeners is to figure out which emotion each speaker is trying to evoke. It seems like a relatively straightforward exercise but only a fraction of the group comes anywhere close to correctly identifying speakers' emotions.

"I sometimes wish I had a corporate decoder for each relationship," one woman laments. "It's very hard to know what people are feeling in my office and how I should respond." Her comment prompts a discussion about the difficulty in the workplace of finding a balance between reasonable openness and respectful discretion.

"When one of my direct reports starts talking to me about her medical problems, I don't want to be unsympathetic, but it makes me very uncomfortable," says a male department head. "I find myself joking by saying to her, 'Too much information.' But I'm not really sure how to get the message across."

Conversations like that one, focusing on the importance of emotions in the workplace, are occurring with greater frequency in all kinds of American companies. Inside American Express, training sessions on emotional competence take place at the Minneapolis facility several dozen times a year. An unlikely pioneer in the field of emotional competence, AmEx launched its first experimental program in 1992. An eight-hour version of the course is now required of all of its new financial advisers, who help clients with money management. During a four-day workshop, 20 participants are introduced to a range of topics that comprise an emotional-competence curriculum, including such fundamental skills as self-awareness, self-control, reframing, and self-talk.

Much of that material represents new territory for these businesspeople. "The majority of those we work with are very cognitive and not very experienced with emotions," explains Darryl Grigg, a psychologist who practices in Vancouver, British Columbia and conducts about 20 workshops each year for AmEx and other organizations. "We're introducing people to a whole new language."

Most attendees of these emotional-competence workshops are compelled to learn a new language for one simple reason: They're visiting a foreign land. Over the past 50 years, large companies have embraced a business dictum that told workers to check their emotions at the door. A legacy from the days of "The Organization Man" and "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," this never-spoken but widely shared policy reflected the sensibility that frowned on employees who brought messy emotions and troubling personal issues to work.

Employees, for their part, complied with that prevailing mind-set. Until recently, the workplace was dominated by male employees -- and most of them were just as eager as their employers were to avoid the ambiguous complications and unexplored terrain of personal feelings.

One notable exception to that tacit pact occurred in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the influence of the human-potential movement prompted a brief corporate romance with such experiential techniques as sensitivity training and encounter groups. But those approaches lacked the rigor to endure. Before long, business got back to business. A backlash set in, and the focus returned to no-nonsense training methods that were highly quantifiable, happily free of emotions, and demonstrably able to produce results that would show up on the bottom line.

Today, more than 20 years later, companies in a variety of industries are once again exploring the role of emotions in business. This renewed interest in self-awareness is, in part, the result of the rising corporate power of baby boomers. The increasing presence of women in the workplace and the higher comfort level they bring to the territory of emotions have also nudged companies in this direction. And the arrival of the new economy has made companies realize that what they need from their workers goes beyond hands, bodies, and eight-hour days.

While the field of emotional competence appears to have emerged overnight, it has, in fact, been 15 years in the making. In 1985, Reuven Bar-On, 56, a psychologist who practices in Israel, first coined the term "emotional quotient," or EQ. Bar-On had moved to Israel at age 20 and became interested in the field while studying for his PhD in South Africa. "My simple -- almost simplistic -- question in the beginning was, 'Are there factors that determine one's ability to be effective in life?' " he explains. "Very quickly, I saw that people can have very high IQs, but not succeed. I became interested in the basic differences between people who are more or less emotionally and socially effective in various parts of their lives -- in their families, with their partners, in the workplace -- and those who aren't." For his thesis, Bar-On identified a series of factors that seemed to influence such success. He then developed a tool that assessed strengths or deficits, based on those factors.

A diminutive, bearded man with a genial style, Bar-On, now a research fellow at Haifa University, is a meticulous researcher who has gathered more scientifically validated data worldwide about emotional intelligence than anyone in his field has. His work has recently focused on developing EQ "profiles," which reveal the specific competencies that characterize high performers in a range of professions. In 1996, he launched the EQI, a self-administered test designed to assess specific emotional competencies. Companies and organizations, ranging from the Bank of Montreal to Fannie Mae to the Toronto Maple Leafs, have used the EQi for employee development. "To measure emotional intelligence is to measure one's ability to cope with daily situations and to get along in the world," argues Bar-On, whose test is marketed through Toronto-based Multi-Health Systems. "I've conceptualized emotional intelligence as another way of getting at human effectiveness."

But if Bar-On pioneered the field,