Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative.
The philosophical EQ is a measure of capacity and not knowledge. A person can be taught to swim like a fish, act like a fish, and even look like a fish. But a person cannot be taught to be a real fish. You can teach people knowledge, but you can’t teach them how to think. Intuition and empathy are innate feelings. Some people just use them preferably or not over other cognitive tools. They are indeed part of EQ. Intuition, empathy, or sensitivity often cannot be taught. If such attributes cannot be taught, how do you as individuals ever learn or become empathetic?
Empathy is the ability to feel the emotional condition of another from their frame of reference. It is not merely recognizing or caring about their feelings...but internally experiencing their emotional state as they do. We can learn to recognize what sadness, or anger, or happiness look like. We can practice controlling, moderating, or commensurate responses to create a more compatible environment. But, this is not empathy but social awareness. Empathy is feeling their emotional state as if their experiences were your experiences, people are different, they have different characters, personalities, cognitions, priorities, different life experience. Hence, even many leaders or managers have a strong intention to lead, however, they just lack empathy to lead in the right way and often go to the wrong direction.
Perhaps a better measurement of Emotional Intelligence is the person's overall healthiness - how healthy are they emotionally, mentally, physically. We each might have a range of empathy that we are able to truly realize, understand, and exhibit in life, the wisdom can be gained through retrospection, life experience, diligent practices, etc. Using leadership techniques such as empowerment and team engagement to get the maximum from your staff by knowing how to approach them in different situations. All employees need to be motivated by chasing a purpose and not only for profit. EQ helps you achieve this. Each individual has an approximate range of capacity or a personal limit to what they could actually assimilate into a feeling, or truly comprehend, but doesn't all wisdom and understanding begin with recognition? Teaching what you refer to as social awareness helps people become aware of this range of emotion. After they become aware of it, perhaps later down the road they experience a similar situation.
Performance can be based on a number of factors. We can’t assign a percentage to the value of any one of them. For certain situations, emotional IQ may be a significant contributor to the success and for others it may account for a small percentage. In any event, this is also dependent on the people themselves if they have compensating skills which they can draw upon. The judgment may vary from one person to another. The perception is shaped by your own values and experience. Maybe you could think about key facts that are easier to measure and uncontestable.
Higher EQ helps you have an open mind, minimize biases, be cautiously optimistic, be an effective listener and be more creative. All these qualities become critical when you are leading and have to constantly align and motivate people to follow your direction; when you deal with cross functional peers where you do not have authority and be persuasive with other senior managers who have strong opinion about doing things. Higher EQ is not completely equal to political cleverness, especially doesn't mean to tramp down others in order to climb up the narrow corporate ladder, or to win without purpose, principle and professionalism. EQ becomes more critical for leading today’s business dynamic with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity.
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