What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Janan Ganesh has always and notably been one of the smartest columnists around. He is more liberal than conservative, but he writes very well and wisely. Last weekend he opined about emotional intelligence in the pages of the Financial Times. Link unavailable.

Ganesh considers emotional intelligence, supposedly the secret sauce that improves all management relations, to be something of a scam. It has been overhyped, and granted powers that it should not be granted.

The more that emo­tional intel­li­gence is exal­ted — in the work­place, in private rela­tion­ships — the slop­pier its usage becomes. It now appears to mean something like being nice and sym­path­etic (a word that itself has got con­flated with empath­etic). 

He does not say so, but one suspects that companies emphasize the importance of emotion because they are becoming more motherly. After all, the greatest degree of emotional intelligence, aka empathy, belongs to new mothers, who use it to deal with infants who cannot articulate their needs.

Anyway, imagine that you are at a party and that you want to read the room. You try to tell who feels mad, sad, bad or glad. Presumably, you know whether you feel mad, sad, bad or glad about those whose feelings you have successfully read.

The problems leap off the page. If you know that a man is mad you do not know who he is mad at, and why he is mad. His anger may or may not have anything to do with you. And even if you know that he is angry because he saw you trying to seduce his wife or because he has just run into his therapist, you still do not, on the basis of your reading of the emotion, know what to do about it.

Should you ignore it? What makes you think that it’s your business?  Should you seduce and manipulate him in order to exploit him? Or should you motivate him to do a better job?

Developing a plan, articulating a strategy, proposing tactics-- these have nothing to do with whether or not you feel your or anyone else’s feelings.

Strictly speaking, reading emotions is not the same as knowing who you are dealing with or knowing the specifics of the situation at hand. Nor does it tell you anything about the nature of the relationship you have with the person. 

Ganesh offers the example of a literary character who possesses superior emotional intelligence. He chooses Iago, from Shakespeare’e Othello. 

[Iago] senses: the sexual para­noia of his boss, the neg­lected feel­ing of his own wife, the romantic des­per­a­tion of a local chump called Roderigo, the mix of ambi­tion and chiv­al­ric hon­our in a fel­low sol­dier.

Iago has more than the reg­u­lar quo­tient of evil. But that alone wouldn’t get him far. His real advant­age is, if we use this term with rigour, emo­tional intel­li­gence.

The character uses his emotional intelligence to advance his personal goal, his vendetta against Othello. Nothing about his mind reading tells him how to formulate or to implement his plan. 

In and of itself, emotional intelligence does not make you a great manager or even a great seducer. Clearly, as Ganesh points out, it is not morally positive. One may certainly use emotional intelligence to manipulate and to destroy people. 

This shouldn’t need say­ing, but people of genius-level EQ include con artists, pick-up artists, stand-up comedi­ans, spies, abus­ive part­ners and, from double-glaz­ing show­rooms to the plushest invest­ment bank trad­ing floor, sales staff. Emo­tional intel­li­gence is what tells you, in a work meet­ing, that a col­league who keeps touch­ing their face and sip­ping water is nervous about speak­ing. 

Whether you then use that inform­a­tion to soothe them, or to ask them a tough ques­tion in front of the oth­ers, well, that is a test of your con­science — not your emo­tional intel­li­gence.

It is a test of your tactical abilities, your sense of the meeting, your understanding of the other people who are there. In my view it is not about conscience, which involves one’s moral sense.

Strikingly, emotional intelligence seems highly suited to a therapy culture. Therapists will happily tell you that they are enhancing your emotional intelligence, and thus making you healthier, wealthier and wiser. They give you a skill that might be valuable at the poker table and pretend that it will solve all of your problems. They will make you self-aware, and will teach you how to manage your emotions. 

And yet, if you want to improve your chess game, getting in touch with your feelings will be a small part of the process. The real work involves endless practice sessions, analyzing situations and strategizing. If you are introspecting about your feelings or are trying to read your opponent’s feelings, you are not going to be a very good chess player.

The greatest chess players tend not to be in touch with their feelings. They tend to be socially maladroit. They are more often male, than female. They do not read emotions, but read positions and pieces on the board. 

True enough, we agree that a good player will manage his emotions. He will avoid the psychodrama and stick to the task at hand. In the best circumstances he will not cultivate his emotional intelligence, but will rise above it.

The manager who spends more time devising the best policy, more time and energy working through all of the options and alternatives, will discover that other people might well accept it because… it is evidently excellent. 

Surely, when a manager presents a new project and sees his staff express serious disdain for it, that might also mean that he needs to reconfigure the specifications. It is hardly a difficult thing to read rejection-- any stand-up comedian can do it-- but one should solve the problem by working harder, not by feeling more deeply. And, one should not try to solve the problem by trying to manipulate the audience’s emotions.

When it came to getting good advice, Ganesh turned, at a crucial moment in his career, to a Tory MP, a man who had a decided lack of emotional intelligence:

Long ago, when I had to decide whether to join the FT from a no less com­fort­able nest, the most pen­et­rat­ing giver of advice, the per­son who best intu­ited my inner state, was someone who is now an MP viewed across Bri­tain as the arche­type of Tory arrog­ance and gauche­ness. The pub­lic per­cep­tion might be cor­rect. But those flaws didn’t stop him divin­ing another per­son’s anxi­et­ies and motiv­a­tions with almost a nov­el­ist’s anten­nae.

I would revise this slightly. The man might have had a better sense of the reality of the situation, a better sense of the good and bad in each decision. He was a politician. Divining someone’s anxieties is hardly foolproof. It might suggest that one option is more dangerous, but better, or perhaps, more dangerous, but worse.

Those who give the best advice tend to be less emotional and more attuned to the real situation. Rather than ask for advice from a kindly empathetic soul, Ganesh discovered that someone who is detached and cynical will probably have a better grasp of reality.

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