The Value of Emotional Intelligence

Defined as the ability to manage oneself, emotional intelligence means those possessing it have a strong awareness of their emotions and know how to manage them well. This means not letting negative emotions get in the way of personal effectiveness while simultaneously using positive feelings for motivation. Between continuously strenuous efforts to maintain a strategic place at the C-suite table, prove learning’s effectiveness throughout the enterprise and all of the scuffling for performance and technology leveraging that entails, there are obvious benefits to possessing emotional intelligence for the CLO and for the leaders the CLO is typically charged with developing.

Daniel Goleman, co-director of Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in organizations at Rutgers University and author of Working with Emotional Intelligence, said there are 18 best practices to help teach emotional intelligence and five broad requirements to help people do it effectively. “The first is you need to care. You have to be motivated or you won’t learn this because it takes time and effort. The second step is that you need to get some objective feedback from people who work with you and know you well, whose opinions you trust about what you could do better. Third, you need to reflect on that and pick a learning target, one specific thing and do one skill at a time. Maybe you could be a better listener. People come into your office and you cut them off before they even get the question out. It’s like a common cold in management, listening poorly.”

Goleman said if you decide that you want to get better at listening, you need to think about how you could do it better. It helps to have a model or someone in mind who does that skill very well and see them as the embodiment of your target behavior. “Make a contract with yourself. Say, ‘OK, I’m going to do it like Tom. When someone comes into the office, I’m going to relax. I’m going to give them full attention. I’m going to drop what I’m doing and hear them out and make sure that I understand what they’re saying, what they want and what their issue is. Then I’m going to tell them what I think. Instead of just telling what I think before I really know what’s on their mind.’