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The general agreement among human capital experts is that technical skills account for roughly 10 percent of a manager’s success.
Hitting quarterly projections and delivering exceptional products or services is significantly affected by factors such as relationship management, resilience and social awareness — in short, emotional intelligence. Of course, this seems logical. Well, if it is, should these skills associated with emotional intelligence be management prerequisites?
What is critical to leadership excellence? Staying aware of and managing change. Daniel Goleman, a pioneer in the area of emotional intelligence encourages focus on remaining aware of constant change and reacting or behaving accordingly — exhibiting behavior that is aligned appropriately with each situation. This requires social-emotional vigilance.
Work teams with high emotional awareness and strong management skills achieve more positive results because of improved ability to exchange information, problem-solve respectfully to make decisions and engage in productive conflict negotiation. The combination of exceptional emotional awareness and management capability is what drives positive business results.
There is mounting evidence that emotional intelligence is a factor distinguishing the best business leaders from the rest of the pack.
Examining effectiveness of management teams in Fortune 500 companies, the late David McClelland found that when senior managers had high emotional intelligence capabilities, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20 percent. In a review of the U.S. Air Force recruiter performance, recruiters with high emotional intelligence scores, exceeded 100 percent of their annual recruitment quotas. Recruiters with low emotional intelligence met less than 80 percent of their quotas. In 1998 when the Air Force started considering emotional intelligence in the selection of recruiters, financial losses (because of recruitment mismatches) were cut by 92 percent, or almost $2.8 million.
– Kim Morris Lee
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