keymodels
Emotional intelligence
How can emotional intelligence support strategic choice or positioning?
Contents
American psychologist Daniel Goleman combined two early models of emotional intelligence to create the best known version, which has four main components: self-awareness,...
Emotional intelligence concerns how accurately people perceive emotion, use emotional information, regulate their own responses and manage relationships. Daniel Goleman popularised a workplace version organised around self-awareness, social awareness, self-regulation and relationship management, with motivation often added as a supporting competency.
When to use it
- Develop emotional intelligence as an ongoing capability, not a technique switched on for difficult conversations.
- Examine effective relationships to identify behaviours already working.
- When a relationship is strained, review each domain and choose one behaviour you can change.
- Do not wait for the other person to change first; adapt without abandoning legitimate boundaries.
Origins
Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer established the modern scientific construct in an article published in nineteen ninety, defining abilities concerned with perceiving, regulating and using emotion. Daniel Goleman’s mid-nineteen-nineties book brought the term to a broad audience and later adapted it into a workplace competency model. Ability EI and broader mixed models overlap, but they are not the same measure and should not be treated as interchangeable.
What it is
The four-domain workplace model asks two questions: whose emotion is being understood—self or others—and whether the focus is awareness or action. High performance requires integration rather than a single “EQ score.”
How to use it
The framework can be represented as follows:
| Self | Others | |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness | Self-awareness How well do I understand my own emotions, behavioural drivers, moods and my effect on other people? To what extent am I able to follow my gut instinct in decision making? 1 | Social awareness How well do I understand what drives other people to act and feel as they do? 2 |
| Actions | Self-regulation To what extent do I control my behaviours, exercise self-control and adapt them appropriately? 3 | Relationship management How do I use my self-awareness, social awareness and self-regulation in order to develop the best relationships with others, showing empathy, building bonds and communicating effectively? 4 |
Begin with self-awareness, box 1. Notice emotional triggers, bodily signals, recurring interpretations and the effect of your words and actions. Seek specific feedback, use a 360° process where appropriate and compare intention with observed impact.
Develop social awareness, box 2 by listening, observing context and checking interpretations. Empathy means understanding another perspective; it does not require agreement or mind-reading.
Practise self-regulation, box 3 by creating a pause between feeling and action, naming the choice available and selecting a response consistent with values and objectives. Suppressing every emotion is not regulation.
Use relationship management, box 4 to communicate, resolve conflict, influence ethically, build trust and adjust delivery to the other person’s needs.
Change one habit at a time. The popular claim that a habit forms in 21 days arose from Maxwell Maltz’s observation that some patients took around 21 days to adjust after surgery, not from a universal behavioural law. Continue deliberate practice until the response becomes reliable in the relevant context.
Increase awareness by interrupting routine: vary a journey, speak with different colleagues, read competing viewpoints, notice unfamiliar details or listen to different sources. The purpose is not novelty for its own sake, but restoring attention to signals automatic behaviour ignores.
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