The fad of EQ

I apologize for the hiatus, but I just didn't have any inspiration and did not want to fill this blog with drivel. Fortunately, the world of social science research has come to my aid, and as such, follows my rant.

It seems these days all people in the business world and certainly in HR can talk about is the prevalence and importance of EQ, and the development of this new aspect of intelligence in our employees and leaders. In fact, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review this month, a couple professors from a US university took to studying the brain of business managers while they are attempting to resolve complex hypothetical situations. They had assumed that the main aspects of the brain being used would be the ones that process information and higher level thinking, when in fact, the brain would go so far as to block off that part of the brain in their best performing subjects to allow more energy to go to the instinctual and emotional parts of the brain.

Amazing, no?

I tried to find the original study but a publication is not even posted on the university website. But I'd like to offer my two cents anyway. The thing is that at this day and age, no self respecting HR person can come out and say that EQ does not matter. It would be ludicrous, as there actually is quite a bit of research that supports that having EQ, especially in a management role, can increase morale and make your employees work harder for you. It improves your ability to communicate with employees as well.

That said, however. To say that in a strategic situation, EQ is MORE important than IQ, even with MRI results to back you up, are absurd. First of all, the study is not even peer reviewed, hell, it's not even posted! Secondly, what the article claims is that "when we examined the best strategic performers in our sample, we found significantly less neural activity in the prefrontal cortex than in the areas associated with “gut” responses, empathy, and emotional intelligence." However, no explanation is made for what constitutes a top performer. Not only would any HR person tell you that you can't rank employees without a benchmark or some previously outlined expectation, any scientist would tell you such parameters are vital to both making sense of the results and having validity with the scientific community.

Bottom line is that a good manager knows how to balance his or her IQ and EQ in a contextual, case by case basis. Rather than repressing their logic to best address "a hypothetical situation" (of which no details were given). Which is something I think the researchers backed up to saying by the end, but certainly not what they were spinning from the so-called results of the study.