Emotional intelligence and productivity - is there a relationship between them?

Emotional Intelligence (EQ), although a long-known concept, rarely engages in the recruiting processes, but our lives, our decisions and our relationship to work are deeply permeated by our emotions. Employers are primarily looking for skills, work experience and rationality of their employees, and they are much more interested in IQ than EQ. It is true, the latter is much harder to describe by numbers.

Sometimes we are truly blissed, feeling released, like happiness is shining through everything. At other times, we look at the world calmly, with peaceful serenity.  But we can be bored as well, indifferent or sad, and sometimes anger just boils in us. Our feelings influence our decisions, our actions, and they also impact our work. In a good mood our work is more efficient and we will have a positive effect on our colleagues as well.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions and the emotions of others.

At first glance, this does not have much to do with a production process and is not necessarily essential for effective work, but in reality, it is often a crucial factor, especially for executives.

Apart from work, it is easily observable that cheerful, lively people make us comfortable to be around with while we become tense being around nervous and tense ones. At the workplace, these effects are more pronounced, especially when it comes to leaders. The personality and emotional maturity of the leaders determines the mood of the subordinates and the atmosphere of the workplace.

A difficile co-worker can cause a lot of damage in the former achieved results, but managers with low emotional intelligence are the ones subordinates almost running away from.

Nevertheless, most of the applications do not place much emphasis on applicants' EQ level, and in many cases they do not even deal with it at all. Since the results of companies have been shown through financial and production data, it is understandable when these companies expect candidates to be efficient, reasonable, and well qualified and they ignore the emotional development of the individual.

However, high emotional intelligence helps to prevent and manage conflicts, reduce fluctuation, accelerate and smoothen the introduction of innovations, and creates an atmosphere of the workplace that noticeably improves productivity as well.

Measuring EQ is not easy, but there are a number of methods and techniques available. Some of them are simple tricks: trying to shift the candidate out of their role while monitoring them to see if they are still able to  smile and get the message or not. One of the great advantage of group exercises is that while candidates are concentrating on solving a given problem, they tend to forget to think about their behaviour, revealing their characteristic traits during the task. In playful tasks, it quickly turns out who is the initiator, who is the authoritarian personality, who seeks compromise, who takes into account the interests of others and who is in the background, avoiding conflicts. Some well-constructed situational games will reliably indicate who can be a good leader and who can be a good co-worker.

Fortunately, emotional intelligence is a skill what we can develop effectively.

With targeted trainings, the recognition and proper handling of feelings can be learned and practiced. This can greatly improve the acceptance and results of leaders. An excellent book on Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace (in Hungarian) was published by SHL Books.