Emotional intelligence is about your self-perceived ability to measure your emotions. The idea that a human’s intelligence is not limited only to the measured IQ is not new. In 1983, Howard Gardner presented the idea of multiple intelligences in “Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences”. He suggested that there are verities of intelligence including:

• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Interpersonal
• Verbal-linguistic
• Logical-mathematical
• Naturalistic
• Intrapersonal
• Visual-spatial
• Musical

Interpersonal intelligence is our capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people. Intrapersonal intelligence is the ability to understand oneself, to appreciate one’s feelings, fears and motivations.

This research was later followed by Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, “Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More Than IQ” which popularised the term and the idea. Emotional Intelligence, or EI, can be defined as follows:

“The ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions”

Salovey and Mayer (1990)

What this means in practice is that when it comes to getting something done, you need to focus on the task as well as on knowing how to interact with other people. As a team, the ability to communicate with others efficiently is of paramount importance, so much so that some like to suggest that lack of communications within a team will lead to disaster no matter how smart the individuals.

EI is a skill that can be learned and like any other skill needs practice and persistence to master. There is a whole science behind measuring EI and since this is an active field, methods are continuously changing. The interested reader is recommended to read Daniel Goleman’s book as a starting point.

In this section, you will explore a few EI related techniques that can help your team to become better at what they do.