Emotional Intelligence

What it is and why it may be more important than IQ.

Nov 07, 2025

smiley ball — Photo by chaitanya pillala on Unsplash

Emotional Intelligence (EI) broke into the public consciousness in the 1990s though it had been around as a concept for a few decades prior. Today it is becoming recognised as a skillset which has more importance in many areas than technical ability.

Harvard Business School define EI as,

the ability to understand and manage your emotions, as well as recognise and influence the emotions of those around you.

However, there is much more to EI than a short definition. Peter Salovey and John Mayer are two researchers who are said to have coined the phrase “Emotional Intelligence” in their research in 1990. They developed a model representing EI in four branches: perceive, use, understand, and manage. Perceiving emotions is to accurately identify emotions, including non-verbal cues, sarcasm, and tone of voice. Using emotions in a way that helps rather than hinders, aids our thinking rather than shuts it down. The next branch is understanding the emotion and why it is being shown. Finally, managing emotions is about regulating your own emotions and responding both to your own and others emotions appropriately.1

Professor Daniel Goleman, famous for his book Emotional Intelligence published in 1995, built off the work of Salovey and Mayer. He now discusses EI in terms of 4 domains and 12 competencies. Self Awareness, Self Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Management.

These four domains are all commonly used and generally accepted as positive attributes, however they are also often regarded as “soft” skills and not necessarily prioritised when thinking about job applications and interviews. While many leadership courses do include some aspect of EI, many leaders, or those aspiring to leadership, would prioritise getting things done and the relational stuff as nice optional additions.

“I don’t feel the need nor have the time to put niceties into my email, I just want them to get a task done.”

The comment above was made by someone in a leadership position while being asked about their behaviour towards another member of the organisation I was part of. The “soft” skill of making a request rather than a demand of a colleague wasn’t seen as important. Being pulled up on their communication style when the working relationship broke down was deflected as the other person’s problem.

Self awareness and the ability to recognise the impact of one’s actions on another along with motivation to tailor communication to improve relationships are all a part of EI.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring how each of the four domains of EI can be developed and strengthened over time. This week I wanted to explore the research around EI/EQ and why intellect (IQ) being the main means of assessment in education or job interviews is misguided.

One of my more frustrated memories from my teaching career was a disagreement I had with a head of year who challenged my feedback for one of my students in my year 9 tutor group. In the UK, student grade targets are often set by using year 6 and 7 assessments and mapped out through to year 11 as to what that student should be achieving in their GCSEs. I won’t get into the background of just how arbitrary these targets really are, but my student wasn’t achieving these targets in several of her classes.

However, I had noticed every single one of the teacher’s comments were glowing - she worked well with others, she worked hard and she completed homework on time, she listened well, she interacted well with staff, she was a joy to teach. I knew, as her tutor since year 7, that she’d come a long way and developed what I’d now describe as emotional intelligence that surpassed many of her peers.

If you’ve ever taught a year 9 class, you might not think that high praise, but, she stood out in way that if it was intellectual prowess, she’d be put into a gifted and talented group. So my feedback to her was to say well done and keep doing what she was doing. My head of year said I needed to highlight she wasn’t achieving her targets. The implication, I felt, was that working hard and working well with others just isn’t good enough.

I still think of that moment as a lightbulb moment for me that the education system isn’t working for a significant number of people. It also highlights that our education system hasn’t caught up with the research that EI is just as vital a skill for kids to learn, if not more so, than being able to regurgitate information.

The students that were the most fun to teach, and I think most likely to be successful in life beyond school, weren’t always the ones who were great at maths or computing (the topics I taught). They were the ones who showed qualities of EI, like self awareness, humility, social awareness, and empathy, and an ability to avoid the social dramas that are an everyday occurrence in a secondary school.

Interestingly, the science bears this out - that EI is a differentiator in whether someone will be successful beyond their childhood. A 40-year study of 1000 children in New Zealand with 95% of the original cohort staying the course, has shown that temperance and self-control improve the likelihood of better outcomes in later life2.

In business and leadership, there seems to be general agreement that EI is important. Richard Branson on a LinkedIn Q&A was asked what was more important, IQ or EQ.

“In short, I think being emotionally intelligent is more important in every aspect of life – and this includes business. Being a good listener, finding empathy, understanding emotions, communicating effectively, treating people well, and bringing out the best is critical to success. It will also help you build a business that really understands people and solve their problems, and it will make for a happier and healthier team too.” Richard Branson.

Despite this consensus, there are still many people experiencing poor leadership and management from leaders whose opinions of themselves are distinctly different from those they lead. Tasha Eurich’s research articulated in her book Insight: The Surprising Truth About How Others See Us, How We See Ourselves, and Why the Answers Matter More Than We Think, found that “95 percent of people believe they are self-aware, but the real number is 12 to 15 percent, that means, on a good day, about 80 percent of people are lying about themselves—to themselves.”3

Positions of leadership seem to make this overconfidence worse.4

We have a problem then that while most people will verbally agree that EI is important and that studies agree that EI is a positive both for individual success but also for society generally, we are mostly pretty bad at it!

However, unlike IQ which is pretty static, EI can be learned and bad habits can be unlearned.

This is where, I believe, coaching can help. A good coach will push back on overconfidence and unrealistic self-assessment. Cognitive-behavioural solution-focused coaching helps build resilience, goal attainment, and overall wellbeing in the workplace5. Resilience being particularly necessary to handle critical feedback that is vital for accurate self awareness. Having someone reflect back how you behave and communicate in an honest but non-judgemental setting can really make a difference.

Even if you don’t want coaching, you can still learn these skills! So, in the next few posts over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring ways we can develop our EI in all its domains and in all areas of our lives.

You can explore the next post in the series below:

Self Awareness

Phil Duncalfe

November 21, 2025

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