High Emotional Intelligence Can Help You Land an Executive Job

Hard skills will always be an important consideration in hiring. But people with superior so-called “soft” skills, or Emotional Intelligence/Emotional Quotient (EI/EQ), are becoming more sought after.

What Is Emotional Intelligence?

Daniel Goleman, psychologist, author and thought leader on Emotional Intelligence, describes the 12 Competencies of Emotional Intelligence:

Self-Awareness

Emotional Self-Awareness is the ability to know your own emotions and their effects on your performance.

Self-Management

Self-Regulate is the ability to keep your disruptive emotions and impulses in check in order to maintain your effectiveness under stressful or even hostile conditions.

Positivity is the ability to see the best in people, situations, and events so you can be persistent in pursuing goals despite setbacks and obstacles.

Achieve means that you strive to meet or exceed a standard of excellence by embracing challenges, taking calculated risks and looking for ways to do things better.

Adaptability means you can stay focused on your goals, but easily adjust how you get there. You remain flexible in the face of change can juggle multiple demands, and are open to new situations, ideas or innovative approaches.

Social Awareness

Empathy means you have the ability to sense others’ feelings; have a desire to understand how they see things; and take an active interest in their concerns.

Organizational Awareness is the ability to read a group’s emotional currents and power relationships, identifying influencers, networks, and the dynamics that matter in decision-making.

Relationship Management

Influence refers to the ability to have a positive impact on others and meaningfully engage people in order to get buy-in or gain their support.

Coach is the ability to further the learning or development of others by understanding their goals, challenging them, giving them timely feedback, and offering them support.

Inspire is the ability to bring your best and motivate others around a shared mission or purpose in order to get the job done.

Teamwork is the ability to work with others toward a shared goal; build spirit and positive relationships; encourage active participation; and share responsibility and rewards among members of a group.

Conflict Management is the ability to work through tense or highly charged situations by tactfully bringing disagreements into the open, seeking to understand multiple perspectives, and searching for common ground in order to find solutions people can agree to.
And now.

Psychology Today describes the importance of Emotional Intelligence:

“Emotional intelligence inspires collaboration, facilitates trust in relationships, and allows a person to help and empower others. The insight gained from emotionally intelligent tendencies often promotes personal growth and happiness. Understanding what EQ looks like in “real life” may help a person continue to cultivate these qualities.

What Companies Want Most in a CEO: A Good Listener

According to a Harvard Business School article, “social skills” are in high demand:

Demand for these skills has been on the rise for decades across all spectrums of management, but they are most highly valued in CEO candidates.

While corporations still require top executive candidates to possess “concrete” skills, such as financial expertise, administrative and operational experience, and technical knowledge, the demand for these skills has remained static or has declined in recent years. In contrast, demand for social skills has jumped significantly.

Past generations of CEOs might have tapped a smaller cadre of advisers or made decisions unilaterally, but today’s leaders must gather more input and buy-in from a larger and more diverse range of experts to achieve corporate goals and solve increasingly difficult problems. Broad changes in the nature of work conducted globally require different managerial capabilities, especially at the top of organizations.

The research shows that executive recruiters and other hiring professionals want candidates with social skills who can:

• actively listen to others;
• empathize genuinely with others’ experiences;
• persuade people to work toward a common goal;
• and communicate clearly or “touch the chords of listeners.”

How Emotional Intelligence Relates To Personal Branding

EI/EQ is directly related to personal branding. Job seekers have always been wise to highlight the personal traits that indicate how they work with people and how they operate. Personality is important to employers. Branding is all about personality.

Forbes senior contributor Jack Kelly found that Emotional Intelligence was a common theme in hiring criteria among hiring managers, recruiters and talent acquisition professionals:

“Emotional intelligence or emotional quotient (EI/EQ) is generally viewed as the ability to be aware, manage and express your emotions. You approach relationships and work-related interactions in an empathetic manner. People who have EQ tend to be emotionally aware and sensitive to the feelings of others. This quality helps effectively solve problems in a compassionate manner. Possessing an emotional intelligence trait equips a person to treat others with compassion, understanding, respect and kindness.”

Traditionally, EI/EQ factored little or not at all into hiring. Pedigree was the thing. Kelly notes that could explain why “so many companies are rife with cut-throat, toxic co-workers and bosses.”

High emotional intelligence people often earn more

According to Kelly:

“It’s reported that workers with high EQ tend to make better decisions, maintain their cool under pressure and stress, deftly resolve conflicts, respond positively to constructive feedback, work well with others and demonstrate leadership abilities. Additionally, high EQ people tend to do well and advance within organizations. A survey conducted by TalentSmart, showed ‘90% of the top performers were high in emotional intelligence, with a higher average income per year.'”

How To Communicate Your Emotional Intelligence on the Page

You know you have the EI qualities employers are looking for, but how do you convey that in writing in your job search materials (resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters, biography, etc.)?

Here are two suggestions:

1. Use storytelling to demonstrate how you operate

Develop concise stories around a few successful relevant projects you steered. The Challenge – Action(s) – Result(s) or C-A-Rs exercise will help you:

CHALLENGE

What was the specific CHALLENGE (or Situation) facing the company and/or your team? Were you/the company facing particularly difficult odds with this situation? What were the stakes?

ACTION(s)

What specific ACTION(s) did you take to meet the challenge and improve things (whatever the goal was or whatever needed turning around)?

RESULT(s)

What were the long and short term RESULT(s) that positively impacted the company? Did you meet the goal, improve things, and/or turn around the situation? How long did it take to see the results? Monetize the results and/or use metrics whenever possible – NUMBERS TALK!

2. Use quotes from others about your EI

One of the best ways to back up your claims about your EI is by including strong recommendations from people you work with that speak to those skills.

Here are a few ways to get and use recommendations:

• Get feedback from those who know your personality best and how you work.
• Ask people to write you a LinkedIn recommendation. Think about writing one for them first. They’ll be more likely to write one for you.
• Look at any accolades you already have in writing, from your performance reviews, customer feedback, etc. Insert some of the best of them into your resume, LinkedIn profile, cover letters and biography.

Career Professionals Discuss Emotional Intelligence

Nicole Rossilli, Senior Director of Marketing at Compliance Search Group shared Kelly’s article in a LinkedIn update. Some career professionals weighed in:

Executive career strategist Maureen McCann

I’m not sure hiring people with high EI/EQ is new or the result of the pandemic. EQ was popularized by Dr. Daniel Goleman in the 1990’s. His research found people with high EI brought with them self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.

To Jack Kelly’s point, I believe these are skills organizations have always needed from employees. Maybe now it’s just a little more obvious than before?

Executive career coach Dorothy Dalton

Organisations and hiring managers have been slow to value soft skills which is why we have so many poor leaders and made some terrible hiring decisions. I have always said that soft skills are the cement that hold all the other skills together.

Hard skills become outdated but soft skills don’t. They are behind all human interaction and relationship building. Glad that hiring managers are waking up finally.

Careers industry advocate Marie Zimenoff

EI in leadership is critical, especially now. Being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is required to persuade or motivate, provide meaningful feedback, and so many other important leadership activities. Especially when all this has to be done virtually and people are dealing with so much.

Career coach Bob McIntosh

Two of the most important traits of emotional intelligence (EQ) are self-awareness and empathy, the first of which is internal facing, the second external facing. Without both what you have are people who can’t grow as employees. They make for difficult people with whom to interact, including not only managers but also fellow colleagues.

As Jack Kelly said in his article, employers will hire “rock stars” disregarding a candidate’s ability to manage oneself and others. This ends up biting them in the ass when they realize the rock stars can be difficult with whom to work. High achievers will possess high IQ and EQ. I might argue that EQ is the most important of the two.

Career pivot strategist Marc Miller

Years ago when I worked for IBM on a large hardware and software development project I had a discussion with my boss about whom to hire out of college. Back in those days IBM only hired new college graduates.

I told him I would rather hire someone with a 3.0-grade point average rather than someone with a 4.0. He looked at me funny and asked why.

I told him that when I was in college, from which I had graduated about 5 years earlier, the 3.0 had friends and knew how to get along with people, but the 4.0 was usually constantly competing to get the A and had no social life. I had learned on my first project that how people got along was far more important than anything else. Therefore, I would prefer to hire the person with the lower grade point average.

Career transition coach Gina Riley

Here is one takeaway, from the cited TalentSmart survey that indicated ’emotional intelligence also accounted for up to 60% of the job performance for supervisors through CEOs.’

80% of our skills are transferrable and largely soft skills – the key is for hiring teams to learn effective Behavioral Interviewing techniques and practice how to ask the right questions & probe, vs. taking canned questions off the shelf and expect to learn anything about a prospective candidate.

Candidates would be wise to gather stories about HOW and WHY they do what they do.

Communication coach Sarah Elkins

Emotionally intelligent people are usually very good at encouraging others, helping build confidence, which is a key aspect of managing and developing people.

One of the biggest frustrations in my career has been working with people who had little EQ, but who were never confronted, despite the cost to productivity, turnover, and disengagement.

Career coach Sonal Bahl

I really, really hope it’s not THAT new to see recruiters look for high EQ. There’s research from years and years ago that proves that EQ is THE differentiator. Those with high EQ actually perform better at:
-Sales
-Leadership
-Work and relationships in general
If some managers are waking up to this fact now, well, it’s never too late and I’m glad to hear it. About time!

Job search strategist Jon Shields

[As Kelly stated] “Many companies demonstrate a preference for hiring so-called ‘rock stars’ who are borderline lunatics, but are given a pass because they bring in revenue or perform a function that’s in strong demand.” I think these people also cause high turnover rates and cultivate a cancerous, stressful culture. We’re all just trying to make a living here and it’s not worth it.

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