BUILD-OUT 1: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Arriving in 1995, Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence:Why It May be More Important than IQ,2 could be considered the first step in bringing the MI concept out of the academic realm and into the lives of ordinary civilians. One could argue that most of the "self help” literature has dealt with EI in some form or another, but Emotional Intelligence deserves credit for crystallizing the idea of an “intelligence” as a useful focus of attention in the popular culture. Goleman’s book became a best seller and very quickly gained a following in the business sector. Executives, personnel managers, trainers, consultants, coaches, and a whole population of human performance practitioners jumped on the wagon and began to sell their services to businesses. Conferences, seminars, books, training materials, and websites sprang up to carry the EI build-out forward. Goleman’s first attempts to frame a practical model of EI identified five dimensions of competence:
1. Self-awareness.
2. Self-regulation.
3. Motivation.
4. Empathy.
5. Relationships.
One of Goleman’s five dimensions, however—the relationship dimension—seemed to stretch the model and the concept beyond its practical boundaries.The four primary competencies do clearly identify The Possible Human 33 elements of the internal emotional landscape, which influence one’s behavior in fundamental ways. And certainly they influence in a very fundamental way a person’s capacity to interact well with others. But trying to force-fit social competence into an already broad model of emotional competence seemed to risk doing too little with too much. Indeed, as previously explained, Professor Gardner clearly separates them in his formulation: he posits an intrapersonal intelligence (emotional intelligence), for all practical purposes, and an interpersonal intelligence—competency in human situations. The value of this clearer delineation of concepts seems to lie in the opportunity to coordinate and inter-relate them, rather than trying to squash them all into a single conceptual container. Goleman and others eventually evolved a conceptual structure for EI that attempted to balance EI and SI, although still trying to keep them fused together under one “brand” name.This dual-concept framework subdivided each of the two dimensions into two sub-scales— awareness and control. The emotional dimension broke down into self-awareness and self-control (or self-management), while the social dimension broke down into social awareness and management of one’s interactions with others. As of this writing, the majority of EI practitioners seem to embrace this four-quadrant view, insisting for the most part that the EI umbrella adequately incorporates the social component and that there is no need for a separately identified dimension of social intelligence. However, Goleman himself has apparently rethought his own approach to EI, and practitioners in the field may have to make some adjustments if they want to stay aligned with the “Vatican view.”