It's not the usual way of thinking about it, e.g. academic smarts, or IQ; it's how you do in life, how you manage yourself, your feelings, how you get along with other people, whether you are empathic, how well motivated you are. We have been over-sold on academics as a predictor of how well one is going to do in life. However latest studies indicate that, at best, IQ predicts perhaps 20 percent of life success, and a harder look suggests maybe it's closer to 10. If you look at studies of top performers, you find that it's their emotional intelligence abilities that set them apart from people who are at the average.
Caruso's article applies the Mayer and Salovey ability theory of emotional intelligence to the world of work. Why is emotional intelligence so important in the workplace? For years, educators, human resource professionals, corporate trainers, recruiters, managers and others have known what sets apart the average performers from the stars. It isn't technical skills - those are easy to learn, and it's easy to determine if someone has them or not. It isn't necessarily intelligence, either. It is something else, something that you knew it if you saw it, but which was difficult to clearly define. It was "people skills".
This term is ambiguous and "soft", and it means different things to different people. After many years of talking about people skills, individuals in the business of training, coaching, managing and hiring are triumphing. Their insight into what makes people shine in the workplace has taken center stage. They can retire that soft phrase "people skills" and replace it with an objective, measurable, term - emotional intelligence. Those who have never valued the ability to read people, understand people and understand emotions because these were soft skills and could not be measured will have to rethink their stand. Emotional intelligence is an intelligence, or a set of abilities.
