Sterile discussions about competencies, Emotional Intelligence and others…
When «Emotional Intelligence» fashion arrived with Daniel Goleman, I was among the discordant voices affirming that the concept and, especially, the use of it, was nonsense. Nobody can seriously reject that personal features are a key for success or failure. If we want to call it Emotional Intelligence that’s fine. It’s a marketing born name not very precise but, anyway, we can accept it.
However, losing the focus is not acceptable…and some people lose the focus with statements like «80% of success is due to Emotional Intelligence, well above the percentage due to «classic» intelligence. We lose focus too with statements comparing competencies with academic degress and the role of each part in professional success. These problems should be analyzed in a different and simpler way: It’s a matter of sequence instead of percentage.
An easy example: What is more important for a surgeon to be successful? The academic degree or the skills shown inside the OR? Of course, this is a tricky question where the trick is highly visible. To enter the OR armed with an scalpel, the surgeon needs an academic recognition and/or a specific license. Hence, the second filter -skills- is applied over the ones who passed the first one -academic recognition- and we cannot compare in percentage terms skills and academic recognition.
Of course, this is an extreme situation but we can apply it to the concepts where some sterile discussions appear. Someone can perform well thank to Emotional Intelligence but the entrance to the field is guaranteed with intelligence in the most common used meaning. Could we say that, once passed an IQ threshold we should better improve our interaction skills than -if possible- improve 10 more IQ points? Possibly…but things don’t work that way, that is, we define the access level through a threshold value and performance with other criteria, always comparing people that share something: They all are above the threshold value. Then…how can I say «Emotional Intelligence is in the root of 80% of success»? It should be false but we can convert it into true by adding «if the comparison is made among people whose IQ is, at least medium-high level». The problem is that, with this addition, it is not false anymore but this kind of statement should be a simple-mindedness proof.
We cannot compare the relative importance of two factors if one of them is referred to job access while the other is referred to job performance once in the job. It’s like comparing bacon with speed but using percentages to appear more «scientific».
Factor Humano 