Chapter 1. Introduction

Fundamental emotional intelligence (EQ) competencies lie beneath great performance for nearly every job tackled by today’s workforce. For a hiring manager or interviewer, including these competencies as part of the interview process begs consideration. We’re not suggesting that technical skills and abilities be taken for granted. Skills and technical competence must always serve a prominent role in the assessment process. However, a growing body of evidence points to the fact that when technical competencies are equal, EQ competencies account for job success in many different positions. In fact, for some positions, EQ competencies account for a larger portion of job success than technical competencies. Leadership IQ, a training and research center that teaches executive and management best practices, conducted a study of more than twenty thousand employees that tracked the success and failure of new hires. After interviewing 5,247 managers, the study’s researchers concluded that only 11 percent of employees failed because they lacked the technical competence to do the job. The remaining reasons new hires failed were issues such as alienating coworkers, being unable to accept feedback, lack of ability to manage emotions, lack of motivation or drive, and poor interpersonal skills.^[1] These results provide a good indication that including comprehensive EQ competencies as part of the interview process gives hiring managers and interviewers access to new and critical information to predict a candidate’s effectiveness.

As baby boomers become eligible for retirement and begin to exit the workforce, employers grapple with how to hire and train enough workers to fill the void. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of the workforce will be over age fifty-five by 2010. In 2004, the number of people age forty and older in the workforce is over 56 percent.^[2] Companies face large numbers of new hires who will view the organization much differently than do the employees who are leaving. Commitment and retention will be a challenge because these new hires will have little invested in a company. As a result, they will have little incentive to stay for the long term if they receive a more lucrative offer from another firm. If the hiring company doesn’t meet the new hire’s expectations, that new hire will leave—causing an endless hiring-resignation cycle and a resultant gap in the skills and abilities needed for the company to compete. And this cycle will prove costly. Turnover costs range from 120 to 200 percent of annual salary, and new employee performance takes thirteen months to reach maximum efficiency. These statistics offer another compelling reason to screen for emotional intelligence competencies. Organizational commitment and retention are closely linked to emotional intelligence.^[3] Few would argue that commitment and retention are not useful traits. Retention links directly to job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is related to self-esteem, emotional stability, and conscientiousness.^[4] The emotional intelligence model in this book takes all of these elements into consideration.