Catalyst – Cautions regarding EQ tests

From http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s581804.htm For almost 100 years IQ tests were thought to be the most reliable predictor of individual intelligence and performance from the school class to the work place. But now there’s a new intelligence test coming into the workplace it’s Emotional Intelligence and it could determine your future.

EQ is a measure of our feelings – how well we understand our own emotions and recognise emotional states in other people. In modern management these criteria are increasingly seen as indicators of how well individuals will work in teams and who is best suited to lead or follow, or doesn’t belong in a team at all.

Reporter Jonica Newby goes to Swinburne University in Melbourne – one of the few labs in the world developing tests to measure EQ to find out just what’s involved in an EQ tests and ask is EQ something that can be measured?
TRANSCRIPT

Narration: This is the NSW training academy for prison officers. Attending, is prison superintendent David Mumford. He’s ambitious – he wants promotion. But his future may hang on how well he does on this test. A controversial new test. Of his emotional intelligence. We’re here to discuss the results. You’ve heard of IQ, well here comes EQ. It’s a measure of how well we understand and manage emotions. And like David, many of us may soon be judged by it. Employers are saying move over IQ, its EQ that counts. Small wonder its already reached our prisons.

David Mumford: I would say emotional intelligence is about 80% of the skills needed.

Narration: But critics ask, are EQ tests scientifically valid? Worse – could they be misused – to discriminate against individuals?

Dennis Garlick. If you use something like emotional intelligence and it hasn’t been validated, then that means you could be identifying or pigeonholing someone as being low emotional intelligence when in fact they may not be.

Narration: In the last few years, the EQ wave has swept across corporate Australia. It’s even entered our universities. This is a different sort of EQ test – a practical one. Students are racing against the clock to rewrite software for this robotic arm. And it’s more than a test of engineering.

Professor Con Stough: What we are really testing here is teamwork and personal growth during the course.

Narration: But is EQ really just a management fad – interpersonal skills rebranded with a sexy new name? Or does it have a hard basis?

Jonica Newby: Well, here at Swinburne University, I’m about to meet a group of guys who are trying to put scientific substance into emotional intelligence. Professor Con Stough is a neuroscientist who actually specialises in IQ. But he’s become fascinated by EQ.

Professor Con Stough: Emotional intelligence is actually about your cognitive understanding of your emotions. This is a new frontier for us.

Narration: Pushing that frontier, Stough and his team have developed what they say is the first truly scientific EQ test. And these executives have just sat it.

Professor Con Stough: We try to measure five basic cognitives; how much emotional information do you use to make decisions so you are more intuitive or less intuitive or analytical. How able are you to understand your own emotions and the differences between emotions. How able are you to understand emotions of somebody you are working with. And how do you use this information in an effective way.

Narration: It’s not surprising these women are anxious about their results. Swinburne University trials have shown this EQ score is 16% better at predicting career success than IQ.

Jonica Newby: So what is actually on an EQ test. Well I have one right here. So here goes. I have no difficulty portraying my emotions to my colleagues. And the answers are always, sometimes, seldom, never. It’s certainly nothing like an IQ test – which Professor Stough gives me next, for comparison.

Professor Con Stough: This is a test of pattern recognition. So what we have to do is complete the pattern so it makes sense this way and this way

Jonica Newby: This could take some time. I’m not sure why, but I think the answer is 4.

Professor Con Stough: Very good, that’s right.

Narration: And this exposes what critics say is EQ’s greatest weakness. With IQ tests, there’s a right or wrong answer.

Professor Con Stough: So here you can see that the brain is working very hard.

Narration: And as these scans show, you can relate IQ directly to what’s happening in the brain. So far, neither of those things is true for EQ.

Narration: And that’s what really gets up the nose of one of EQ’s biggest sceptics. He’s IQ expert and go-kart enthusiast Dennis Garlick. Dennis Garlick says the great thing about IQ is that it can be measured. Accurately.

Dennis Garlick: I have difficulty with the notion you can measure emotional intelligence. With IQ tests, what they’re measuring is known as a general factors of intelligence, and if you do well at visual and spatial test, you also tend to do well at verbal and linguistic tests.

Narration: In contrast with emotional intelligence, it hasn’t yet been established that there is a general factor.

Professor Con Stough: Well I say that’s a very premature answer to give everybody. I mean emotional intelligence is a developing field. But certainly we’ve found associations between our tests and the important criteria like leadership for instance, happiness, life satisfaction. So we’re definitely tapping into something, and we’re pretty confident that the properties of the test are good.

Narration: This debate over whether EQ can be measured is not just academic. It goes to the heart of how it will affect us all. These students are entering a workforce where EQ tests will increasingly be used. If the tests aren’t valid, the personal cost could be huge.

Dennis Garlick: One of the main concerns with emotional intelligence is that you could then have it pigeonhole people. Which means that because someone performs poorly on an emotional intelligence test, then that means that they won’t ever be able to get a job.

Narration: It is possible EQ will be mishandled – used to unfairly slot people into categories. That certainly was a criticism of IQ over the years. But EQ advocates stress that’s not their aim.

Con Stough: What we’re trying to do is trying to help people understand and manage their emotions in the workplace and we know that that’s something that’s been a problem in the past because of our focus just on intelligence.

Stough believes we’ll all benefit from EQ becoming as highly regarded as IQ.

Con Stough: Well I think in 10 years time, IQ will still be used for graduate selection and assessment. But side by side with the Emotional Intelligence test.
Topics: Health

* Reporter: Jonica Newby
* Producer: Steve Salgo
* Researcher: Carina Dennis & Owen Craig

Story Contacts

Prof Con Stough, Swinburne University, Melbourne VIC Australia

Dennis Garlick, Sydney University, Australia

Prof Warren Yates, University of Technology, Sydney Australia

Larry Marlow, Organisational Psychologist, Marlow Hampshire, P O Box 189, Balmain Sydney Australia Ph: 9810 9000

Building Emotional Intelligence, 5 day course Feb, Jun, Sep 2010

Did you know the number one reason why individuals miss their opportunity to be promoted at work, increase their personal profitability and creating meaningful relationships is due to a lack of Emotional Intelligence? This is according to Harvard Business School’s recent study.

The five key components of emotional intelligence (EI) are:

• Self-awareness: The ability to recognize and understand your moods, emotions, and drives as well as the effect they have on others
• Self-regulation: The ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, suspend judgment, and thinking before acting
• Motivation: The ability to pursue goals with energy and persistence, for reasons that go beyond money or status
• Empathy: The ability to understand people’s emotional makeup
• Social skill: The ability to manage relationships, build networks, and find common ground

We would qualify and enrich these definitions during the course – For example, if you have been trying to ‘control‘ your impulses and moods, or putting yourself down for certain behaviours, we would like to suggest that you increase your ‘choices‘ of moods and impulses, and that you find reasons to pursue those new choices that provide better outcomes. This is how real change occurs for our coaching clients, and it is how we teach real NLP for change.

Careers, Workplace and Beyond

It has been said that IQ lands you a job, and EQ keeps you in the job. These days more employers, recruitment agencies and HR specialists are recognising the importance and overidding effect of a person’s EQ on individual’s performance at their job, their team effectiveness and an organisation’s culture.

As a sailor, I can draw upon an analogy from sailing – apparent wind speed, which is the wind speed that is the sum of the real wind speed if you were standing still and the + or – of the wind generated by your progress through the water. Simply, it is the wind experienced by a moving object. I propose that increasing your EQ can change your apparent IQ, where you choose options and answers better.

Have you ever been watching a game show and you initially say to yourself or out aloud “B, the answer is B” and your intellect takes over and says “No, it is D” and you modify your answer to “D” – then the game show host says the answer was “B” (your first choice) after all. What would happen if you were able to understand the underlying process that drives you to choose the wrong answer instead of the right answer and be able to make the right decision more often? Would it be beneficial to your career, relationships and life directions?

Imagine if you could draw upon the right answer more often in life? It is not always the first choice as in this example. These internal messages are coming to us most of the time, we often just do not take notice… These answers or insights apply to every area of life from chosing what lane to drive in traffic, down to who to call, who to visit, what to say, and what is more important for you to spend your next 20 minutes doing. This is one of the elements of EQ that we teach – getting a greater connection with yourself. You are your best hope.

A career in management involves coping with complexity; a life of leadership relies on your coping with change. As you learn to lead yourself through the skills gained on these courses, your life of leadership will spill out to others, your career and what you actually achieve in life. Can you imagine being able to give yourself honest and useful feedback? If this was a habit for you, imagine how you would grow and how congruently you could give feedback to others?

NLP Module I (5 days), is designed to establish the foundations for Building Emotional intelligence.

Students of this type of training say that they approach life on a whole new level.

Module I is part of the NLP Practitioner Program

We have divided our course into 3 modules, allowing you to pace your study to your needs. Module I provides the Emotional Intelligence basis, a strong connection with self, self-awareness and self-management skills. These can be used stand-alone, or to contribute towards your eventual growth with the NLP Practitioner program.

A full NLP Practioner qualification is Internationally recognized and allows you to continue with an NLP Master Practitioner certificate at a later stage with us or another NLP Training organization.

Check this out right now and get ahead of the game.

NLP Practitioner Course, More information, to register, download our brochure

The NLP Practitioner Course will be offered as a unique small group coached training in Brisbane.

Enjoy the unique coaching style of training in smaller classes which has a high facilitator to student ratio, maximises your learning and ultimately your investment in the training.

What’s the connection between Emotional Intelligence and NLP?

Not all NLP training courses make a strong link back to the EQ, but we make a point of doing so. We believe that we should be releasing students that have worked on themselves before they are let loose to work on others and this is what this foundational part of the course achieves.

Remember that a career in management involves coping with complexity; a life of leadership relies on your coping with change. If you want to lead, you need to be able to cope with change.

NLP is all about change and we consistently teach our students how to make changes with ecology.

We are offering certificate programs co-signed by the founders of the International Trainers Academy – John Grinder, Carmen Bostic St Clair and Michael Carroll. This course is the only one available in Australia and NZ of this type.

Who does this sort of course?

People who know that a pre-requisite for a better, more fulfilling experience of life (personally and professionally) is their own internal change. So these people include those who want to:

• increase their own performance
• hone their skills to improve their career options
• seeking business improvement through increasing their own personal profitability
• learn the skills in NLP for a therapeutic or coaching profession

Your Brain on Leadership? Assess Yourself!

Published by lisaj February 27th, 2009 in Applying NLP Now,

I just read a great article “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership” from the September 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review. It details fascinating new research by Daniel Goleman of “emotional intelligence” (EQ) fame.

The emerging field of social neuroscience — the study of what happens in the brain while people interact — will be familiar to any of you with NLP training. It’s the scientific proof of what we’ve been doing in this field all along. It talks about how two major characteristics of leaders — empathy and becoming attuned to others’ moods — affect BOTH their brain chemistry and that of their followers: “Individual minds becoming, in a sense, fused into a single system.” Goleman and Boyatzis have detailed what happens in the brain chemistry during rapport,

Complimentary Modalities – Spiral Dynamics

Complimentary Modalities

Spiral Dynamics is not NLP, but there are some complimentary skills and concepts.

We have personally enjoyed learning Spiral Dynamics Integral online over the last year, and here you can find out more information about SDi as a concept.

Spiral Dynamics Integral or SDi origins
About 5-Deep… 5 Deep is not a consultancy but an attractor field that enables emergence to a new and sustainable future. Change lies at its core. We have no predefined solutions as each person and organisation is unique in surviving in their own life conditions. The work we do often has a intense affect on those we work with, from the total supply chain in large organisations to individual mentoring and self-development. We do not have all the answers but through our global knowledge network we can find people with the right experience. We help you find the links that cause tension and dissonance between people, communities, suppliers and customers by working in the ‘white space’ between. This allows a different perspective and a ‘shift’ in thinking leading to new solutions to new and old problems or successes. Change is occurring and the dreams of humankind will become reality – 5 Deep by understanding ‘white space’ will help this transition – however tiny. A time of turbulence, chaos and change that is needed for humankind to be pulled towards the ‘Integral Pulse’. John Cook 2008

The foundation course Part 1 & Part 2 is now enrolling on a continuous basis – This means you can do it in your own time – have 1-2-1 sessions but still be part of a larger group. Completion of Part 1 and Part 2 gives Level One Accreditation. To find out more about this course please contact us – Click Here for current courses. Integral-Pulse online course information and registration.