What’s different about the emotionally intelligent mind?
What is Emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EQ), popularised by Daniel Goleman, refers to, “a wide array of competencies and skills that drive leadership performance”. The benefits of having a workforce of highly emotionally intelligent individuals are myriad and well known: more effective teamwork and collaboration, greater leadership skills, stronger client relationships and greater organisational agility, to name but a few.
Five constituent skills
Self Awareness
Motivation
Empathy
Social Skills
Self Regulation
Structural Cognitive Differences
There is little evidence that differences in EQ can be linked to structural differences in the brain. However, there is plenty of evidence for which neural regions are involved in the tasks of emotional and social processing. For example, the ability to self-regulate is linked to a region in the prefrontal lobe that enables us to tolerate discomfort. Further back in the brain, at a junction between the temporal and parietal lobes, is a region that is involved in our ability to see the world from another’s perspective - critical for empathy. Fascinatingly, emotional intelligence is also linked with the networks involved in memory. A discrete organ called the hippocampus has long been known to enable us to collate our memories together as a story, or a whole. More recently, it's been shown that this same region enables us to imagine how we might play out and act in future scenarios - a skill closely involved with social agility.
All of these regions are part of what is known as the neocortex; the most recently evolved part of the human brain. However, EQ also relies on other, more ancient, neural networks- such as the amygdala - a region responsible for storing emotional memories. Emotional responses such as flight or fight are triggered from the amygda la.
What’s clear then is that rather than belonging to a specific region of the brain, emotional intelligence is a function of how all of these regions are coordinated to act in concert, enabling us to chart a pathway of appropriate and agile response for the social-emotional road in front of us. Cognitive scientists refer to this as an ‘executive function’.
So how does executive function work exactly?
Executive function is a kind of cognitive steering
Let’s think of executive function as a kind of cognitive steering. Imagine your brain is a car. The car’s engine, which determines how far and fast it can travel down a straight road, is your IQ; your ability to process information. However, this is only one half of the cognitive story. Just like with a car, our brains need to be able to steer, changing how we act and respond depending on the situation we find ourselves in. This is our ‘cognitive steering’; the ability to regulate our attention, and response to, a situation.
Work by Dr Simon Walker in the UK showed that EQ is determined by how people cognitively steer four components, or ‘steering biases’: their trust of themself, their trust of other people, their self-disclosure and their seeking change.
He suggested that each of these is like a lever which we can switch to either high, or low, in any situation we are in. A person with a high EQ has the ability to regulate these ‘steering biases’, adjusting their cognitive steering to match what a situation requires. For example, when giving a presentation to a client, or offering reassurance to anxious children, they can steer up to a high trust of themself to convey confidence and assurance in their body, language and tone. However, when they are working in a team, or learning a new skill, they can steer down their trust of themself to become more open to listening, learning and making space for other people.
Walker was able to show, through studies involving thousands of school students, that the ability to steer explained why some academically gifted students failed to excel in social tasks. Conversely, he also demonstrated that some less academically-oriented students were more socially agile because they could adjust their steering from situation to situation more effectively than others.
Steering can drive better Emotional Intelligence
Because EQ is not a structural property of the brain, there is promise that it can be trained and improved. Learning to steer effectively can increase your emotional intelligence by developing its 5 constituent skills.
Self-awareness
Becoming self-aware involves noticing one’s behaviours and the impact they have on others. Behaviours are complex and one way to understand them is to use a simpler model, of which various are available. One such is the four steering bias model, by which we analyse our behaviours in terms of our patterns of trust of self, trust of others, self-disclosure and seeking change in different contexts.
Self-regulation
At its heart, learning to steer is about self-regulation: consciously choosing to modify your behaviours and thoughts from context to context to bring about better results. Learning to steer the four steering biases - trust of self, trust of others, self-disclosure, seeking change- breaks down self-regulation into conscious actions which can be learned and acquired.
Empathy
Empathy is about holding others in mind. The model of steering cognition suggests there are times to be empathic and times to be less so. For instance, empathy is required when interacting with the victim of a violent crime, but less so with the perpetrator. For empathy to be appropriate, it must be adjusted to the situation; this is what it means to cognitively steer.
Motivation
Motivation: Motivation is a key driver in both personal and organisational success: Steering identifies that motivation is not simply down to the individual as is often maintained. It is also a function of the culture, or the road, on which the worker is driving. A ‘company road’ which is well signposted, has clear goals, and in which others are driving collectively with you, has a significant positive impact on an individual’s ability to achieve their goals. Companies need to look harder at their culture if they want to drive motivation.
Social Skills
Learning to steer is about recognising which behaviours are appropriate in different contexts, including in different social situations. Research has shown that competent steerers are more agile in responding to those around them, which in turn leads to the formation of stronger teams with closer feelings of belonging. It is this social agility which underpins productive communication, easier rapport-building and effective relationships.
How can I learn to Steer?
USTEER is a new tech ecosystem that measures and supports the development of crucial soft skills and emotional intelligence by teaching individuals to Steer effectively. USTEER has been developed out of our extensive experience of the challenges inherent in tracking and facilitating soft skill improvement. This technology has been tested rigorously in both business environments and in education, with more than 70,000 participants over 10 years, resulting in a platform that is both robust and intuitive.
Find out more about how USTEER can help your organisation develop and measure the crucial soft skills and emotional intelligence of your workforce.