There is a continuing dialog of what’s more critical to Brand U career success – people skills or technical skills. Recent Bell Lab studies indicate your emotional quotient, the EQ, is now as important to your long-term success as your IQ. IQ, the intelligence quotient, was once thought to be the key to career success. Many are finding that IQ is not a measure of life or work success. Many motivated, average or less than average IQ Brand U’s succeeded in life and work through single focused desire and drive.
To understand this phenomenon, Bell Labs studied the career profiles of successful engineers. The most valued and successful engineers were not those with the highest IQ or even the best technical skills. Instead, the most successful engineers were those with high EQ or emotional intelligence quotients. Do these results mean that companies are altering their hiring policies? Some are. However, technology is accelerating so quickly that companies are still hiring technocrats and hoping they can develop communication skills, maturity, and ability to work with people.
Similar studies validate why some Brand U fast trackers plateau prematurely. It wasn’t because the Brand U wasn’t smart with facts and numbers but because they weren’t smart dealing with people and life. Dan Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence developed the notion that knowing your feelings and using them wisely resulted in more successful life and work decisions. Similarly to the Bell Labs study, Goleman says that maintaining your emotional life without being paralyzed by worry, change, or difficulty was more important than brainpower.