The All India Council for Technical Education has made a good beginning by deciding to test the emotional quotient (EQ) of aspiring management graduates in the Common Management Admission Test that it conducts every year for 3,700 management institutions (excluding the IIMs) in the country.For, every single reputed MBA (Master of Business Administration) institute all over the world has been testing EQ of candidates for ages.
To understand what testing EQ is about, take a look at some sample questions (taken from one of the past test papers for management trainees in a multinational company): "Please be honest to yourself and mark in the appropriate box whether the following descriptions about you are true or false: 1) I am not satisfied with my work unless someone praises it; 2) I avoid fights, expressing my opinion, or doing what I want for fear that I will upset others or lose their love/friendship; 3) When I need to do something difficult or unpleasant, I find it hard to motivate myself to get started".
There are no right or wrong answers; you just have to tick mark whether they are true or false.
It's easy to dismiss such tests as a gimmick and treat EQ as a touchy-feely trend that doesn't tell you anything worthwhile.
But that would be wrong because emotional intelligence (EI) is the structure that supports effective responses to events, people, and change as you go up the professional ladder.
The EQ score gives an idea about whether you already have it in you to be in a future leadership role or can be trained to have it.
A Time magazine article put it more effectively: IQ (intelligence quotient) gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.
This could well be true, as many companies are finding out. For example, research by the Carnegie Institute of Technology showed that 85 per cent of your financial success is due to skills in human engineering, your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. And, just 15 per cent is due to technical knowledge.
HR consultancy Hay Group also says EI has a significant impact on performance in many different situations.
For example, software developers with high EI levels can develop effective software three times faster than others; sales consultants with high EI generate twice the revenue of colleagues; hiring sales staff with high EI rates halved the first-year dropout rate for a national furniture retailer; experienced partners in a multinational consulting firm who were assessed on their EI levels delivered 139 per cent more profit from their accounts than other partners; and oil refinery managers who participated in the Hay Group EI development programme over two years showed a 20