Emotional Intelligence Competencies: definitions
According to the model of Daniel Goleman & The HayGroup®.
Cluster 1: Self-Awareness
- Emotional Self-Awareness: recognising how our emotions affect our performance.
It is the ability to recognise one’s emotions and their effects. It is the ability to effectively read how we react to cues in the environment and be aware of how one’s emotions affect performance.
- Accurate Self-Assessment: knowing one’s own inner resources, abilities and limits.
It is being aware of one’s strengths and limitations. It is based on the desire to receive feedback and new perspectives about oneself and to be motivated by continuous learning and self-development. It implies having the ability to target areas for change.
- Self-Confidence: a strong sense of one’s self-worth and capabilities.
It is a belief in one’s own capability to accomplish a task and select an effective approach to a task or problem. This includes confidence in one’s ability as expressed in increasingly challenging circumstances and confidence in one’s decisions or opinions.
Cluster 2: Self-Management
- Emotional Self-Control: keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check.
It is the ability to keep one’s impulsive feelings and emotions under control and restrain negative actions when provoked, when faced with opposition or hostility from others, or when working under pressure. It also includes the ability to maintain stamina under continuing stress.
- Transparency: maintaining integrity, acting congruently with one’s values.
It is having one’s actions consistent with what one says. It includes communicating intentions, ideas, and feelings openly and directly, and welcoming openness and honesty, even in difficult situations with multiple parties involved. Transparency is congruence between what one is thinking and feeling and what one is saying and doing.
- Adaptability: flexibility in handling change.
It is the ability to be flexible and work effectively within a variety of changing situations, and with various individuals or groups. Adaptability entails understanding and appreciating different and opposing perspectives on an issue, adapting one’s approach as the requirements of a situation change, and changing or easily accepting changes in one’s own organisation or job requirements.
- Achievement Orientation: striving to improve or meeting a standard of excellence.
It is a concern for working well or for surpassing a standard of excellence. The standard may be one’s own past performance (striving for improvement); an objective measure (results orientation); outperforming others (competitiveness); challenging goals one has set; or even surpassing what anyone has ever done (innovation). Thus a unique accomplishment also indicates Achievement Orientation.
Achievement Orientation is not just accomplishing things. Rather, it is accomplishing things through one’s own efforts, against a clear, challenging standard of excellence. This competency is most effectively engaged in situations that provide immediate, concrete feedback from a credible source.
- Initiative: readiness to act on opportunities.
It is the ability to identify a problem, obstacle, or opportunity and take action in light of that to address current or future problems or opportunities. Initiative should be seen in the context of proactively doing things.
- Optimism: persistence in pursuing goals despite obstacles and setbacks.
Cluster 3: Social Awareness
- Empathy: sensing others’ feelings and perspectives, and taking an active interest in their concerns.
It is having the ability to understand other people. It is the ability to accurately hear and understand the unspoken or partly expressed thoughts, feelings, and concerns of others. It implies taking an active interest in other people’s concerns. It measures increasing complexity and depth of understanding of others and may include cross-cultural sensitivity.
- Organisational Awareness: reading a group’s emotional currents and power relationships.
It is the ability to understand and learn the power relationships in one’s own organisation or in other organisations (customers, suppliers, etc.). This includes the ability to identify who the real decision makers are, and the individuals who can influence them, and to predict how new events or situations will affect individuals and groups within the organisation.
- Service Orientation: anticipating, recognising, and meeting customers’ or clients’ needs.
It is a desire to help or serve others, in order to meet their needs. It means focussing one’s efforts on discovering and meeting the customer’s or client’s needs.
Cluster 4: Relationship Management
- Developing Others: sensing others’ development needs and bolstering their abilities.
It is the ability to foster the long-term learning or development of others. Its focus is on the developmental intent and effect rather than on a formal role of training.
- Inspirational Leadership: inspiring and guiding individuals and groups.
It is the ability to take a role as leader of a team or other group. It implies a desire to lead others. Inspirational Leadership is generally, but certainly not always, shown from a position of formal authority. The “team” here should be understood broadly as any group in which the person takes on a leadership role, including the enterprise as a whole.
- Change Catalyst: initiating or managing change.
It is the ability to alert, energise, and lead groups to bring about specific changes in the way things are done.
- Influence: having impact on others.
It is the ability to persuade, convince, or impact others in order to get them to go along with or support the speaker’s agenda. It is based on the desire to have a specific impact or effect on others, where the person has his or her own agenda (a specific type of impression to make or a course of action that he or she wants others to adopt).
- Conflict Management: negotiating and resolving conflict.
It is the ability to handle difficult individuals, groups of people, or tense situations with diplomacy and tact. This competency entails finding the best solution to a given problem or disagreement.
- Teamwork and Collaboration: working with others towards a shared goal.
Creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals.
It is the ability to work cooperatively with others, to be part of a team, to work together as opposed to working separately or competitively. It means working with others towards shared goals, and creating group synergy in pursuing collective goals. For this competency to be effective, the intention should be genuine. Teamwork and collaboration may be considered whenever the subject is a member of a group of people functioning as a team.
