Leading with Emotional Intelligence: Hands-On ... - always yours

12 LEADING WITH EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
people are promoted more for what they know or how long
they have worked for a company than for their skill in managing
others. They reassert, though, that “EQ skills are more
important to job performance than any other skill. The same
holds true for every job title; those with the highest EQ scores
within any position outperform their peers.”
5. EQ and age showed a big gap in self-management between
the older generations, Traditionalists (born 1922-1944) and
Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964), and the younger generations,
Generation X (born 1965-1976) and Generation Y (born
1977-1998). The biggest gap was between the Boomers and
Generation Y. Self-management and overall EQ both increase
with age: 60-year-olds scored higher than 50-year-olds, who
scored higher than 40-year-olds, and so on.
6. In examining the rise of China as an economic power, Talent-
Smart studied 3,000 Chinese executives. They found that
American executives scored 15 points lower than the Chinese
executives in self-management and relationship management.
This makes sense considering that in Chinese culture, business
is personal and executives regularly meet over dinner to
discuss business and family, which is part of the relationship
management competencies. They also see personal outbursts
as shameful and have learned to manage their impulses in
contrast to the lack of impulse control we have seen with
some Americans (see Chapter 2). 14
For 515 senior executives analyzed by the search fi rm Egon
Zehnder International, those who were primarily strong in Emotional
Intelligence were more likely to succeed than those who were
strongest in either relevant previous experience or IQ. 15
“Analyses done by dozens of different experts in close to five
hundred corporations, government agencies, and non profit organizations
worldwide have arrived at remarkably similar conclusions . . .