In a previous *spark-online editorial, I lamented about employers' increasing intoxication with the concept of "team work" and "team players". One would be hard-pressed to find any company that doesn't think "team work" is the answer to every single workplace problem. A close ally to this obsession with team work is the growing fixation on the concept of "emotional intelligence".
By now we're probably all familiar with the term, popularised by Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman in his 1995 best-seller, Emotional Intelligence. According to Goleman, emotional intelligence "is a different way of being smart. It includes knowing your feelings and using them to make good decisions; managing your feelings well; motivating yourself with zeal and persistence; maintaining hope in the face of frustration; exhibiting empathy and compassion; interacting smoothly; and managing your relationships effectively. Those emotional skills matter immensely—in marriage and families, in career and the workplace, for health and contentment."
Also known by the colloquial (and in my opinion, vulgar) initials "EQ", emotional intelligence has become such common parlance in popular culture that corporations are spending thousands of dollars on EQ conferences, training, and retreats in the hopes of getting their employees in greater touch with their feelings. The reasoning? If you can teach people how to read their own emotions and those of others, they'll be happier, healthier, and—most appealing to employers—more productive workers. Boost their EQ and in one fell swoop you'll get rid of tardiness, laziness, sloppy work, team dysfunction, gossip, romantic dalliances, insubordination, infighting, theft, and every other corporate vice imaginable.
The folly, of course, is in the blind belief that the only thing wrong with the workplace is that people aren't in touch with their feelings. The bigger concern, however, is that this frenzy is quickly reinforcing what I see as an unhealthy obsession with EQ at home and in the schools. As parents groom their 3-year-olds for early entry into high-paying, high-powered jobs (read, as parents use their children to compensate for their own career-related shortcomings), they go to great lengths to emphasise EQ in every single part of their children's lives. And their children's teachers are enthusiastic, willing accomplices.
I would be the last person to argue that such qualities as self-awareness, self-management, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills do not go a long way in fostering children's healthy social development. As someone who is a devout follower of the late psychologist Carl Rogers' exhortations to "listen to your feelings", I could never undervalue—or laugh at—the concept of an emotional intelligence. Yet as with so many other "hot topics", I worry that some parents and educators may become so enthusiastic about EQ that they slowly start taking it out of context. To my mind, this context is the child's total environment—not only his inner world (emotions, attitudes, thoughts), but also his home and school environment, and the values of the society in which he is inevitably embedded.
Bullies and victims provide a ready example of the problem with EQ obsession. Although intervening in bullying situations and giving both bullies and victims an opportunity to reflect on their conflicts and anger can go a long way towards promoting mutual understanding and respect, I am concerned that some parents and teachers may underestimate the subtext of bullying behaviours. We may jump to the conclusion that bullying is a sign of poor "EQ", and inadvertently ignore serious discord or abuse in the bully's home environment. Billy has low EQ, we say, but the fact that Billy's mother is being beaten black and blue at home is of no consequence.
Another concern centres around individual differences and temperament—the in-born building blocks of personality. Although temperament is not a purely fixed phenomenon, it strongly influences the quality and nature of children's emotional reactions to parents, teachers, and peers. For instance, a child who by nature has trouble adapting to changes in her environment might be more prone to express frustration or anger when forced to work in groups with new students. If some parents or teachers believe that emotional reactions are very strongly determined by in-born temperaments, they might make the mistaken assumption that the capacity for emotional flexibility—i.e., emotional intelligence—is somehow fixed for life. In such cases, we might get parents and teachers who "give up" on some children, assuming that there is really no way to expand their emotional intelligence. Yet as Goleman himself claims, emotional intelligence can be expanded (if only to a certain degree).
An over-emphasis on EQ is also leading some of us to believe that children with high EQ are "good" and those with low EQ are somehow..."not so good". For example, teachers sometimes pay more attention to and praise children who they believe possess "high EQ" (or who are developing it more quickly than other students), the consequence being that they set a particular tone in terms of which students are popular and which are not. If a child with high EQ is treated well by a teacher, then other students might follow suit—the end result being a well-accepted and popular student. While this is great, what happens to the child with less of a capacity for EQ? Do we inadvertently treat that child as poorly as we sometimes do the child with low IQ? If so, what is the tone we set in the classroom, and what are the consequences for the popularity of that child?
More to the point, what do we say about our values for individual differences when we inadvertently (or not so inadvertently) express our preference for emotionally intelligent children? In such cases, do we not make the implicit statement that there is somehow no room for other kinds of children—such as those with great intellectual abilities but not-so-great emotional skills? Although time and again we learn that children with good emotional skills tend to get along better with their peers—and, thus, have a heads-up in social development—focussing too much on EQ may send the message that there is something undesirable about having more IQ than EQ. In fact, is there?
If we can foster enough healthy emotional intelligence so that children have what is minimally necessary to develop well socially, why go overboard and foster so much that we overshadow the value of other intelligences? This question is critical when we think of children's development of self. Much of the self develops during the elementary school years. A big part of self development is the idea of self concept and self esteem—how we see ourselves, and how we feel about what we see. Do we do any damage to children's development of self concept and self esteem when our focus on EQ inadvertently makes them feel bad about, say, having quite a lot of IQ? These are serious questions to ponder. All the more important when we consider that one of the goals of fostering healthy emotional intelligence is to help children develop into healthy, well-rounded individuals. As psychologist Maurice Elias wrote in the 1999 winter edition of EQ Today, "emotional intelligence is helping to focus on what it means to be complete human beings."
My intention in this editorial is not to "beat up" on emotional intelligence. Rather, it is to call for a more balanced approach to this popular topic. In my own experiences, it has been lack of balance that has doomed many honest and sincere efforts to better children's emotional and social development. Let us not go overboard and waste a great opportunity to reach our children.
Eddy Elmer is a psychology student at Simon Fraser University. He can be reached through his website at www.eddyelmer.com
Copyright © 2002, by Eddy M. Elmer
Permanent URL: http://www.eddyelmer.com/articles/eqsp.htm