How developing emotional intelligence can benefit your company, every day

Every week The Money Show interviews the author or reviewer of a new or trending business book.

This week Ray White talked to regular book reviewer Ian Mann, MD at Gateways Business Consultants.

Mann reviewed Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day.

It's written by psychologist and best-selling author Daniel Goleman, and Cary Cherniss, Professor of Applied Psychology at Rutgers University in the US.

Goleman is credited with 'revolutionising' how we think about intelligence in his best-seller Emotional Intelligence. 

With Optimal, 'he reveals practical methods for using these inner resources to more readily enter an optimal state of high performance and satisfaction while avoiding burnout'.

"This is the book Daniel Goleman came out with 25 years after he developed his idea of emotional intelligence. Although some people call it EQ - for emotional quotient, he's very strict about calling it EI, emotional intelligence."

"A lot of work has been done on the subject... and this idea of 'Optimal' is designed to take all that and show people - by using the science, not theory - how enormously important it is to develop emotional intelligence."

"One of the things that's come out from from findings around the world, is that the same pattern emerges. You hire executives for hard skills like business experience, but you find lapses in soft skills with emotional intelligence, like blowing up in anger, like making rash decisions."

"They've shown through the research that the most effective leaders are people with high emotional intelligence... In one huge study by a multi-university group made up of thousands of participants, they worked out that when you hire somebody with emotional intelligence, it counts for a 25% advantage when it comes to workers' performance."

"This data was regionally uniform in Asia, South America and Europe. It's extraordinary... because if you imagine staff improvement or performance it would be based on job experience, age, education, their IQ... but just having a CEO who's got high levels of emotional intelligence can represent a 25% increase."

"According to Goleman's definition, emotional intelligence has three primary components - being self-managed when it comes to handling your emotions effectively... social awareness, which is the ability to tune in to what others are feeling in a situation and being able to care about their welfare... and being good at social interactions, so that can get teams to function optimally, which is what this book is all about."

"Goleman believes that you can teach this... He called the book 'Optimal'; he says we need to sustain excellence every day. His idea is that if you can build up your own emotional intelligence, which you can, what would happen is that you would function better each day because your brain is in a different state to what it would be otherwise, a 'good day' state."  

"And this book is a good place to start to do this."

Ian Mann, MD - Gateways Business Consultants

Description on Amazon:

There are moments when we achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a business has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying days. Fulfillment doesn’t come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. So how do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance? 

In Optimal, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss reveal how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day. They explain how to set a realistic, attainable goal of feeling satisfied that you’ve had a productive day — to consistently work at your ‘optimal’ level. Based on research of how hundreds of people build the inner architecture of having a good day, they sketch what an optimal state feels like, and show how emotional intelligence holds the key to our best performance.

Optimal is the culmination of decades of scientific discoveries bearing on emotional intelligence. Enhanced emotional intelligence pays off in improved engagement, productivity, and more satisfying days. In this book, you’ll find the keys to competence in emotional intelligence, and practical methods for applying this skill set more readily. It will equip you to become a highly effective leader and enable you to build an organizational culture that empowers workers to sustain high performance.

Scroll up to listen to Mann's review