Is Emotional Intelligence relevant to Engineers? 6

[PaulaK]

Having recently completed a psychology degree to balance my engineering education, I am trying to gain a better understanding of the whole 'soft skills' debate surrounding engineers. In recent years the concept of Emotional Intelligence has been sweeping through the HR scene and I'm wondering if anyone out there has had any exposure to it and indeed whether you think it has any relevance to engineers in the workplace at all?

(For those of you in the know about EI, I have to make the distinction though that I have a distinct preference for the ability-based Mayer-Salovey-Caruso approach to EI and not the popularised Daniel Goleman or the Bar-On EQi versions of EI.)

 

[PaulaK]

I'm giving you a star Kontiki99 just for making me feel better but all that research into what makes a good manager has to have something going for it - doesn't it??
Anyway, it has set me to thinking again along the 'Gattaca' lines (the movie that is) i.e. if I was being considered for a management post now, would such a low score (average EI overall) preclude me from selection??
By the way, while Antonio Damasio has done some great work on the difference in cultural expression of emotion, Paul Ekman showed that the basic ones happy/sad/fear etc have a universal commonality.

Sounds like y'all are havin a bit of fun with the brain test and don't underestimate the unconscious reactions to the photos Greg, bodies do lots of communicating on that level without us ever consciously getting wind of it!

 

[BJC]

"In recent years the concept of Emotional Intelligence has been sweeping through the HR scene ..."
New trends show periodically in both HR and OBOT. There is Theory Z, Comparable Worth etc.
New theories help business professor sell books and for few year and collect hefty consulting fees.
Where is Tom Peters now? Can you find his books in Boarders?
Emotionial Intelligence is like Comparable Worth, "interesting but useless". They cannot be applied.
It sounds like they are trying to measure wisdom and maturity. IF you could measure it what would you do with it? It would be like teaching common sense. First define it, then teach it. Simple, right!

You can understand the reason men and women think differently from a good anthropology class. Men hunted and women gathered. Different skills that resulted in different thinking and communication patterns.

IF you think about it the basket may be a more important invention than the wheel.

 

[HgTX]

If I may expand on my 24 May 07 11:44 post...

It's interesting what they pick and choose in the quiz, and what people in general will choose, as diagnostics for "maleness" or "femaleness" rather than simply where along a spectrum one seems to fall.

Men tend to be taller than women. I didn't see a "how tall are you" question on the quiz, even though they made a big deal about another physical dimension. Should we consider tall women to be more man-like and short men to be more woman-like? I don't see a lot of that attitude about (these days anyway).

Back to questions used on the quiz...if you're better at certain kinds of analytical tasks (matching line angles, rotating shapes in 3D) you're to be considered "male-brained" because the general pattern is that men tend to fall higher on that particular scale. The quiz takes that attitude and so do a lot of other people who get into discussions of this kind.

But then there's the vocabulary question. Apparently women tend to have larger vocabularies, according to that quiz. So well-read intelligent men with large vocabularies are...female-brained? I don't see anyone saying that, outside this quiz.

Looks like women who are good at what men are good at must be considered man-like, but men who are good at what women are good at are simply better at that task than the average man, and good for them.

Hg

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[FOETS]

Another touchy feely concept marketed by HR to justify their own existence.

"In recent years the concept of Emotional Intelligence has been sweeping through the HR scene ..."

Some sort of intelligence needs to get into HR, if this is to be their only qualification.

Surprisingly I didnt score too good

 

[PaulaK]

One thing that is coming through loud and clear here is the disdain for HR and their associated 'bag of tricks', of which the latest one appears to be EI!
I'm not going to launch into a defence of HR but, in line with the other thread on 'what engineering would you recommend to your kid', I have long been an advocate of finding out as much about yourself as possible so as to make informed decisions about which course of action/career might suit you best. Have any of you ever learnt anything about yourselves from IQ tests? personality tests? EI tests?

I got tired of looking at machinery and began looking at the human machine instead and, from my engineering perspective, it makes sense to me that there should be patterns.
HgTX, you brought up tallness- While I think that it can influence a person's self-esteem (male or female) it is interesting to note that among boys (not girls) height can be rough indicator of status within a peer group. Take a look at the Fortune 500 company heads, they are above average height!
The testosterone issue relates to the impact of this hormone on brain wiring and hence behaviour and the patterns here show that the more testosterone a girl receives prenatally, the more her behaviour will conform to typical male behaviour than female. Personally, I don't fret too much about this because it has helped me to understand a lot about where I fit on the continium.
And for the guys, their continium leads from female braining (male nurse) to mid braining preformance all the way to the extreme male brain of Autism.
EI, when properly tested, fits with this contimium and I think we can learn a thing or two about our decision making from it, both technical and non-technical.

 

[epoisses]

Hi PaulaK,

These tests are quite interesting and I'm sure they teach people things about themselves, but I do agree with HgTX in the sense that I wonder what is the added value of linking one extreme of the scale with the concept of "male" (not even very precisely defined) and the other one with female.

First of all males and females all score differently, so we end up with the funny situation of some males being more male than other ones who might be more feminine than many females... as if male and female were not already very precisely defined on a chromosome level.

Secondly it makes the whole discussion politicial all of a sudden, because one end of the scale is obviously more desirable than the other one: we would all prefer to be more emotionally intelligent rather than less, but does that mean we should all try to become women? Just imagine if the extremes had been flagged black and white and the test had been about dancing skills or you name it, the thread would have been red flagged immediately and the site would have been banned for racist content.

Let's not do the same thing with men and women. Let's consider EI as a scale on itself and keep the fact of being male or female as a completely separate issue.

 

[PaulaK]

Ah Epoisses, thank you for your thought provoking post.
It brings up those thorny issues of political correctness and its relationship to scientific correctness....Hmmmmmm.
The scientific examination of human male/female behaviours have had a long history of political mangling and misinterpretation and in this media-soaked/soundbite world, I think there is little scientists (and this engineer) can do to stem this phenomena, other than to reiterate over and over again what the terms 'on average' mean.

In terms of EI, the only reason one extreme is linked to male and the other to female is on the basis that on average, these are the people who exhibit these type of behaviours. Lets add the clarification that it is the continuum of male/female brainess that EI is related to rather than any all encompassing idea about what single marker makes a man or a woman (chromosomes are not as specific as you might think!)

You raise the interesting idea that one end of the scale is more desirable than the other. Would we all like to be more emotionally intelligent???? This is actually what I was trying to get at in my title for this thread. Do engineers WANT to be more emotionally intelligent???
Should we be aiming, as you hint, towards that politically correct centre where every male is more empathetic and every female more systematic???
What would become of the 'very well behaved child, shy lonely and withdrawn, considered mentally slow, unsociable and adrift in his dreams'? Ans: A lost Einstein.
And think of the words of Hans Asperger, ' A good professional attitude involves single-mindedness as well as a decision to give up a large number of other interests...It seems that for success in science or art, a dash of autism is essential'

So, personally, even though the MSCEIT showed my EI shortcomings, I'm perfectly happy with my lot. I don't want to have a higher EQ, IQ or any other Q's, I just want to understand the Q's I've got and make the most of them.

 

[PSE]

To quote a friend of mine,

"If I had wanted to deal with people all the time, I would not have become an engineer."

This was in response to an HR question regarding interpersonal skills.

Regards,

 

[WGJ]

Discussing a job application that you filled in with an HR person over the phone.......

"....artistic! Oh, it says artistic does it? I'm sorry about that, I didn't have my glasses on, so I explained about my being autistic. I wondered why you had such an enlightened recruitment policy".


Bill

 

[BJC]

"Lets add the clarification that it is the continuum of male/female brainess that EI is related to rather than any all encompassing idea about what single marker makes a man or a woman (chromosomes are not as specific as you might think!)" I am not sure what that means, but it may be a good example.
My earlier reference to anthropology was to the many studies of Hunter-gatherer societies. There are few left so all the studies we have now are likely to be all we ever have.
In those societies men hunted and women gathereed. To hunt successfully you need and use a spatial thought process. You see a picture in your mind of the wooly mamoth over the next ridge, you see a picture of the canyon it's in and what the terrain is like. The same processes are used today in hunting, war and many games.
Women gathered food. If I remember correctly they brought in more food than men. The basket allowed them to bring in more food than the hunters did. They could bring the food to a central place where people could eat it in safety and leisure. What do you do in that situation - develope language.
If men and women both hunted we could still get along with grunts and hand signals, we wouldn't need to talk.
There are variations on this and the exact way it happen is subject to interpritation. I prefer to read on anthropology and related subjects than some contrived theory like EI.
You can apply it a lot of what men and women do today. Women gather (shop) men play games.
Women talk more- look at the entries in this thread. the women have written longer post, the men tend to write shorter more terse entries.

 

[HgTX]

"Women talk more- look at the entries in this thread. the women have written longer post, the men tend to write shorter more terse entries."

Get us some stats from other threads. Maybe women are more invested in gender-related topics.

Hg

Eng-Tips policies: faq731-376

 

[BJC]

HgTx
Could be. I don't do stats, just citing casual, unscientific evidence. Same evidence that has been cited in literature for at least 2,000 years. The scientific group that has done the best job so far to document the difference in "brains" of men and women are anthropoligist and behavorial scientist.
If in fact people are going to measure and use EI an understanding of the reasons for the differences in men and women and how they got that way is useful. I was just trying to put a slant on the subject, no ulterior motives. I am not a MCP.

 

[epoisses]

Hi PaulaK,
Thank you for all your enthusiastic contributions!

In response to your comments: I'll steal HgTX' example to try and explain why I don't agree with calling one extreme male and the other one female. Knowing that the average male is taller than the average female, imagine we developed a length scale from 0 to 20 ft, could we say 0 ft is female and 20 ft is male? And could we call anyone in between more male or more female depending on where he/she is on the scale from 0 to 20 independent of his/her gender? That sounds as silly to me as doing the same thing with EQ.

Re would we all want to be more EI - on second thoughts I agree that is less of a no brainer than I thought initially. Would we all want to be stronger, run faster, be more agile? Would we all want to be more intelligent? Well I guess yes - then why not more emotionally intelligent? But you suggest being more EI would be at the expense of something else. I admit I have no actual knowledge here, heck I hardly know how to define EI, so you may very well be right. If you add EI to Einstein, how would he change...? would he "improve"? (define?)

In any case I am not suggesting we should all converge to the politically correct middle, as you thought you read between the lines. (Although there are some males (not females) which I would love to make a bit more
I do believe deeply that the great variety of personalities make humanity interesting and provides tremendous opportunities for it to develop. As you sugggested it might actually be a good thing to have a couple of autists around.

 

[epoisses]

"more systematic" I wanted to write (boss stepped in)

 

[rbulsara]

Intelligent engineer(or any professional) would not depend on HR to give them raises or make/break their life or careers. He/she would be on his own or dictating his own terms.

So what is the definition of Emotional Intelligence? Is that another way of describig interpersonnel skills?

So is there must be non-emotional intelligence?

No intelligence but all emotions? No emotion but just intelligence?

As far as I know intelligence has little to do with knowledge.

 

[kontiki99]

The problem with Emotional Intelligence ->

Video (watch with sound)

Apologies for the misfire.

 

[SomptingGuy]

The problem with "Emotional Intelligence" is the name. Why not call it "Emotional Bias" instead? That way cavemen like me don't feel emotionally thick.

 

[kontiki99]

Validation through semantics

 

[BJC]

"As far as I know intelligence has little to do with knowledge."
Or wisdom.

 

[FACS]

There is no such thing as "Emotional Intelligence."

HR needed something to do, and some PhD needed to sell his test.

Charlie

http://www.facsco.com