

Even if your employer promotes you for the wrong reasons, you’ll still outperform your contemporaries. Your effort can also ensure that you don’t experience declines as you climb the corporate ladder. Work on your EQ and it will boost your performance now. Your emotional intelligence is completely under your control. Whether you’re a leader now or may become one in the future, you don’t have to succumb to this trend.


It’s so easy to get out of touch that leaders’ EQ levels sink further. They spend less time in meaningful interactions with their staff and lose sight of how their emotional states impact those around them.

Once leaders get promoted they enter an environment that tends to erode their emotional intelligence. Possibly worse than metrics, companies also promote leaders for their knowledge and tenure, rather than their skill in inspiring others to excel.Ĭompanies sell themselves short by selecting leaders who aren’t well-rounded enough to perform at the highest levels for the long term. While these short-term, bottom-line indicators are important, it’s shortsighted to make someone a senior leader because of recent monetary achievements. The higher you go above middle management, the more companies focus on metrics to make hiring and promotion decisions. You might get promoted with a low EQ, but you won’t outshine your high-EQ competition in your new role. The trick is, for every title in the graph above, the top performers are those with the highest EQ scores. Even though CEOs have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace, the best-performing CEOs are those with the highest EQs. CEOs, on average, have the lowest EQ scores in the workplace. The assumption here is that a manager with a high EQ is someone for whom people will want to work.īut things change drastically as you move beyond middle management.įor the titles of director and above, scores descend faster than a snowboarder on a black diamond. Middle managers stand out with the highest EQ scores in the workplace because companies tend to promote people into these positions who are level-headed and good with people. We found that EQ scores climb with titles from the bottom of the corporate ladder upward toward middle management.
