Amitabh Sharma
Features Coordinator

There are leaders who have the qualifications and then there are yet others who 'Born Leaders'; one usually tends to stop at the phrase itself, seldom trying to go into the depth of the phrase.

There have been many instances where an academically sound person loses the race to the top, which goes to a person with lesser qualifications on paper. And we start to wonder How and why?

"Well," says Ashish Jhingran, director of sales, marketing and operations, Indusa Global, a Montego Bay based Information Technology company, "the answer lies in a phenomenon that is fast becoming a vital component in the corporate world - Emotional Intelligence (EI)."

What is EI?
From the time one is born, one starts acquiring knowledge through the interactions with the external factors - environment one lives in, people one lives with, etc. This acquired knowledge - at home, at school, at places of work, from parents & relatives, teachers and classmates, clients, peers & superiors - contributes towards making one intelligent. We learn how to react in different situations in each stage of life.

However, each individual has another intelligence which is different from this acquired intelligence - the emotional intelligence. "This is the ability of the individual to understand, use and manage his/her own as well as others' emotions" says Jhingran.

"The traits of sympathy, empathy, gratitude, anxiety, etc. are never learned, these are present in the individual right from the beginning," he explains. "However, it is the ability of the individual to be able to realise the potential of each of these traits and use these to derive the maximum benefits from every interaction in every situation one comes across in life," he adds.

"We all are aware that inter-personal relationships play, perhaps, the most important part in our lives," says Jhingran. "It is our relationship with other individuals that keeps life moving," he says.

These relationships are both individual and professional, with parents, siblings, teachers or friends. Professionally, there are relationships with colleagues, superiors, clients or vendors. " All these are inseparable part of our lives," he says.

From each relationship, we derive something that helps us move on with our respective lives. "But to be able to derive anything from another individual, one needs to be intelligent enough to understand the other individual," says Jhingran.

To get the maximum benefit, it is imperative to strike a perfect match with the other person. "Should there be a mismatch of emotions, the relationship will be disastrous and the resultant outcome will be nil," he adds.

EI at work
Jhingran cites an example of EI at work, ; if a company hires two business analysts, and within a year, one of them, who had graduated from a less reputed college with lower percentage, was made the Vice President of Business Development, while the other remained a business analyst.

"The reason," he says," is in being smarter." The manager identified the changing market trends and realised the possible outcome of company's existing products, which were soon becoming obsolete." He convinced the management about his understanding and the need to cater to the new line of consumption patterns and influenced them to make the necessary changes. This decision helped them retain their position as market leaders. "This demonstrates the role of emotional traits of initiative, innovation, influence, self confidence and drive to achieve,"says Jhingran, "which helped him to surge ahead of his more illustrious peer."

EI benefits and drawbacks
Unlike Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests, there are no universally accepted measures for EI (which is also referred as Emotional Quotient). "Companies have devised their own methods to measure this trait and have started putting more emphasis on the need for recruiting personnel with high emotional intelligence," says Jhingran.

"Even within the existing employee base," he informs, "people who have demonstrated high emotional maturity tend to get to the higher positions much faster than their other colleagues."

The possible benefits the companies see are - increased performance at work, better personnel relationships leading to increased productivity, more forward thinking people will allow organisations to adapt to the changing environs much faster without losing out on the transition periods.

"It will not be wrong to say that an organisation which places importance on recruiting people with high emotional intelligence will always tend to be among the front runners in the industry," Jhingran says.

But this concept cannot be used as the only measure to judge a person, it can be a complementary measure to other traditional methods of identifying a talent.

"Since there are no universally accepted quantifiable measures for this value, it purely depends upon an individual to set standards while judging and being a qualitative value, these standards can keep on varying with individual personalities," he says.

amitabh.sharma@gleanerjm.com