How Do You Feel?

A diminutive, bearded man with a genial style, Bar-On, now a research fellow at Haifa University, is a meticulous researcher who has gathered more scientifically validated data worldwide about emotional intelligence than anyone in his field has. His work has recently focused on developing EQ "profiles," which reveal the specific competencies that characterize high performers in a range of professions. In 1996, he launched the EQI, a self-administered test designed to assess specific emotional competencies. Companies and organizations, ranging from the Bank of Montreal to Fannie Mae to the Toronto Maple Leafs, have used the EQi for employee development. "To measure emotional intelligence is to measure one's ability to cope with daily situations and to get along in the world," argues Bar-On, whose test is marketed through Toronto-based Multi-Health Systems. "I've conceptualized emotional intelligence as another way of getting at human effectiveness."

But if Bar-On pioneered the field, Daniel Goleman, 54, formerly a behavioral- and brain-sciences writer for the "New York Times," brought it to popular attention. Drawing on the work of two academic psychologists, John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey, Goleman published "Emotional Intelligence" (Bantam, 1995). The book became an instant best-seller -- with more than 5 million copies in print worldwide -- and sparked inevitable criticism from Mayer and Salovey, who believed that Goleman distorted their work and made sweeping claims about the benefits of emotional intelligence.

Goleman has gone on to advance the case for emotional competence in the workplace. He published a second book, "Working with Emotional Intelligence" (Bantam, 1998), aimed specifically at businesspeople. He then authored two articles for the "Harvard Business Review." He also coedited a forthcoming book of essays written by leaders in the field; cofounded the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence, a group of academics and businesspeople with interest in the field. Later, he began working with the Hay Group, a Philadelphia-based consulting firm that specializes in human-resource issues, to deliver emotional-intelligence training.

All of this should come as welcome news to residents of the new economy. Companies can continue to give top priority to financial performance -- but many now also realize that technical and intellectual skills are only part of the equation for success. A growing number of organizations are now convinced that people's ability to understand and to manage their emotions improves their performance, their collaboration with colleagues, and their interaction with customers. After decades of businesses seeing "hard stuff" and "soft stuff" as separate domains, emotional competence may now be a way to close that breach and to produce a unified view of workplace performance.

But like other good ideas that started in psychology and later found new applications in business, emotional competence is confronting the challenge of its own sudden popularity. Increasingly, emotional competence is being sold as a solution to each of the categories for which companies have training budgets, from leadership to motivation to leveraging diversity -- competencies that are emotional only by the most ambitious of stretches. The emerging field has sparked the almost inevitable scramble to cash in on the spreading claims of its potential applications.

As emotional competence grows in application, so do the questions: Are these new dimensions of emotional competence genuine and verifiable categories? Can they be effectively taught and measurably improved? And what is the risk that emotional competence will veer badly off course and end as the next short-lived fad?

AmEx's Emotional-Insurance Policy

It's difficult to imagine a less likely setting for a training program on emotions than American Express -- that buttoned-up, by-the-numbers, financial-services giant, which last year had more than $21 billion in sales. In fact, the company launched its program in 1991 as a possible solution to a simple business problem that defied a logical solution. More than two-thirds of American Express clients were declining to buy life insurance, even though their financial profiles suggested a need for it. Jim Mitchell, then president of IDS, American Express's Minneapolis-based insurance division, commissioned a skunk-works team to analyze the problem and to develop a way to make life insurance more compelling to clients.

The team's findings took the company in an unexpected direction. The problem, the team discovered, wasn't with AmEx's product -- or even with its cost. Put simply, the problem was emotional.