How Do You Feel?

When Goleman tackled the subject, he expanded the definition to include the ability to motivate oneself. Where Mayer and Salovey appeared content to identify the concept of emotional intelligence, Goleman staked out a more aggressive claim for its value and benefits. Witness the subtitle of Emotional Intelligence: "Why it can matter more than IQ."

Published in the wake of Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's controversial book, "The Bell Curve" (Free Press, 1994), which argued that IQ is the critical variable in achievement, "Emotional Intelligence" offered readers a new set of metrics. "We have gone too far in emphasizing the value and import of the purely rational," Goleman wrote. "For better or for worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway."

Among Goleman's skills is his ability to move easily between different audiences and disciplines without any sense of contradiction or ambivalence. After getting his doctorate in psychology at Harvard in 1973, he went on to write popular pieces for "Psychology Today" and later became a reporter for the "New York Times." He published his first book, "The Meditative Mind" (Tarcher, 1988), and for years, he lectured and held workshops on meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhist psychology.

Although "Emotional Intelligence" focused largely on applying emotional competencies to education, the book resonated with a business audience, and Goleman began getting flooded with corporate speaking invitations. He also established a consulting firm in 1996 to deliver emotional-intelligence training. But he quickly realized that he was more interested in speaking and writing than in designing training programs and running a business.

Goleman solved that dilemma a year later when he began working with the Hay Group. David McLelland, founder of one of the firm's divisions, had been Goleman's dissertation adviser at Harvard. The Hay Group largely took over the design, marketing, and delivery of a Goleman-branded emotional-intelligence training program.

The program model was based on the work of Richard Boyatzis, a classmate and fellow doctoral candidate of Goleman. Boyatzis, now 53 and a professor and department chair at Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, had focused his research on identifying the competencies that predict high performance in a particular job. Goleman found the data compelling. "If you want to know what will make an outstanding performer, don't look at IQ scores or specific technical skills," he says. "Look at the people who are the stars and see the abilities they exhibit that aren't found in people who are mediocre."

From there, it wasn't a huge leap to adapt that model to emotional intelligence -- which is precisely what Goleman did in his third book, "Working with Emotional Intelligence," which he aimed specifically at corporate audiences. "The competency model uncovers hidden ingredients for success," he explains. "The correlations between performance and these emotional competencies have been well-established, but no overarching framework or theory could make sense of the foundation of these abilities." Goleman's competency model suggested an accessible way of understanding the connection between "soft" skills, such as adaptability, interpersonal effectiveness, leadership, and teamwork -- competencies that previously seemed to stand alone.

Goleman set out to demonstrate this model's predictive power. He began by looking at research results, from studies conducted by several hundred organizations, on a range of competencies as predictors of performance. "When I sorted out those results, EQ abilities were twice as important as anything else in distinguishing stars from average performers," Goleman says. "And the higher you go in an organization, the more they matter."

In one Hay study, outstanding sales agents at a financial-services company were compared with average agents. The competencies that distinguished the two groups were ranked and then correlated with the degree to which a strength in a particular competency contributed to agents' annual revenues. High "networking-empathy skills," for example, correlated with a $50,000-a-year difference in revenues. High "team-leadership skills" increased salaries by $39,000 a year. Those agents who demonstrated a high "drive to achieve" earned $31,000 more a year. According to Goleman's and Hay's interpretation of the findings, emotional competencies accounted for a difference of 58% between earnings of high and low performers, whereas technical skills accounted for a far lower percentage.