Emotional Intelligence

There are instruments that purport to measure this, but they have yet to show that they are more than a combination of intelligence tests plus personality tests. Conscientiousness is an advantage for some jobs or activities, agreeableness for others, risk-taking or resilience for still others. IQ helps at least a little in just about everything, but sometimes the added advantage of a few more points is negligible. Sometimes discretion matters little.  Sometimes it is everything.

There are just too many poorly-correlated traits that might be called emotionally intelligent. The star basketball player or salesman might need to be a leader - except when the school hires a top-flight coach or the company is rolling out a radical new product that requires expert knowledge, in which case the emotionally intelligent thing to do is be a follower, at least at first. Is it emotionally intelligent to listen to your people, or to not be distracted by individual complaints and get everyone moving in the same direction for at least their 40 hours per week over the next four months? Answer: Yes., depending.

IQ tests identify a g-factor, a common factor, because people who do well on one type of cognitive test tend to do well on the others. This is not especially true of personality/emotional tests. There are people who are terrible at many emotional tasks, but it is really hard to be very good at both decisiveness and consensus-building, humility and confidence, or to be both phlegmatic and sanguine, to use older terms.  Moreover, there are sociopaths who understand other people very well, to our peril. Do we call them "emotionally intelligent," with a high EQ? It is certainly possible to balance these characteristics in wisdom - in fact, that is what we are all hoping to accomplish.

It is just so transparently a consolation prize for people who overvalue intelligence to begin with. "Smart" people are admired. just like the beautiful, and they want to be admired too. Their resentment at having what they think are their important virtues devalued that they try to shove them under the rubric of some kind of intelligence. But they are eating their own tails with this. Generosity and kindness are infinitely more valuable in an eternal sense, and people like them pretty well here as well. Don't cheapen them by trying to squeeze them in to some sort of  (blank)-Quotient knockoff. Reliability, discretion, (real) tolerance, compassion...why on earth would we want to elevate something ephemeral like being "smart" by lending real value to prop up cheapness?

Seek wisdom, and the Four Cardinal Virtues and Three Theological Virtues are a great place to start. If you hve those you lack for nothing.