Education 2.0 & 3.0

The L&D hammer is always in search of nails to slam into the heads of employees. So imagine their joy, in 1995, when ‘Emotional Intelligence’ hit HR on the back of Goldman’s book ‘Emotional Intelligence’. (The term actual goes back to a 1964 paper by Michael Beldoch and has more than a passing reference to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences.) Suddenly, a new set of skills could be used to deliver another batch of ill-conceived courses, built on the back of no research whatsoever. But who needs research when you have a snappy course title?

EI and performance At last we have some good research on the subject which shows that the basic concept is flawed, that having EI is less of an advantage than you think. Joseph et al. (2015) published a meta-analysis of 15 carefully selected studies, easily the best summary of the evidence so far. What they found was a weak correlation (0.29) with job performance. Note that 0.4 is often taken as a reasonable benchmark for evidence of a strong correlation. To put this into plain English, it means that EI has a predictive power on performance of only 8.4%. Put another way, if you’re spending a lot of training effort and dollars on this, it’s largely wasted. The clever thing about the Joseph paper was their careful focus on actual job performance, as opposed to academic tests and assessments. They cut out the crap, giving it real evidential punch.