Business Bites: Rerun Emotional Intelligence Assessments

Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week, we're going to be talking about emotional intelligence assessments. When you think about professional development assessments, they can cover a wide range and variety of topics, competencies, and other psychometric tools.

Emotional intelligence, though, is a unique component where we are centering the specific assessment on this competency, emotional intelligence, and an individual's ability to be able to demonstrate it at a specific point in time. There's a variety of different types of assessments, but what I want to share with you is the different levels or the depths to which the assessment can go. First, we start off with a self -assessment. This is where you take a test and you're giving feedback on yourself to yourself.

And so a self -assessment, while helpful to start building awareness, to gain more insight about a particular topic, with emotional intelligence, it's trickier to rely only on a self -assessment because we are measuring things such as self -regulation, self -management, social management. That's how we react to the emotions of others, how we manage ourself around them, and how we respond to others. So while the initial data in a self -assessment can be helpful,

Emotional intelligence is really how do other people perceive our ability to be able to manage and adjust those emotions as we're using them in a professional context. The next level of assessment after a self -assessment is a 180 assessment. A 180 assessment is where you get feedback from one direction.

Imagine for a moment we're talking about a circle that has 360 degrees around it, a 180 assessment which provide you feedback from the folks that you directly supervise a team, a group of individuals whom you have some kind of reporting relationship to. Now, this is very helpful data to be able to receive more than just a self -assessment and gives you a sense of how you're actually coming across to others. The third level that we're talking about is the 360 -degree assessment. In this type of an assessment, this is where we are trying to get the fullest picture possible about how an employee is demonstrating a competency.

So not only feedback, from folks that you individually supervise, but also the feedback of your peers and your supervisor. Imagine if you could get feedback from all around your performance, not just to your team or not just to your boss, but thinking about that full centeredness of the whole system and how we're actually performing. Emotional intelligence is unique as an assessment competency because we are looking at a skill that can be developed.

Unlike IQ or other fixed competencies, emotional intelligence is something that we can develop over time. So the benefit of regularly completing these assessments, helps us to be able to improve and understand how we are improving relative to the different groups of people who we interact with. Again rather its our team, our peers or our manager.

Of course, with a quick Google, you can always find lots of different free and available self -assessments for you to be able to better understand where you sit with that competency. However, with a low -cost investment, you can get more detailed tools to help you understand, again, where you are sitting and ensuring that the assessment that you're doing has two important factors, reliability and validity. There's a lot of research that goes into various assessment tools, and so it's important to ask the question of, here is this data coming from and how is it supported so that I know it's not just a personality quiz on the internet, but really a solid assessment of this competency and ensuring that it's going to provide me with the tools I need to actually improve the competency over time

Unlike IQ or other fixed competencies, emotional intelligence is something we can develop over time. So the benefit of regularly completing these assessments helps us be able to improve and understand how we are approving relative to the different groups of people whom we interact with, again, whether it's our team, our peers, or our manager. This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast at mod .network. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like by size. And as always, give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.