When I look back at myself five years, I realize that there has been much change and growth that has adjusted my perspective about a lot of matters that I used to feel strongly about. One of these matters is success and intelligence. In the past for me, success involved making the most money and being smarter than everyone else. My first bachelor’s was in Mechanical Engineering so in my job I though that if you can figure out all the engineering concepts and have an answer to most questions then you would eventually become everyone’s boss. Soft skills and communication were secondary and only important for clerical or customer service positions. I now have a much different view of success, intelligence, and the importance of emotional inteligence.
Five years ago, I looked at where I was in life and I felt dissatisfied with my progress in many areas, specially my career. At that point, I had been a Manufacturing Engineer for four years where I learned how things were done in my company and had established a role for myself. I had multiple coworkers that worked in the same position for over 20 years and at the time I wanted to move “up”. I decided to get an MBA in hopes to learn all the finance and management subjects that were probably the only thing that was keeping me from moving “up”. It ended up being a good decision because it provided a solid base to start understanding the business parts of a company but more importantly it helped me learn a lot about myself and recognize a lot of immature ideas that I had. Like I thought management was about secret formulas to manage resources and overtime and setup the best metrics to make people perform. In the organizational behavior class, I learned that emotional intelligence is the key to not only being a good manager but a pretty solid indicator of career success. A person’s EQ score is a much better predictor of success than a persons IQ.
I still remember one of the professors simple explanation of a person’s EQ. It’s broken down into four areas. 1. How you see yourself (how well you know yourself), 2. How other people see you (how you carry yourself), 3. How you see other people (Being able to recognize other people’s emotional state), 4. How you make other people see themselves (most important how you make other people feel).
Over time I’ve realized that knowing myself and getting to know other people has become a much more valuable skill in life and at work than a lot of the engineering concept that I learned before.
