Tune up your EQ

How to find valuable EQ information

Nowadays there are thousands of people who talk about Emotional Intelligence. But you know that “talk is cheap.” If you’re going to improve your quality of life and be more effective at work you need practical information and approaches that you can use right away to increase your EQ.

Project management and EQ blog

Anthony Mersino seems to be a courageous EQ writer because he really gets his hands dirty. He’s looked in depth at how EQ affects project management, his chosen profession.

I always find his insights helpful and I’m impressed by his attention to detail.

Over at his EQ4PM blog he’s been putting some cutting edge research about project management success under his microscope.

What makes projects successful?

Anthony’s reported on a recent International Journal of Project Management article called “Matching the project manager’s leadership style to project type.” The authors, Ralf Muller and J. Rodney Turner reviewed over 400 projects and conducted questionnaires. They searched for the factors that caused projects to be successful.

3 possible factors

Muller and Turner set out to understand what impact IQ,(Intelligence Quotient) EQ, (Emotional Intelligence) and MQ (Managerial Competence) had on whether projects were successful.

The defined IQ as the cognitive skills of Strategic Perspective,Vision and Critical Thinking). The components of EQ were Motivation, Conscientiousness, Sensitivity, Influence, Self-awareness, Emotional Resilience and Intuitiveness. Managerial Competence consisted of the skills of Managing Resources, Communications, Developing, Empowering and Achieving.

Research findings

They found that there was a strong correlation between emotional intelligence and project success, and no relationship (or a negative relationship) between project success and IQ and MQ.

Muller and Turner dug deeper to find out which particular aspects of EQ were critical to project success. Interestingly, they found that different attributes were critical for particular types of project.

For example Motivation had a positive correlation to success of Organizational projects but not to Engineering or Information projects. Conscientiousness and Sensitivity were shown to be related to the success of all projects.

What next?

So the case is closed. If you’re a project manager, get signed up on an EQ Learning Programme and soar to the dizzy heights of project management success.

Um, not necessarily. After his detailed examination of the research, Anthony says that the study him wanting to know more.

Follow up questions

Anthony asks the authors some additional questions. For example, he asks them why they think that some EQ competencies have such a high correlation to project success, while others had little or no relationship.

He’s also wants to know how they identified individuals with each of the 15 competencies they tested and what testing tools they used.

Anthony is an EQ enthusiast. However, he hasn’t let his enthusiasm get the better of him. I’m looking forward to his update on the answers that he receives. He’s sharing important information and by asking more questions he’s keeping the researchers on their toes. As a result their findings will be more useful for all of us.

Useful EQ and project resources

Anthony has a new book entitled Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers: The People Skills You Need to Achieve Outstanding Results. You can pre-order it right now.

Have a look also at his Squidoo lens, which has some good articles and resources, as well as links to lots of EQ resources, including this blog (Thanks Anthony)

Is there a place for emotions in project management?

My hands on experience in leading and facilitating change management projects is that effective project management always has an emotional component.

Download 6 Things You Must Know To Make Your Project An Outstanding Success in pdf format

We’ll explore more about the truth about EQ and project management success and EQ in some forthcoming posts.

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License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.