Something to readWorking with others
Emotional Intelligence
A book on why handling feelings, yours and others', can matter alongside IQ
Why it’s worth your time
Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence makes the case that what you do with a flash of irritation or worry can matter at work as much as what you know, and sometimes more. His 1995 book made the phrase an everyday one, arguing that self-awareness, self-discipline and empathy can be learned.
How to handle emotions at work before you react
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read for the idea of two minds.
Goleman's case rests on a rational mind and an emotional one shaping decisions together. Notice where he says these skills come from and how he thinks they're strengthened.
- Name the feeling before you reply.
In your next tense message or meeting, pause long enough to put one word to what you feel, such as annoyed, anxious or embarrassed. Then decide what you want your reply to do. If it's a message, wait ten minutes before sending it.
Good moments for this: before a conversation you're dreadingafter an email that made your face hotin your first months managing people
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Goleman's skills start with knowing your own feelings, and a colleague who was in the room can often see what introspection misses. Being honest with yourself first, then checking that picture against one trusted person's, tends to be more accurate than either alone.
What might make this harder
Keep the work inward: name the feeling privately, adjust what you say, and save the conversation about it for someone you trust. Goleman's skills don't depend on talking about feelings out loud.
Questions people ask
What is Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman about?
A 1995 book arguing that skills such as self-awareness, self-discipline and empathy help explain why some people with high IQs struggle and some with modest ones do well. Goleman draws on brain and behavioral research and argues the skills can be strengthened through adulthood.
Does emotional intelligence matter more than IQ?
The evidence doesn't support that as a general rule. Psychologists Dana Joseph and Daniel Newman, reviewing the research in 2015, found that how much it adds to predicting job performance, beyond intelligence and personality, depends a lot on how it's measured.
Can you learn emotional intelligence?
Goleman argues you can, and his publisher describes the skills as not fixed at birth. Some parts, like naming a feeling before reacting, behave like habits and tend to get easier with practice.
What it says, and how it holds up
Picture two colleagues. One stays steady when a launch goes sideways; the other is brilliant and can't take a hard question in a review. Goleman's 1995 book offered a name for the difference. He argued that knowing your own feelings, managing them and reading other people's shape how lives and careers go, alongside raw intelligence. A psychologist who spent years covering behavioral science as a New York Times journalist, he wrote it for a general audience, and the term spread quickly into hiring and training.
The subtitle's promise, that these skills can matter more than IQ, hasn't held up as well. Dana Joseph and Daniel Newman, psychologists who study the field, wrote in 2015 that the label covers two different things: an ability to perceive, understand and regulate emotion, measured with right-or-wrong tests, and a broader mix of traits and self-ratings, the kind of model Goleman's book helped popularize. In their reading of the evidence, the ability version adds almost nothing to predicting job performance once intelligence and personality are counted. On that evidence, they called popular-press claims about how well emotional intelligence predicts performance substantially overstated. The broader version does predict more, which they suggest may be because it borrows from personality traits, self-confidence and how people rate their own work, leaving open how much of it is about emotion at all.
None of that makes the everyday habits useless. Noticing a feeling before it drives a reply, and paying attention to what a colleague is worried about, tend to make meetings and handoffs go better whatever a test would say. Read it for those habits and as the source of a phrase you'll hear at work, keeping in mind that its brain science dates from the early 1990s.
A team where raised voices are routine is a different problem. Working on your own composure there can quietly make it yours. That pattern usually needs naming, in writing if it helps, to someone who can change how the team works.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.