UpTrajectory Review
Fast Company's piece, drawn from a leadership coach's observations, argues that emotional intelligence — not technical skill — separates high performers in the workplace. The author cites research from Harvard Business School and TalentSmart claiming that 71% of employers value emotional intelligence over technical skills when evaluating candidates. Six habits define the emotionally intelligent: pausing before reacting, displaying authenticity, and four others the excerpt cuts off before revealing. The framing is familiar. Emotional intelligence has occupied this pedestal since Daniel Goleman's 1995 book made it a management consulting staple, and the 'soft skills beat hard skills' thesis has become a genre unto itself in business publishing.
For a small-business operator, this matters in ways the source does not address. Large companies can absorb a brilliant jerk or a charismatic incompetent; a ten-person shop cannot. When you run a lean team, one person's inability to handle criticism or navigate conflict creates immediate operational damage. Hiring decisions carry more weight because there is no HR department to buffer a bad fit, no middle management to absorb a leader's emotional volatility. The operator reading this piece should care less about the 71% statistic and more about the practical question: can this person de-escalate a frustrated customer, admit a mistake in front of the team, and stay functional under pressure?
The piece's central claim — that emotional intelligence predicts workplace success better than traditional intelligence measures — is contested terrain. Critics have long argued that emotional intelligence is a repackaging of personality traits and social skills under a marketable label, and that its predictive power shrinks once you control for general cognitive ability and conscientiousness. The 71% figure, sourced to Harvard Business School, likely originates from a CareerBuilder survey that HBS referenced, not original HBS research. That distinction matters. A survey of employer preferences is not longitudinal evidence that emotionally intelligent employees outperform their peers. We agree that the six habits described are genuinely valuable behaviors. We are skeptical that wrapping them in the emotional intelligence framework adds clarity beyond simply describing what good interpersonal behavior looks like.
The second-order effects of elevating emotional intelligence in hiring and evaluation deserve more scrutiny than the source provides. If employers systematically prioritize interpersonal warmth over technical competence, they risk building teams that are pleasant but underpowered. This hits small businesses hardest. A startup with three engineers cannot afford to hire the most emotionally fluent candidate if that person cannot ship code. There is also a bias risk: emotional intelligence assessments often penalize introverts, people from cultures that express emotion differently, and neurodivergent candidates who may communicate in ways that read as less 'authentic' or 'empathetic' to a hiring manager applying subjective criteria. The push to evaluate emotional intelligence can become a license for gut-feel hiring dressed in scientific language.
What to watch: whether the remaining four habits in the full piece offer anything beyond standard leadership advice. The two visible habits — pausing before reacting and displaying authenticity — are sound but hardly novel. What a reader can actually do: build the pause habit into your own management practice by instituting a personal rule of waiting ten minutes before responding to any provocative email or Slack message. When hiring, test for the behaviors the piece describes through structured scenario questions rather than relying on emotional intelligence as a vague hiring criterion. Ask candidates to describe a specific conflict they de-escalated, a mistake they owned publicly, or a time they changed their mind under pressure. Specifics reveal more than self-assessed emotional intelligence ever will.
“Technical skills may get you hired, but emotional intelligence determines how effectively you work with people, handle pressure, navigate conflict, and lead others.” — Fast Company
Takeaway: Test for emotional intelligence through specific behavioral examples in interviews, not vague impressions or self-assessments.
Excerpt from the original — Fast Company
For nearly three decades, emotional intelligence has been one of the strongest predictors of workplace success. While technical expertise and cognitive ability still matter, the skills that set high performers apart are deeply human: self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to build healthy relationships.
Employers have taken notice. Research cited by Harvard Business School found that 71% of employers value emotional intelligence more than technical skills when evaluating candidates, while studies from TalentSmart have identified emotional intelligence as a stronger predictor of workplace performance than many traditional measures of intelligence.
The reason is simple: Technical skills may get you hired, but emotional intelligence determines how effectively you work with people, handle pressure, navigate conflict, and lead others.
In my work as a leadership …