Emotional intelligence and Bias
Reflections on the Bias Self Assessment results:
Which of the areas is your strongest?
Bias and Identity. There is no such thing as apoliticality. Everything in existence is political in some way, and to claim otherwise is to support the current status quo, whatever it may be. Every person is the product of the infinite ocean of variables that determined their birth, how they were raised, and what lead them to where they are now, and thus the degrees of interpretation of the human experience are equally infinite.
Which of the areas is your weakest?
Effective courage. Speaking up is hard. Networking is hard. I frequently find myself deferring to others for a majority of situations, or staying quiet, because I do not want to potentially cause complications or bad things to happen, even if they are a necessary step for improvement of an existing workplace or situation. A generous interpretation would be to say that I am willing to be a small part of something, doing what is needed of me only. A less generous interpretation would be to say that I am a coward.
Which of the areas will you focus on in the coming weeks and beyond?
Networking, networking, networking. I need to speak to others, I need to learn the language of business, I need to be able to stand up for myself and argue in my favor, and I need to strengthen my resolve for professional social interaction.
Reflections on the emotional intelligence
After taking the provided emotional intelligence survey, my highest score was 23 of 25 in the category of Self-Management, while my lowest was 15 of 25 in the category of Social Awareness, with self awareness and relationship management being equal at 19.
With surveys like these, I tend to find myself questioning the survey as much as I question myself. Human experience cannot be converted to numbers and statistics, much less one that uses 20 1 to 5 scale questions. There are implicit value judgments present in the act of scoring people in this way. The ability to turn off emotion and bottle things up until outside of the workplace makes you score high in Self Management. Is the ability to lock away all emotion a “good thing” then?
To have difficulty judging others’ non-verbal cues of mood and tone gets you a “low score” in social awareness. If the chart is for measuring “emotional intelligence” then the implication is raised that having trouble with interpreting emotional cues with others renders you “emotionally unintelligent.” Sure, it’s a spot to improve on, but I always find myself wondering about the overarching value judgments implied by scoring people high and low in this way.