It’s become cliché to assert that having high emotional intelligence equals better performance at work. But I’m going to shock you, because the link between emotional intelligence and job performance is wildly overstated.
In fact, research suggests that in certain jobs, having higher emotional intelligence is actually correlated with lower job performance!
By now, you’ve undoubtedly seen the video of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick getting into a heated argument with Fawzi Kamel, one of his company’s drivers. And you’ve likely followed Uber’s other problems over the past 3 months; from #DeleteUber to a former software engineer’s scathing blog post about Uber’s sexual harassment problems to Uber’s head of engineering resigning Monday after Uber learned about sexual harassment complaints from his former employer.
Interview questions and answers are critical to hiring success, and one thing we want to be careful of when we’re talking about interview questions and answers is not hiring people who say the words “always” and “never” a lot. Here's why. 
Momma always told me that watching television and movies would rot my brain. Well, now I’ve got a great counter-argument to that, because there’s an exercise for developing emotional intelligence that involves watching television.
Emotional intelligence is just as important as traditional intelligence.
Most executives I study are driven by power or achievement (or some combination of the two). Power-driven people want to be in charge and they want authority to make decisions that will impact others. By contrast, achievement-driven people are more thrilled by accomplishing difficult tasks, even if no one else notices. 
Teaching attitude is something that a lot of leaders give up on before they even try. They say “Pat just is the way he is. He’s a little cranky, and he’s a little sarcastic, but I can’t do much about that.” But when you look at great leaders, they do teach attitude, and so can you.
Here’s a different kind of communication skills tip: If you give enough presentations, eventually you will have one not go well. You will have one go off the rails. Now, when most people do this, they have this feeling that I just have to power through no matter how bad this is, no matter how much sweat is pouring down my back, and how irritated and annoyed the audience is.
Given the huge amounts of information most of us have to cram into our presentations, getting people to remember everything is a tall order.
Now, we all have different presentation styles and different ways of making our message memorable.
When I go into organizations and I ask the employees “tell me why your team exists?” the most frequent response I hear is “I don’t really know.” This certainly isn’t great news, but it does help clarify one of my recent research findings that only 23% of employees say their leader always communicates their vision clearly. 
