I’ve obviously been around too long, or certainly long enough to see things get rediscovered and repackaged for the umpteenth time (everything is cyclical). Emotional intelligence (EI) is a good example. When Daniel Goleman introduced this concept in 1995 I felt a bit miffed. To me he seemed to have rediscovered the interpersonal skills that Neil Rackham and I had written about in our book Developing Interactive Skills in 1971 - but we weren’t American and we didn’t have the good sense to call it “emotional intelligence”.

Recently I have read lots of articles extolling the virtues of EI. A recent Sunday Times feature had the headline “Good leaders manage feelings”. This was presented as if it was new, leading-edge stuff, nothing short of a breakthrough. The article went on to make some spurious claims. For example, it said that raw intelligence accounts for only about 1 per cent of management success (how on earth was that measured?) and that what really matters is EI. It also said that personality is about 67 per cent genetically determined (notice the “about”) with the other 33 per cent affected by your early learning environment. Despite explaining away 100 per cent of personality, the article insisted that “your emotional intelligence continues to develop”.

What a muddle! What to believe?

In the absence of hard data, I have adopted an operating assumption that goes like this: for practical purposes I assume that I inherited predispositions that “contaminated” my early learning and accounts for, say, 50 per cent of my characteristic behaviours (notice the “say”). These ways of behaving have been with me for so long that they have become ingrained and habitual and are relatively fixed and unchanging. However, the good news is that this leaves the other half up for grabs - malleable and amenable to life-long learning.

I like this assumption because it removes the excuse that I can’t do anything to change my behaviour - sceptics often despair of me at this point. They remind me that a leopard can’t change its spots (and, even more depressingly at my age, that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks). But a leopard’s spots are a physical characteristic and nothing to do with the leopard’s behaviour.

I’d far rather believe that I can choose my behaviour – even choose my feelings – rather than being a zombie dictated by genes. If our behaviour patterns are irrevocably fixed by the time we are adults then any attempt to help people develop their soft-skills is rendered utterly futile at a stroke. Learning and development activities rest on the assumption (another assumption) that it is possible for adults to learn relationship skills, empathy, self-awareness and all the rest of it. We’re back to the claim that EI “continues to develop”.

Some years ago I wrote a song called “Choose, choose, you can choose”. One of the verses goes like this:

Choose, choose
You can choose
What to do
What to think.
Assert or shrink
Agree or refuse
Frown or wink,
You can choose.

It would sound more convincing if you could hear me sing it.