How to Measure Emotional Intelligence (EQ) for Managers and Leaders
Chris Schutte  | Updated 6 October 2026
Key Takeaways
- EQ is the ability to understand and manage emotions — yours and others’.
- Goleman’s model groups EQ into five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, motivation, empathy, social skills.
- Three types of emotional intelligence assessment: self-report, ability-based, and 360-degree.
- Best used as a starting point for coaching, and as one input — not the deciding factor — in promotions.
- High emotional intelligence is linked to effective leadership, team performance and productivity.
What emotional intelligence (EI) is
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to understand and manage your own emotions, recognise the emotions of others, and use that awareness to guide how you respond.
In the workplace, this means recognising that every interaction has two elements: the practical issue being discussed and the human response to that issue.
A manager can have the facts right, make a fair decision and communicate clearly, yet still create a poor outcome if they overlook how their message is being received. The way people feel about a conversation often influences what they do next.
This is the practical value of emotional intelligence in leadership. It helps managers understand what is happening beneath the surface of an interaction and adjust their approach accordingly.
It does not mean avoiding difficult conversations or making every decision based on keeping people happy. Emotionally intelligent leaders still give challenging feedback, hold people accountable and make unpopular decisions. The difference is that they consider both what needs to be said and how it is likely to be received.
The five components of emotional intelligence in the workplace
Daniel Goleman developed a framework for understanding emotional intelligence that’s still the most commonly used in workplace settings. It splits emotional intelligence into five areas.
1. Self Awareness
Self-awareness is probably the most foundational of the five. It’s the ability to notice your own emotional state while it’s happening.
A manager with high emotional intelligence can feel their own irritation building midway through a meeting, and has a chance to adjust their tone before it shapes what they say next. A manager who only realises they were irritated once the meeting’s over has already lost that chance.
2. Self Management
Self-management is the practical work of learning to manage emotions in the moment (irritation, stress, defensiveness) rather than being run by them.
This is arguably the harder of the two skills, because noticing an emotion and controlling your response to it are different capabilities. Plenty of people are reasonably good at one without being particularly good at the other.
3. Motivation
Motivation, in Goleman’s model, has less to do with external reward and more to do with internal persistence — staying committed to something even when a project has stalled or a plan hasn’t gone the way you hoped.
4. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to notice and understand the emotions of others, and to treat that as useful information about the situation rather than something separate from “the real issue.”
5. Social Skills
Social skills are everything above put into practice: relationship management, social awareness, conflict resolution, giving feedback someone can actually hear and act on, and adjusting your communication style depending on who you’re talking to.
Together, these five areas (sometimes grouped as emotional intelligence competencies) describe both the internal and interpersonal sides of EQ: how someone understands themselves, manages their own behaviour, and works effectively within team dynamics.
How organisations measure emotional intelligence
While emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the underlying ability itself, emotional quotient (EQ) is the term commonly used to describe how that ability is measured or represented as a score.
There are three main types of emotional intelligence assessment, each built to answer slightly different questions. Organisations use them to assess emotional intelligence for different reasons, from personal development through to formal selection decisions.
Self-report assessments
Self-report assessments — essentially a structured form of self-assessment — such as the TEIQue (Trait Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire) or the EQ-i 2.0, ask people to evaluate their own emotional patterns and tendencies.
They’re widely used in leadership development because they give someone a structured way to reflect on their own habits.
Because the questions are answered by the person being assessed, results say as much about how someone sees themselves as they do about how they actually behave.
Ability-based assessments
Ability-based assessments take a different approach. The best known is the MSCEIT (Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test), built on the idea that emotional intelligence is closer to a cognitive skill than a personality trait.
Rather than asking people to rate themselves, it presents scenarios and asks what emotion is likely present, or what response would actually help. There’s no self-reporting involved, which makes it a different kind of measurement — one based on demonstrated reasoning rather than self-perception.
In practice, this approach shows up more in research and clinical settings than in day-to-day leadership development, largely because it’s more time-intensive to administer and interpret.
360-degree assessments
360-degree assessments, such as the ESCI (Emotional and Social Competency Inventory), gather feedback not from the person being assessed but from the people around them: their manager, their peers, the people who report to them.
This approach captures how someone’s behaviour is actually experienced by the people they work with, day to day. It’s particularly useful for leaders already in a role, where the gap between self-perception and lived experience tends to matter most.
Which type of assessment should you use?
Choosing between these usually comes down to what you’re trying to learn, and who the result is for. Someone preparing for a development conversation is often better served by a self-report tool, since the goal there is reflection rather than proof of anything.
Someone being assessed as part of a formal selection process might get more value from an ability-based test, simply because the result isn’t shaped by how they happen to see themselves. And when what you actually want to understand is how someone already in a leadership role is experienced by the people around them, 360 feedback offers something the other two can’t, because it asks those people directly rather than inferring it secondhand.
Many organisations end up using more than one. For example, a self-report tool for individual reflection, paired with 360 feedback for a fuller picture of how that person comes across to others.
How to use EQ assessment results with managers
A number on its own doesn’t tell anyone much. What matters more is what happens after someone sees their results, the conversation that follows, and the specific behaviours that conversation ends up focusing on.
Development and coaching
EQ results tend to make feedback far more specific than it would otherwise be.
Telling someone to “be more approachable” doesn’t give them much to work with, because it’s vague enough that almost anyone could interpret it differently. Telling someone that their team tends to read their directness as impatience, particularly when they’re under deadline pressure, gives them something they can actually recognise in themselves and start to adjust.
The same shift shows up in coaching more broadly. Instead of offering general encouragement, you can ask someone what situations tend to bring out their strongest reactions.
It also applies to conflict management. Rather than telling someone they need to “handle conflict better,” an assessment can point to the specific pattern behind it.
Selection and promotion
For selection and promotion, EQ tends to work better as one part of a bigger picture than as something that decides the outcome by itself.
It shouldn’t be the sole reason someone does or doesn’t get a leadership role. But it can be useful for noticing a mismatch early — someone who strongly prefers working independently, and has little natural interest in coaching or supporting others, might find a role built around managing a large team harder than their technical skills alone would suggest.
Combined with someone’s work history and how they come across in interviews, that gives you a more holistic view of the individual.
The same reasoning applies before someone is promoted, not only afterwards. A lot of people move into management because they were excellent individual contributors, and then find the transition harder than expected, because leading a team draws on a different set of skills than doing the work yourself ever did.
The importance of emotional intelligence for leadership
The shift into management changes what actually makes someone successful. Being excellent at the individual work doesn’t automatically translate into being good at getting a group of people to do their best work together, and that gap is what catches a lot of new managers off guard.
Daniel Goleman’s original research, based on nearly 200 large global companies, found that the leaders who consistently delivered outstanding results were distinguished by strong emotional intelligence rather than IQ or technical skill alone. More recent data points in the same direction: a 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that leaders who regularly built trust and showed empathy (core EQ behaviours) saw staff turnover roughly 40% lower than their peers, along with higher productivity and satisfaction scores.
Lower turnover alone means less time and budget lost to re-hiring and re-training, and teams led by someone who reads a room well tend to raise problems earlier, argue more productively, and stay longer.
Chris has over 30 years of experience as a senior manager and entrepreneur in Human Capital and people management. He has worked extensively with psychometric assessments and pre-employment testing, helping organisations hire the right people and build strong teams.