Emotional Intelligence (EI) has rapidly become a more critical skill set to develop than ever in the age of artificial intelligence (AI).
As the world of work becomes increasingly impacted by automation and AI, the skills of emotional intelligence have become a core capability at all job levels.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional Intelligence is a set of skills that help us better perceive, understand, and manage emotions in ourselves and in others. Collectively they help us make intelligent responses to, and use of, emotions. These skills are as important as your intellect (IQ) in determining success in work and in life.
Everyone, no matter what job function, has interactions with other people. Your capacity to understand your emotions, to be aware of them and how they impact the way you behave and relate to others, will improve your “people” skills and help you ultimately be more satisfied and successful.
It truly is the science of how we “show up”.
Impact of Artificial Intelligence
AI is not the future – it’s here. It’s now. And it will emerge quicker than we can imagine.
This wave has already started and it will crash into our lives like a tsunami that started halfway around the world. Once the forces to cause the tsunami start, the wave moving through is unstoppable.
Should you be concerned? Absolutely! It will impact us all.
Unskilled jobs or lower skilled jobs are the first to be affected – a 2019 McKinsey study indicated that nearly 40% of current US jobs are in occupational categories that could shrink due to AI, between now and 2030. This includes jobs such as office support, food services, production work, customer service and retail sales. What percentage of jobs will be impacted worldwide?
Anything that is a rote process will be done faster and better by AI.
But these aren’t the only roles that will be affected. Previously, people in more professional level roles – those that are better paid and require a bachelor’s degree or higher – felt safe – even smug. After all, our knowledge worker status protects us from this, right? Wrong.
Doctors make diagnoses from a lifetime of experience – they cannot out-diagnose a machine that in seconds makes the same diagnosis from millions of lifetimes of experience.
Investment consultants look at a client’s objectives and sift through the investment options they are aware of and produce a recommendation – AI will sift through every known option – and do it faster!
AI is now expected to impact numerous well-paid occupations such as market research analysts, sales managers, programmers, engineers and more.
Addressing the Transition
So, what to do? Are we doomed to watching our careers fade away? Of course not, but it won’t necessarily be an easy transition.
The biggest challenge will be for humans to find their passion amongst new responsibilities and new types of roles that require their uniquely human capacities. The Association for Psychological Science commissioned a study that concluded, with reference to AI based emotion recognition systems, that because individuals express emotions in a variety of ways, it is difficult to infer feeling reliably from a simple set of facial movements. Currently, technology is far from being able to understand and respond accurately to emotions. Therefore, we are in no danger of AI replacing humans in that category for some time to come.
This is perhaps your greatest ever opportunity to differentiate yourself. AI is a threat only if you’re not prepared. If you understand the implications and prepare accordingly, then the world of work, today and in the future, could be even more rewarding as jobs are upgraded and expanded. But the time to start digging this well is today – not when you’re thirsty.
You see, as we move further into the age of artificial intelligence, your essential humanness is going to become your greatest differentiator. How do you maximize your human capabilities? You do that through developing your emotional intelligence skills.
The Genos Model of Emotional Intelligence
This brings us to the Genos Model of Emotional Intelligence. This model was designed specifically to make it practical and easy to measure observable emotional intelligence behaviors. It was designed by Genos CEO Dr Ben Palmer in the late 1990’s and has continued to evolve over the subsequent 20+ years of additional research.
The model underlies an assessment process that allows organizations to accurately measure the way their people show up and then determine what needs to be done to improve each person’s results.
As a Genos Certified Practitioner, I work with individuals and organizations to measure, create action plans, and develop the skills of emotional intelligence. It’s time to move the development of our human-oriented skills to a top priority as they become increasingly important over the remainder of this decade and beyond.
The bottom-line is don’t wait! AI and machine learning are already here and evolving rapidly.
Take the initiative to assess and develop yourselves and your team to show up with emotional intelligence and have a jump on preparing yourselves for changes ahead. For an exploratory conversation, please contact me.
Article in collaboration with Genos International Europe.
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