Many business leaders agree that success is strongly influenced by personal qualities such as perseverance, self-control and skill in getting along with others. They could point to "super sales persons" who had an uncanny ability to sense what was most important to the customers and to develop a trusting relationship with them. They could point to customer service employees who excelled when it came to helping angry customers to calm down and be more reasonable about their problems with the product or service. And they also could point to brilliant executives who did everything well except get along with people, or to managers who were technically brilliant but could not handle stress and whose careers stalled because of these deficiencies. Business leaders well understood how valuable these "emotionally intelligent" employees are to an enterprise.

The question is, what about all those executives who lack these emotional competencies? Is it possible for adults to become more socially and emotionally competent? Many business leaders are less certain about this question. For instance, the dean of a major business school, when asked about the importance of emotional intelligence at work, enthusiastically agreed that it was crucial. But when asked how his school attempted to improve the emotional intelligence of MBA students, he said, "We don’t do anything. I don’t think that our students’ emotional intelligence can be improved by the time they come here. They’re already adults and these qualities are developed early in life."

On the other hand, there are those who seem to claim that they can raise the emotional intelligence of a whole group of employees in a day or less. Scores of consultants are selling workshops and seminars designed to help people become more emotionally competent and socially skilled. Infact some of these programs are quite good while others involve heavy reliance on inspirational lectures or intense, short-lived experiences – and little else.

So who is right – the skeptics who believe that nothing can be done to improve emotional competence after the age of 15, or the others who claim that they can turn emotional dunces into emotional Einsteins in an afternoon? As usual, the answer lies somewhere in between.

A growing body of research on emotional learning and behavior change suggests that it is possible to help people of any age to become more emotionally intelligent at work. However, many programs designed to do so fail to recognize the difference between two types of learning.

Two Types of Learning

Training and development efforts in industry have not always distinguished between cognitive learning and emotional learning but such a distinction is important for effective practice. For instance, consider the example of the engineer whose career was stunted because he was shy, introverted and totally absorbed in the technical aspects of his job. Through cognitive learning, he might come to understand that it would be better for him to consult other people more, make connections and build relationships. But just knowing he should do these things would not enable him to do them. The ability to do these things depends on emotional competence which requires emotional learning as well as cognitive learning.

Emotional incompetence often results from habits learned early in life. These automatic habits are set in place as a normal part of living as experience shapes the brain. As people acquire their habitual repertoire of thought, feeling and action the neural connections that support these are strengthened becoming dominant pathways for nerve impulses. Connections that are unused become weakened, while those that people use over and over grow increasingly strong. When these habits have been so heavily learned, the underlying neural circuitry becomes the brain’s default option at any moment – what a person does automatically and spontaneously often with little awareness of choosing to do so. Thus for the shy engineer, diffidence is a habit that must be overcome and replaced with a new habit & self-confidence.

Emotional capacities like empathy or flexibility differ from cognitive abilities because they draw on different brain areas. Effective learning for emotional competence has to re-tune the brain circuits.

Cognitive learning involves fitting new data and insights into existing frameworks of association and understanding, extending and enriching the corresponding neural circuitry. But emotional learning involves that and more – it requires that we also engage the neural circuitry where our social and emotional habit repertoire is stored. Changing habits such as learning to approach people positively instead of avoiding them, to listen better or to give feedback skillfully, is a more challenging task than simply adding new information to old.

Motivational factors also make social and emotional learning more difficult and complex than purely cognitive learning. Emotional learning often involves ways of thinking and acting that are more central to a person’s identity. A person who is told, for instance, that he should learn a new word processing program usually will become less upset and defensive than if he is told that he should learn how to better control his temper or become a better listener. The prospect of needing to develop greater emotional competence is a bitter pill for many of us to swallow. It thus is much more likely to generate resistance to change.

What this means for social and emotional learning is that one must first unlearn old habits and then develop new ones. For the learner, this usually means a long and sometimes difficult process involving much practice. One-day seminars just won’t do it.

Those who study training have tended to consider all training the same, without regard to the purpose of the training or the type of learning involved. Some of the previous thinking about training, based largely on cognitive learning, is valid for social and emotional learning as well. However, the principles for social and emotional learning differ greatly from those that apply to purely cognitive abilities. A better source of guidance comes from research that examines social and emotional change processes more directly. Such research comes from many different fields, including sports psychology, psychotherapy and behavior change and personal development. This research suggests a set of guidelines for the design of effective social and emotional learning. These guidelines point to components that are additive and synergistic; to be effective, social and emotional learning experiences need not adhere to all of these guidelines but the chances for success increase with each one that is followed.