It takes more than business know how to run business. Understanding the way people react to various outside forces can impact greatly on many core decisions. Thankfully softer skills are now being acknowledge and encouraged. Your people can learn to embrace harmonising, listening, persuasion and contribute positive attitude.

Anyone conducting international business today is well aware of the importance of social, cultural, and political mores in their interactions. Xenophobia, or simple ignorance, can break a deal as fast, possibly faster, than any of the “usual” negotiation factors.

The impact of these “intangibles,” however, is not limited to international transactions. Today’s work force is more diverse than ever before, and a company doing business in one location must be as cognisant of cultural differences in its employee population as a global corporation. The days of business domination by one country or ethnic group are gone, and organisational leaders must expand the scope of their people skills accordingly. In addition to social, cultural, and political intelligence, therefore, effective managers must have emotional intelligence. EI, in fact, enables intelligent behavior in the other three areas.

Research in the area of emotional intelligence has created an “EI quotient” by which an individual’s level of development in this area can be measured. Further, there is now an established business case for high E-IQs in a company’s personnel. A significant number of highly successful executives as well as highly productive sales people and business developers have high E-IQ scores. Even in more operational jobs, researchers comparing top performers to average or poor performers found that EI accounted for two-thirds of the performance differences (one-third was attributed to better technical skills).

In this keynote, Anne McKevitt will discuss the different kinds of “intangible intelligence” that can make a difference to a company’s level of success and ways that management can increase their organisations’ IQs. She will cover topics such as:

The facets of emotional intelligence. EI is at the bottom of it all, and there are specific characteristics associated with it.

The business case for getting more intelligent. Improving your company’s emotional, social, cultural, and political IQs will definitely impact the bottom line.

Measuring your E-IQ. There are specific competences that can be measured and that figure into the score.

Increasing the intelligence of your organization. Raising IQs in different parts of your company calls for different types of training and practice.

Anne will illustrate the impacts that attention to intangible intelligence can have on an enterprise through case studies across a variety of industries and in different organisational levels.