Coach at work: 'I lack the emotional intelligence to be promoted'

I work for a company that develops simulation software for the military. I was interviewed recently for a promotion into senior management, but it went badly. The feedback was that I'm not emotionally intelligent enough to lead a multidisciplinary team. So I missed out on a promotion even though I'm sought-after in my field.

The thought of giving our people on the ground a tactical advantage because of my simulations is very cool and I don't really want to work anywhere else. But my boyfriend, who teaches yoga, was relieved when I told him I'd bombed at interview. He thinks war games are immoral and that he has enough emotional intelligence for both of us. He hopes I'll get fed up where I am and move to a tech field that's more touchy-feely, like climate change simulation. Where do I go from here?

The coach:

Oy vey. I'm not much liking the smell of your boyfriend's moral high ground from here, but let's start with what's going on with you at work before we look at you at home.

By the sound of it, you have the great pleasure of working in precisely the field of your dreams. You built it, and they came; and even better, you see your work in the context of something that really matters to you: keeping soldiers safer in the thick of battle. Amen to that. You've made a value judgment (the lives of "our" boys are more important than the lives of "theirs"), which coaching leaves undisturbed. Doing what you love: tick.

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If you want to get promoted, and your colleagues think your emotional intelligence (also known as "EQ" as distinct from "IQ") needs some work, then let's get to it. EQ is predictive of high performance, particularly in tasks with high emotional demand: like supervising a multidisciplinary team, where it's your job to make sure everyone's talking to everyone else and the designers and coders can play nice together. It also makes for happy home lives, of which more later. Let's start by defining EQ as the capacity to recognise your (and other people's) emotions, to moderate your emotional responses, and to take into account emotional information in making decisions.

A recruitment panel's view of what you're like to work with is not necessarily going to be accurate, by the way; referee reports are a true record of their writer's limits. Nor are managers always accurate in their assessments of their staff; few would say they feel OK about developing their staff. In terms of you and your EQ, it's possible you're highly developed in key areas but held back by a glitch (e.g. communicating what you're insightfully observing in your staff) that is quite coachable. Whatever needs strengthening in you, it'll be important to get yourself to a trusted colleague or coach for a more detailed discussion about what's working, or not, in how you relate to yourself, your colleagues and your team.