Beyond the Buzzwords: A Critical Look at Emotional Intelligence in Active Listening

TLDR:?

• Emotional intelligence (EI) is a questionable popsych concept
• EI focus can cause more damage to relationships than good
• Dialogic listening – focusing on attentiveness, ethical engagement, and mutual discovery between joint participants in conversation – is more beneficial for building relationships.

The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), popularized by Daniel Goleman, has gained widespread acceptance in professional and interpersonal contexts as a vital skill for understanding and managing emotions. Its applications in leadership, coaching, and communication are well-documented, often positioned as indispensable for fostering empathy, self-awareness, and effective relationships. However, critics such as Merryland university’s Edwin Locke and Adam Grant at Wharton university argue emotional intelligence, as it is popularly understood, risks oversimplifying and overstating its psychological foundations, reducing it to a catch-all for social skills or a panacea for interpersonal issues.

This critique explores the limitations of emotional intelligence, particularly in the context of active listening, and supports the call for a reorientation toward listening as a practice of attentiveness, relational engagement, and ethical respect, rather than a skill narrowly tied to the EI framework.

Criticism of Emotional Intelligence

1. Overgeneralization and Vagueness

Prominent critics argue that emotional intelligence is too broad and imprecise to be a scientifically valid concept. Psychologist Edwin Locke described it as “a misnomer,” suggesting that its components—such as self-regulation, empathy, and social skills—are better understood as distinct attributes rather than elements of a unified construct. Others, such as Adam Grant , accept the construct but contend that EI’s popularity in management and self-help literature has led to exaggerated claims about its efficacy, making it more of a pop-psychology buzzword than a rigorously tested theory.

2. Questionable Causality

Critics also challenge the assumption that high emotional intelligence directly leads to better outcomes. Locke and other skeptics argue EI may be a correlate rather than a cause of effective leadership or interpersonal success. For example, individuals who are naturally empathetic or skilled communicators may be labeled as emotionally intelligent without requiring the construct itself as an explanatory framework.

3. Risk of Manipulation

Another concern is the potential misuse of emotional intelligence in professional and personal settings. Adam Grant argue’s an overemphasis on EI could enable manipulation, where individuals use their understanding of emotions to exploit others rather than build genuine relationships.

When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests

Adam Grant

Reframing Active Listening Beyond Emotional Intelligence

While emotional intelligence has value in highlighting the role of emotions in human interaction, its application to active listening can obscure the deeper, more relational dimensions of the practice. Listening, particularly in the context of active or resonant listening, is not merely about emotional attunement but about fostering a shared space of understanding, ethical respect, and mutual exploration.

1. Listening as Attentiveness

Active listening prioritizes attentiveness, the act of being fully present to the speaker. This goes beyond emotional cues to encompass the broader context of the speaker’s words, tone, body language, and silences. Rather than framing this as an “intelligence” rooted in emotional insight, attentiveness can be understood as a relational discipline that requires:

• Removing distractions.
  
• Engaging with curiosity rather than judgment.
  
• Respecting the speaker’s autonomy.
  

2. Listening as Ethical Engagement

Unlike the instrumental view of EI, which often focuses on achieving outcomes like conflict resolution or persuasion, listening should be grounded in ethical engagement. Philosopher Martin Buber’s concept of the “I-Thou” relationship offers a useful lens, emphasizing that genuine dialogue requires recognizing the other as a person with inherent worth, not as a means to an end. This view reframes listening as:

• An ethical act of respect.
  
• A commitment to understanding the speaker’s perspective without imposing one’s own agenda.
  

3. Listening as Mutual Discovery

Active listening involves not only hearing emotions but also engaging with the cognitive and existential dimensions of what the speaker is expressing. This process is better described as mutual discovery, where the listener and speaker collaborate to uncover insights or solutions. In this way, listening as mutual discovery in which both speaker and listener exchange roles as joint participants in discovering new meanings in conversation is closer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism. More recently, John Stewart and Milt Thomas’, using the term, dialogic listening’, gave Bakhtin’s ideas a 21st Century managerial twist. Unlike the EI model, which emphasizes managing and interpreting emotions, mutual discovery highlights:

• The interplay of thought, emotion, and intention.
  
• The value of reflective techniques, such as paraphrasing and summarizing, to co-construct meaning.
  

The Value of Repositioning Listening

Repositioning listening from an emotionally intelligent skill to a broader relational practice offers several advantages:

1. Precision: It avoids the conceptual vagueness of EI, focusing on clear, actionable aspects of listening such as attentiveness and engagement.
   
2. Depth: It acknowledges the complexity of human interaction, incorporating emotions as part of a larger context rather than the central focus.
   
3. Ethics: It situates listening within an ethical framework, emphasizing respect, trust, and the intrinsic value of dialogue.
   

Final thoughts

While emotional intelligence has popularised the importance of understanding emotions in communication, its application to active listening risks oversimplifying the nuanced relational dynamics at play. Active listening is more accurately described as a practice of attentiveness, ethical engagement, and mutual discovery. By shifting focus from managing emotions to fostering genuine dialogue, we can enrich listening, ensuring it remains a profound and transformative human act rather than a reductive tool of instrumental psychology. However, sometimes, attentive listening has other objectives. For example, Resonant Creative Listening (RCL) is not primarily focused on building and maintaining relationships. Rather, RCL aims for the listener to serve as a skilled ‘sounding board’ for problem-solving and aiding the self-discovery of solutions among individuals, particularly high achievers.