What Are Emotional Intelligence Interview Questions & How Do You Answer Them?

No matter who you are or how experienced you might be, interviews always tend to get those anxiety butterflies fluttering. This is because we invest a lot of time researching companies, reviewing our experience and qualifications, and preparing for the potential questions we might be asked. It all starts to build up the feelings we might be having about being quizzed on being the right person for the job.

There are many common questions, such as 'Tell me about your strengths', alongside more specific ones related to the job at hand and your particular experience. But what about questions like 'How do you handle setbacks in your job' or 'How do you go about supporting your team when there's conflict?'

These questions might feel a bit more personal. They're not trying to catch you out - they're seeking to explore your Emotional Intelligence at Work.

In this question, you can describe the challenging situation, the emotions involved, and how you managed them. Also, you can explain the actions you took to resolve the situation, highlighting your ability to remain calm, empathise with others, and find a positive outcome through effective communication and problem-solving.

You should discuss your strategies for managing stress, such as maintaining a healthy work-life balance, practising mindfulness or meditation, and using effective time management techniques. Also, be sure to emphasise your ability to stay composed, adapt to changing circumstances, and maintain a positive attitude in high-pressure situations.

You can explain the challenging team dynamic and how you approached it. Also, you must highlight your ability to listen actively, show empathy, and seek common ground. Explain how you used your emotional intelligence to build rapport, address conflicts constructively, and collaborate effectively to achieve team goals.

Show your open-mindedness and willingness to receive feedback. Besides that, you can talk about instances where you actively sought feedback, listened attentively, and responded in a positive and constructive manner.

You can provide a specific example where you actively listened, showed understanding, and responded empathetically to someone's needs or concerns. Also, explain how you put yourself in their shoes, offered support, and took appropriate action to help them feel valued and understood.

Emotional intelligence is our ability to recognise, understand and regulate our emotions in response to various situations, triggers and stimuli.

Mayer and Salovey (1990) are credited with first developing the concept of emotional intelligence. Their developmental model devised sixteen steps that show the development of emotional intelligence from childhood to adulthood. The sixteen steps are divided into four main categories:

1. The ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately.
2. The ability to use emotions to facilitate thinking.
3. The ability to understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions.
4. The ability to manage emotions to attain specific goals.

Emotional intelligence interview questions seek to uncover your level of emotional intelligence in relation to everyday workplace challenges or situations. These questions will essentially ask you about various situational or hypothetical scenarios to see how you would behave, engage, and react. Interviewers who use these types of questions want to understand how you regulate yourself and respond to others in workplace contexts.

It's important to know that there are no real 'wrong' or 'right' answers when it comes to these questions. It's only about you, how well you understand your emotional self-awareness, and your capacity to express this.

Below I've picked out five possible emotional intelligence questions you could be asked, along with some guidance on what the question is trying to uncover as well as some advice on answering them:

More than an icebreaker question, this is seeking to understand what type of personality and approaches you respect and potentially want to emulate yourself. When answering this question, consider the following:

• The organisation's culture and values: Who inspires you, and who exhibits similar values?
• Before suggesting someone, make sure you really know about them and the individual's public profile: You don't want to be aligning yourself with someone who may have said politically incorrect statements.
• Their capacity to build relationships and partnerships: Are they team players more of a lone wolf? How could this be perceived in the context of the job you're applying to?

This question looks to get a bit deeper into how you build relationships and what value you place on friendships as part of healthy workplace culture. So, in your answer, talk about the following:

• Whether you're still friends with colleagues from past workplaces.
• Focus on the qualities that help you build relationships and demonstrate how this enables great co-working to achieve projects and goals.
• How friendships in the workplace have helped you achieve work-life balance.
• You can also see this as an opportunity to ask about the current culture and team.

This is probably one of the trickiest questions! How exactly do you answer? Too much honesty could land you in hot water, but denying you get annoyed or angry at work is unrealistic — we all do it from time to time. When answering, consider the following:

• Your self-awareness for how you handle pet peeves: Having some pet peeves is fine, but they want to hear how you manage these professionally and proactively.
• Don't talk negatively about specific people or organisations: Keep your answer general and focused on you and your self-awareness.
• Keep it light: Use humour to prevent this from getting too heavy. Talk about how you understand this particular frustration/pet peeve of yours is part of the role/industry, and you're proactive in not letting it get to you.

This question wants to get to the heart of what's important to you. How you answer can reveal a lot about what you see as success. In your answer, consider the following:

• Whether you want to pick a solo achievement or a team achievement: Depending on the organisation and the role, which one you choose could be a real deal-breaker.
• Why was this achievement essential to you, and why did it make you proud?
• How you achieved it: Tell a story highlighting any perseverance or resilience required to achieve it.

This question is a little double-edged. Firstly, they want to hear about a time you failed (never a comfortable topic) and how you overcame it. Essentially, they want to know how you bounce back from setbacks. In your answer, consider the following:

• Using a professional example rather than something too personal.
• Describe what went wrong without assigning blame, and make sure you demonstrate appropriate ownership and introspection.
• Talk positively about how you overcame it: Who did you speak to? How did you reevaluate? What did you put in place for next time?

Emotional intelligence interview questions aren't designed to catch you out, make you feel stupid, or prevent you from securing the opportunity you're after. Instead, they are great questions to use outside of any context to help you develop your self-awareness for your emotional intelligence and uncover potential personal and professional growth areas.

Don't wait for an opportunity to come along to sit down and reflect on what your answers might be to some of the questions included above. Your answers might surprise you.