Emotional intelligence is a vital quality for every leader.

Psychologist Daniel Goleman, studied leaders at nearly 200 global companies. His findings will help you recognize emotional intelligence in yourself and your employees and assess people’s leadership potential.

Great leaders come in all shapes and sizes. Some are reserved and analytical, while others shout their messages from the mountaintops. Different situations call for different styles. But the best leaders all have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

This is the ability to monitor your feelings and those of others and to use that information to guide your thinking and behavior. Technical skills and smarts matter, of course, but they’re essentially table stakes for leadership positions: although you need them to get into the game, they don’t guarantee that you’ll win.

Emotional intelligence is twice as important for jobs at all levels. And in the top tier, it accounts for nearly 90% of the difference between average and star performers.

Studies also show a strong link between emotional intelligence and bottom-line results.  At one food and beverage company, divisions whose senior managers scored high in emotional intelligence beat their yearly earnings goals by 20%. Divisions without such leaders underperformed by almost as much.

Daniel Goleman identified five components of emotional intelligence.

We look at each one so that you can start to recognize these qualities in yourself and your employees and see how they make leaders more effective.