Answer: Emotional Intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others, harness and apply them to tasks, and to regulate and manage them. El is an essential asset for a public servant as it helps in:

• Motivating workforce: A public servant must win the trust of his staff and keep them motivated. He can neither be a dictator nor be a people-pleaser. He has to connect with the staff emotionally in order for them to comply with his orders.
• Managing family and work life: A public servant with a balanced family and work life can contribute more to the system due to a relaxed state of mind owing to El.
• Effective conflict resolution: It can reconcile the differences among co-workers or different factions of people and can resolve problems in a more constructive and effective manner.
• Better decision making: Being aware of one’s wants and fears can help the public servant in being neutral and impartial while dealing with issues pertaining to conflict of interests.
• Better policy making and implementation: El helps in better understanding of ground realities. It can further help in suggesting better policies, and implementing them even more effectively.
• Repose trust in the system: By listening attentively to the problems of people, empathizing with their situation and bringing positive change in the work ethics of the bureaucracy, El can help in making the system more trustworthy in the eyes of citizens. However, a public servant with high El can also use it as a tool for his private gains:
• Manipulating others: Evidence shows that when people hone their emotional skills, they become better at manipulating others. They can tug at their heartstrings and motivate others to act against their own best interests. Especially when they have self-serving interests, EI becomes a weapon for manipulating others. For example, often the ill-motivated people use glaring socio-economic disparity to inculcate hatred between two communities and derive political gains.
• Distorts reasoning: When a leader gives an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience becomes less likely to scrutinize the message. It robs them of their capacity to reason. For example, Hitler’s persuasive impact came from his ability to strategically express emotions.
• Tactical emotional expression: Emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain. Emotionally intelligent people “intentionally shape their emotions to fabricate favorable impressions of themselves”. For example, persons having criminal backgrounds often use emotional pitch to win trust and vote in the elections.

Thus, El is not always virtuous and can be used as a tool for negative ends as well. However, public servants are the trustees of public interest and therefore, they need to be high on El in order to be firm in their approach, and be agents of good change.