Date: Sunday, August 23, 2026
Hello! I am Rajib Nandi, a researcher and evaluator working primarily in South Asia, with a focus on evaluation capacity development. Here, I reflect on the evaluation competencies of emotional intelligence and resilience. I have identified these within a core set of eleven competencies in the forthcoming article ‘Rethinking Evaluation Competencies for the Transformational Imperative,’ part of a special issue of the Journal of MultiDisciplinary Evaluation (JMDE) led by the International Evaluation Academy (IEAc)
The evaluation landscape today looks very different from the one many of us entered fifteen or twenty years ago. Emerging evaluators are starting their careers amid the lingering effects of COVID-19, climate emergencies, conflict, democratic backsliding, widening inequalities, and rapid technological disruption, with additional strain from shrinking funding, organizational restructuring, and pressure to ‘do more with less’.
Evaluation standards have traditionally emphasized methodological rigor, analytical thinking, and technical expertise. While essential, these are no longer sufficient.
Evaluators increasingly work across cultures, disciplines, and competing interests to facilitate conversations about difficult findings, contested values, and unequal power. Navigating these demands requires emotional intelligence. It is the ability to recognize and regulate our emotions, understand how our values and identities shape our judgments, and connect with empathy, humility, and integrity.
Emotional intelligence helps to sustain ourselves amid the complexity, uncertainty, and emotional weight of transformation-focused evaluation. It also helps connect with others, build the trust, openness, and shared understanding needed for findings to be heard and acted upon. From personal experience, evaluations often succeed or fail not due to the quality of the relationships we build, not the methods chosen.
When conversations become emotionally charged, a common reflex is to provide answers immediately. Instead, I have learned to pause.
Practicing mindful presence means staying attentive to evidence and emotions. It creates space for better conversations. It helps us listen more carefully, recognize different perspectives, and respond thoughtfully. Small moments of reflection often lead to better decisions than instant technical fixes.
What I did not appreciate early in my career is that resilience is not simply about working harder or enduring more stress.
During the COVID-19 years, we all balanced demanding evaluations with caring for family, supporting colleagues, and navigating our own uncertainties. I realized that taking care of myself was integral to being an ethical evaluator and being able to care better for others.
Resilience means safeguarding our mental and emotional well-being and setting healthy boundaries. It means learning from supportive professional communities, and having the courage to uphold ethical standards even when institutional pressures favor compliance over meaningful learning.
As evaluators, we ask organizations to become more adaptive and resilient. Perhaps we should expect the same of ourselves.
Emotional intelligence and resilience are professional competencies that help us build trust, navigate complexity, and sustain ethical practice over the long term.
Evaluators will be remembered not only for the methods they mastered, but for the trust they built, the courage they showed, and the humanity they brought to their practice.
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