How does emotional intelligence at work work?

Engaging with emotional intelligence at work is simple.

There are two stages.

(1)  The stage where someone—or some people—from an organisation explore(s) with us whether we are appropriate people to help them solve whatever issues, problems and challenges are troubling their organisation.

(2)  The stage where the organisation that the person, or people, represent has become a client and some of the people in it work with us in with the intention to solve some or all of these issues, problems and challenges facing the organisation.

Stage 1

This stage is wholly at our expense and can take as long as the individual(s) needs, or would like.

In order for both parties to have some understanding that it would be beneficial for eiw and the organisation (usually a business) to work together, there is an exchange of information.

Although we are gently discussing with the person(s) what the problems are, in truth we are coaching them to explore what the real issues are (these are often not what the individual presents with).  This process therefore enables the individual(s) to get a real sense of how we work.

We will usually present one or more of the models that we use and discuss a few case histories which might be relevant.

We will, of course, discuss what we might do were we to be asked to work with the organisation (once we have some idea of the issues).  See Train.

This process may take a number of meetings and sometimes phone calls.  The longest, so far, is four meetings totally six hours before the prospect decided to become a client.  The shortest is 47 minutes from the moment of first meeting the prospect.

If requested, I am happy to provide ancillary written material.  Depending on the nature of the issue, this might be a proposal, though, unlike IT projects for example, the sort of intervention emotional intelligence at work undertakes may not qualifiable, or quantifiable at this point.

This stage concludes with the individual(s) asking to become a client.  We never sell.

Stage 2

emotional intelligence at work’s client is always the organisation (business, public sector department and so on) that the individual(s) represent.  This can sometimes give a small problem to sole traders;  we believe the individual and their business are two separate things (in law, they certainly are) and our client is always the business.

The nature of our engagements is so diverse, they cannot begin to be covered here.  They have ranged from

• coaching a senior manager in the UK office of a global corporate who was, I understand, a pain in the office whenever work got stressful
• with associates, developing and delivering a 20 hour training programme for 2000+ full time students, annually, in employability skills for an FE college
• developing and implementing a programme of “cultural shift” to help a public sector quango be more commercial.

Any one intervention will contain one or more of the following

• one to one (or, possibly, one to two) work, for which we deploy an integrative approach which combines coaching, mentoring, consulting, teaching, advising (occasionally) and analysis
• training sessions for 8-16 participants—whilst these are interactive, with exercises for the participants, they are essentially events in which we impart knowledge and understanding to the participants, who bring their work experiences to be examples of the subjects of the training
• workshops for 6-12 participants—these are far more interactive than training sessions.  In these we address the work experiences the participants bring through role play, group discussion and so on;  we add some “chalk and talk” to ensure learning and understanding is achieved.

If a sufficiently detailed description of what we propose to do hasn’t already been drawn up, we will do that before we start work.

Depending on the size and scope of the intervention, we will include review points as needed by the client.

We are always happy to work with the client to assess the value of our work.  To the question “How do you measure the success of your intervention?” we would answer (if we had ever been asked this question), “How would you like us to measure it?”

It is not for us to provide performance metrics.  (We will always be able to find ones that put our work in a complimentary light!)  We work with the client, at the beginning, to establish what their outcomes of our intervention should be and, because we believe in well-formed outcomes, these will, by definition, be detectable.

Finally, we take no credit whatsoever for any success the organisation has as a result of intervention.  We didn’t do it.  The client did it.

Nor do we take any blame for any difficulties that the organisation has as a result of our intervention.  It’s all about responsibility.  We work on the business, not in the business.

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