About the emotional intelligence at work approach

The emotional intelligence at work approach is to apply emotional intelligence teaching to clients’ management skills and leadership qualities in order to facilitate them to resolve business issues and achieve their objectives.

About coaching and mentoring

There’s nothing more unhelpful than the person, newly qualified in method X, who then goes on to force X on every client he’s lucky enough to get, entirely irrespective of whether X is an appropriate technique for the particular challenges with which he’s presented. So, we deploy techniques you’ll find used by coaches, mentors, trainers, consultants, teachers, advisers and others. We use all the techniques in a conversation, flitting between them so as to provide the best service we can for the client. As advocates of the precept, Make the other person more important than you, we could hardly do other. Insisting that the client is going to get method X, come what may, would make our need to be right that X is invariably suitable more important than the client’s issue.

We teach clients a small number of models based on psychology which we have found helped clients gain insight into the situation they and their businesses are in. These are mostly too complex and subtle for any other approach (eg, coaching) to be of any use.

We also use a set of principles and precepts which form the basis of the coaching and mentoring components of our conversations with clients. Precepts are ‘special’ principles: they’re injunctions to be a certain way. We use them because we’ve found the ways advocated can be useful in achieving the objectives clients have. Example precepts are Make the other person more important than you and Be the change you want to see in the world.

Principles are general statements of how the world seems to be which are worth steering one’s ship by. For example, The meaning of a communication is what the recipient makes of it and The map is not the territory.

Our programmes

We are always very happy to provide a service which responds to the client’s needs, month by month. Models and precepts are introduced as and when appropriate, and objectives for the work are developed on the fly. We have some clients stay with us for well over a year on this basis. But we recognise that many clients need something more focussed, often something which is consistently repeatable in different parts of their organisation.

So we prefer to work with a client to identify a specific issue or challenge and then create a programme to enable the client to resolve the issue. This can be as small as working with a single individual who is having problems leading their team. Usually, however, the issue is one which embraces a number of people in the business, at different levels, who have different takes on the issue and different reasons to be involved in the solution. This programme may well be a series of workshops for the whole groups (or even subgroups, if the group is large), plus some training sessions, plus individual work. Such a programme may be anything from 6 to 12 months and involve between 6 and 24 people.

Typical projects that such programmes would address might include:

• enabling a public sector organisation be more commercial
• fostering a spirit of efficiency coupled with compassion in a care home
• helping a business set up a regional office with all the ethos and values of the parent office
• implementing a succession strategy in a business
• improving the motivation and performance of a sales team.

We believe that, whenever we hear a problem, all we know at that moment is that that is not the problem, so we take special care to work with prospects, before they become clients, on helping them identify what their problem actually is. In some complex cases, we might suggest an initial project in which the detailed requirements are identified.

Because the objectives of each project are defined by the client (albeit with some assistance from us), if the client needs to measure the success of the programme, the client is in a position to do this themselves. After all, if the client knows the problem and the desired outcomes, they will be able to tell when the outcomes have been delivered.

Our material

Our training, coaching and mentoring is delivered always in a context of extensive, hands on workplace experience and expertise.  It is derived from: