Praxis Management Ltd.

Goleman's 2002 writing on Emotional Intelligence (E.I.) stimulated wide interest. It appeared to offer a root to better personal relations in the workplace. It created a lucrative line of business for consultants in measuring E.I. But, where the work fell short for me was in the limited consideration of how to improve your E.I. once you knew what it is.

Goleman's work displayed the silo mentality. It would have been much stronger if it had integrated with other management thinking specifically around coaching and performance management. Both these disciplines can be mobilized to help people improve their E.I.

The great strength of the initial work was to break down areas or domains of the E.I and define the competencies needed to excel in these domains. He began to help us reflect on how we could improve our business relationships. He also demonstrated the styles of leadership, which with a little imagination you can append emotional competencies to each leadership style.

The process of developing E.I. draws from the work of Boyatzis on self directed learning. It is also congruent with a ‘value-based’ practice, stretching to help you find your unique and authentic self. It is a five-stage process:

1. Identify your ideal self – who you really want to be.
Covey's work around his funeral ovation is particularly useful to help you reflect on this issue.
2. Then identify your real self. Who you actually are.
Brookfield’s four lenses process in “Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher” is good on this.
3. Next identify your Learning Agenda.
Your learning agenda can be shaped from the gap between your ideal self and your real self. There are many isometric processes that can help with this. But a simple personalized upward appraisal process can deliver quick cost effective results.
Goleman assumes you would want to build on your strengths and fill the gaps. However, work around motivation by Marcus Buckingham suggests that working on your weaknesses does little to improve performance. A distinction should be made here between improving E.I. weaknesses and attempting to improve managerial competencies. And this harks back to the early part of the process where unlike normal S.W.O.T . analysis you should be assessing yourself against E.I. capabilities.
4. Experimenting
Once you have decided where you want to improve it is time to start experimenting on new behaviors. This is not so easy
5. Developing a trusted relationship becomes critically helpful to your reflective process and can feedback on the success of your experiments.

A small example might help:
A rising executive, Tim, took charge of a monthly sales management meeting. Keen to lead the team to success he prepared thoroughly for each agenda item and led the meeting with enthusiasm. However, sales performance started falling and engagement of the team noticeably dwindled. On seeking advice from his coach, he identified a common problem. He was talking too much, and not creating empathy with the team. The coach recommended placing a prompt in front of the executive at each meeting. The prompt simply said I. T. T. M which meant I talk too much. Tim recruited one manager to act as a trusted advisor and this person became the only other person at the meeting that knew what I.T.T.M meant. Over the next few months, the sign helped Tim reduce his input, conscious that his coach had pointed out, as chairman he can always sum up any issues. He found that his team covered the agenda points almost as thoroughly as he would, and he had little else to contribute to the meeting.

The team immediately started regaining ownership of the meeting and over just two months, the sales' results improved substantially. The trusted relationship helped the executive with feedback after each meeting pointing out ways of drawing each member of the team into the meeting. Tim learnt to listen more effectively, and to build empathy, letting others take ownership and keeping his strength in reserve for when the team ran into problems. That is why he had been promoted.

The cost and time spent working on emotional intelligence is yet to prove its worth. But a good knowledge of the issues and the use of reflective processes can do no harm. What is self-evident though is that the leaders who develop greater empathy with their colleagues become more successful.

From related work we also know the strength of good listening skills has a lot to do with building empathy, and in this domain women outperform men by a significant margin. If Goleman is right on the importance of E.I. then the next generation of leaders will be women. Men ! You have been warned.

In the near future we will post additional items on E.I. specifically laying out the domains and leadership styles that will help you reflect on this issue. For posting dates, see forthcoming articles, and if you can't wait, email us for a draft copy.