Amanda Knight was a student of the first ever CAEI Certificate course in Applied Emotional Intelligence, and is now the Director of Programmes with the Centre.

AppliedEI™ represents the ethos and the work of the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence.

The CAEI promotes high performance and personal success through
• learning to manage your self and your personality effectively
• learning to manage your relationships effectively, and
• acceptance of self and others

Here at the CAEI, we only use highly qualified facilitators and practitioners whose practice is based on these principles and the ethics of the CAEI.

AppliedEI™ is a registered trade mark. It describes our approach to emotional intelligence development, and is a kitemark awarded to graduates of our Certificate in Applied Emotional Intelligence who continue to demonstrate on-going EI practitionership and CPD. Wherever you see this mark, you can be assured that the practitioner or training organisation subscribes to the CAEI standards in EI development, and have undertaken indepth training with us.

Why is Applied Emotional Intelligence important?

Emotional intelligence should be part of the organisational culture – emotionally intelligent behaviour throughout an organisation will directly impact on the working environment. A lack of organisational EI will affect employee health and morale, key indicators being absenteeism, high turnover and work-related stress.

For us, "emotional intelligence" is not a synonym for personality (something which is relatively fixed); it is about how we manage our personality. This is why applied emotional intelligence, or knowing how to put EI into practice, is essential for effective leadership, for transforming team and organisational culture, in fact for any job where individuals have a lot of interaction with others, or where the individual has to manage him/herself.

So AppliedEI™ defines our approach to developing transformational leadership, high-performing teams, and personal effectiveness within organisations.

The CAEI facilitates this through its flexible range of EI training and development products and services. We can either work with you to design and implement effective EI development programmes specific to your needs, or run ‘Train the Trainer’ programmes to provide your organisation with people who have the necessary attitudes and skills to implement long-term EI strategies.

Please contact us for more information on any of our products and services – for an overview of these, please click here.

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Our Ethos

The CAEI promotes high performance and personal success through:

• learning to manage your self and your personality effectively

• learning to manage your relationships with others effectively

• acceptance of self and others.

How We Achieve This

The CAEI promotes high performance and personal success by:

• facilitating the effective assessment and development of emotional intelligence

• through our flexible range of EI development products and services

• provided through a community of highly qualified EI practitioners

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1. We are each of us in control of and responsible for our actions.

2. No one else can control our feelings.

3. People are different: they experience the world differently; they feel different things; they want different things.

4. However you are, and they are, is OK. (Though this does not mean that whatever you and they do is necessarily OK.)

5. Feelings and behaviour are separate. (Being in touch with our feelings does not mean being out of control of ourselves and our behaviour.)

6. Feelings are self-justified, to be accepted and important.

7. Change is possible.

8. All people have a natural tendency towards growth and health.

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Richard Harvey was involved with the UK Stores Change Programme with Marks & Spencer. He was introduced to the importance of emotional intelligence during his MBA, and has recently completed the CAEI Certificate in Applied Emotional Intelligence.

It is not the strongest of the species who survive,
not the most intelligent, but those who are the most adaptive to change.
Charles Darwin

The ability to adapt and time taken to adapt to change can be linked fundamentally with many aspects of emotional intelligence, whether the species in question is an individual or a collection of individuals in the form of an organisation.

The most successful organisations have accepted this “adapt or die” truism and have integrated the capacity for continuous learning and change at a core level. However, these organisations are currently few and far between!

Increasing external and internal pressures on organisations indicate that change - whether evolutionary or revolutionary - will continue to have a significant impact in all modern workplaces.

Understanding the importance of EI in human performance and integrating this knowledge into your change interventions could make the difference between success and failure.

Do you recognise any of the following scenarios in organisations you have worked with or within?

• Low levels of employee engagement:
high levels of absenteeism; talented employees leaving; an absence of creativity and innovation; poor customer service; a general lack of collective energy

• Diversity initiatives met with compliance rather than a collective commitment to the value of different perspectives and contributions

• Bullying and aggression tolerated and perhaps even celebrated: “It’s my way or the highway” “Fit In or F*** Off” (FIFO): the coercive “JFDI” approach as the predominant leadership style.

• Managers seeking status & hierarchy adopt a superior attitude, for example, avoiding eye contact and communication with front-line workers

• A huge gap between what leaders say and what they do

• People are seen as liabilities rather than as assets: the HR function is under constant pressure to demonstrate that it is adding value to the organisation

These scenarios are indicative of organisations with low collective EI.

This article is an introduction to the potential of EI when integrated into a planned Organisational Development (OD) change programme.


Organisation Development (O.D.)

In simple terms, Organisation Development (O.D.):
- draws on our understanding of the conditions that promote effective human performance in the workplace
- analyses the gaps between the organisation’s desired future state and where it currently stands
- designs and implements a joined-up programme of interventions based on new structures; roles; attitudes; behaviours; rewards etc - to achieve the desired future state.

Tactical changes, in isolation, may effect desired change using a “fine-tuning” approach. However, for most organisations the need for a more strategic joined-up approach is required, either in anticipation of or in reaction to more wide ranging environmental changes such as higher customer expectations.
In these cases the organisation may well need to change its culture - “the way we do things round here” – to increase innovation or flexibility, for example.

The application of EI principles can help to anticipate and minimise both surface and below-surface resistance to the changes required.

Understanding and applying EI principles is beneficial at all stages in the OD process, including:
- Visioning and defining the desired future in terms of values/ attitudes/ behaviours
- Developing and implementing an analysis of the current environment
- Designing the interventions that move the organisation and its people from current to desired state in the most effective way
- Helping people cope with the personal implications of the change process
- Helping change agents and managers at all levels lead the change process

Many planned OD change programmes do not fulfil their potential as they fail to change the culture of the organisation at a deep level. Some behavioural change may be observable – but scratch below the surface and you may find that real attitudinal change is lacking.

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Starting in 1996, thorough and scrupulous as usual, Tim researched all the Emotional Intelligence tests that were being developed and assessed them for their strengths and weaknesses. He was therefore able to give constructive, sensible and impartial advice to clients on the most suitable assessment tool for their needs. The trouble was that the feedback usually was: I can see that there are problems with all these measures, why don’t you design one that works? So he has become an expert on the measurement of EI, and has co-developed 1) the first true Team EI test and 2) the only measure of individual EI which is composed, as required, of a mixture of scales - “more is better” and “you can have too much of a good thing”, in other words a combination of linear and bipolar scales. These are the Team Effectiveness questionnaire (TEq) and the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire (IEq), the measures the CAEI currently uses.
Given the intimate relationship between measuring and the concepts that are being measured, becoming an expert in the measurement of EI means becoming an expert in EI as a whole. Tim has made significant developments in the theory of EI and its application, and is familiarly referred to by his colleagues as “the guru”.

As Learning Director of the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence, Tim is involved in training on the Centre’s own courses, doing in-house training and consultancy for commercial and governmental clients, addressing in-house and public conferences on emotional intelligence, developing new EI measurement tools, and writing articles on EI. He is currently in the later stages of co-writing a book (the book!) on the application of Emotional Intelligence, and at the age of sixty (CPD never finishes!) is doing a PhD by explication on EI development.

He lives in Gloucestershire with his beloved border collie Polly, and he and Elizabeth, who is now Principal of the School of Emotional Literacy (the analogue of emotional intelligence in the education sector), have a house in Greece (Tim is fluent in three European languages but unfortunately Greek, which is difficult, is not one of them) where much of their writing gets done – in theory.

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Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence
Buckholdt House, The Street, Frampton on Severn, Glos, GL2 7ED
Tel: 01452 741106 Fax: 01452 741520
Email: info@appliedei.co.uk
Web: www.emotionalintelligence.co.uk

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