There are plenty of articles, and books, about being an effective organisational consultant. This is not another of those to join the pile. I am going to concentrate specifically on the dos and don’ts of being a consultant specialising in emotional intelligence. To my mind there are two big extra problems over and above those of consultants in general. (1) People’s, including clients’, expectations are higher. And (2) it is very tempting, but fatal, to oversell what you can offer.

First, the issue of expectations. Like people who take on any consultant, what the clients of EI consultants are really interested in in the long run is whether you produce the goods, whether you are able to generate the kinds of change in their organisation that they are looking for, and thus increase their organisational effectiveness and – in the case of a commercial organisation – profitability, in the direction and to the extent that they hope. It takes a while, however, to work out whether you are going to be able to deliver. But meanwhile, they will very quickly be able to assess whether in their dealings with you they experience you as emotionally intelligent. And that will be another one of their expectations, even if not explicitly expressed as such. So, quite rightly, it is important that process matches content, and that not only does the EI consultant help generate emotionally intelligent working in the organisation, and facilitate the development of the emotional intelligence of the members of the organisation, but also that he/she acts with emotional intelligence personally while doing so. Hence in part the importance in the training process of EI consultants of not only learning about EI and how to promote it, but also of enhancing one’s own emotional intelligence. However, it is not only a question of being seen to be emotionally intelligent, you actually have to be emotionally intelligent too. Just as you can’t teach someone French if you don’t speak French yourself, so too you can’t foster emotional intelligence if you aren’t reasonably emotionally intelligent yourself.

Next, the other side of expectations: the danger of EI consultants overinflating them by overselling what they can offer. This is very tempting because what is on offer is indeed very powerful. In part because of the combination of numbers two and four of our Five Crucial Attributes of Emotional Intelligence:
2 EI predicts performance.
4 EI is changeable and developable.
Since all consultancy clients are seeking to improve the performance of their organisation, and of its members, that means that what EI has to offer is the Holy Grail: something which affects performance across the board, and which can be changed and developed.

That in a nutshell is the key to what EI consultancy has to offer in terms of content. But it also has something unique to offer in terms of process, and this is best explored in terms of the KASH model. This model proposes that there are four determinants of the level of performance, which are:
K nowledge
A ttitudes
S kills
H abits.
This means that any programme of change which is aimed at enhancing performance levels needs to address all of these aspects. But that is not what happens. The vast majority of organisational change programmes focus almost entirely on knowledge and skills, and ignore attitudes and habits. This is why so many developmental training programmes have only limited success.

EI consultants, on the other hand, are aware of the importance of attitudes (both Self Regard and Regard for Others, and the eight Principles of Emotional Intelligence) and habits; they have the knowledge and skills (and the attitudes and habits!) to tackle them; and they address their efforts largely to these aspects. Consequently, not only is EI based consultancy setting out to change things which have a determining effect on performance level, but it sets out to do so in a way that will work.

However, and this is where the danger of overselling comes in, there are two serious drawbacks about trying to change attitudes and habits.

Consultancy clients, and I acknowledge that this is a little unfair on some of the more sophisticated ones, tend to want guaranteed results, and to want them by yesterday. The temptation is to respond to what they want and offer guarantees where none are possible, and to agree to an unrealistic timescale. It is important to bear in mind what we have been looking at, and to take into account that:

It follows that introducing emotional intelligence in a systematic way to an organisation, is not a quick or a cheap fix. But the benefits are likely to be across the board and substantial. Provided the organisation is ready for it. A particular point that EI consultants will need to address, using their Other Awareness, their Flexibility and their Goal Directedness, is how the organisation and its members are likely to respond to such a programme of organisational change, and whether any preliminary work needs to be done about response to change. A lot of this will depend on the organisation's previous experience, if any, and response to, programmes of culture change within the organisation.

One aspect of EI consultancy which I have not touched on yet is measurement. This is pretty crucial as it allows us to assess what needs to be done, to intervene in an appropriately directed way and to measure progress/achievement: the first and third of the Five Crucial Attributes of Emotional Intelligence are:
1. EI is multifaceted.
3. EI is measurable.
But not all measures are equal, as my articles on measurement in e-zine numbers 2 and 3 (March and April 2005) explained. Luckily in the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire and the Team Effectiveness questionnaire we have measures which lend themselves to being used in an empowering way, rather than involving the belittling process of most psychometric testing. They both, too, have the advantage that merely completing the questionnaire is an intervention in itself in that it invites the respondents to consider the issues being explored. Feeding back results, and exploring them with the respondents, develops the process. Team responses to discussion of TEq results tend to be very productive in terms of identifying what the necessary interventions are, and of generating willingness to undertake them. Probably a skilled team consultant could gather the same information over three days of interviews, but the use of the TEq saves both consultant time and management time. Exploration of IEq results at least allows an individual to focus their self development energies, and at best it can prove a life-changing experience, profoundly deepening the individual’s self knowledge and self acceptance.

A word here about using the 360 degree version of the IEq. Because the IEq 360 degree version is abbreviated and not time consuming, it can routinely be used to validate the IEq itself. From the consultant’s point of view, this is a relief, because it provides the easiest way of dealing with the potentially most difficult kind of individual respondent. We have noticed the importance of Self Regard within EI as a whole, and the most tricky sets of responses come from those who have an underlying, if unconscious and unadmitted, sense of low Self Regard, but who cloak this by adopting the I’m OK You’re Not OK life position. This will usually be apparent to the consultant, despite their high score on Self Regard, because their Regard for Others, and consequently their Relative Regard, will be low. Such people, however, tend to be pretty defended, and to be resistant to taking in negative feedback from others. Nonetheless, it will be difficult for them to deny the reality of a 360 degree which is at variance with their own self assessment in Scale 16, and this may provide the impetus for them to reconsider their view of themselves. It is particularly important in such cases that respondents to the 360 degree are reassured before they complete it that their responses will be anonymous and not identifiable to them, and that all attempts by the ratee to discover how individual raters assessed them are resisted.

One question which EI consultants in particular have to address is whether to go into a particular organisation explicitly flying the banner of “emotional intelligence”, or whether to offer generic performance improvement in terms of self management and relationship management. It is hard to lay down general rules about this: it is up to the skill of the consultant and his/her knowledge of the particular circumstances. What is more important is that the work gets done, rather than the particular name it is initiated under.

An issue which EI consultants share with management consultants in general is where to start, what level to go in at. There is a particular difficulty here in that senior management will often assume that they are emotionally intelligent (because they are senior) and that the interventions need to be directed further down the hierarchy, towards middle and junior management. The more they believe this, the less it is likely to be true! It is usually best to start at the top, if you have the “in” to do so. If not, it is often helpful to start a pilot scheme in a particular corner of the organisation: if all goes well, the success of that will be the basis for spreading EI promotion more widely.

EI consultants need to bear in mind the three levels at which one can assess the level of functioning in terms of emotional intelligence, and at which one can intervene: individual, team (including leadership) and organisation. There is an almost infinite variety of ways in which intervening at these three levels can be related and programmed. Often one level will enhance the other. For example, doing a TEq on a board of directors first will often lead to suggestions that each should do the IEq, and then when the board level interventions have been completed, they will likely want to address the extent to which the whole organisation is run in an emotionally intelligent way. Conversely, one can start by having team members complete IEqs and often that will lead to a suggestion that they should then complete a TEq on the team as a whole. Again, there are no hard and fast rules: it is down to the skill of the consultant to respond to the inclination of the client and the particular circumstances of the organisation.

In terms of defining the focus of a piece of EI consultancy, it is a common pattern that the client presents with a problem of relationships (e.g.,“Sales and Accounts are at war”) with the expectation that the interventions will be at the inter-group relationship level. Often, however, it is important to bear in mind the direction of the causal arrows in our four part model.

The symptoms may be at the Relationship management level, but in order to deal with them, it is often necessary to address Self management, Awareness of others, and indeed Self awareness, from which everything else springs.

Finally, a reminder and a word of warning. The last of our Five Crucial Attributes of Emotional Intelligence is:
5. EI is an aspect of the whole person.
What this means is that it is not a bolt-on addition. If someone changes the level of their functioning in terms of emotional intelligence, they themselves are changed, both at home and at work, at weekends as well as 9-5. Furthermore, feelings are a core part of our identity, and something we tend to feel pretty tender about. It therefore behoves all EI consultants to work in a respectful and professionally careful manner, to facilitate the respondent to go where they want to go, and not to instruct them as to where to go.
In order to be able to do this, since the consultant is being paid by the organisation, not the individual respondent, it is important to be very clear about the elements of this three cornered contract before the work begins, so that each party knows where they stand, for example in regard to confidentiality.
The process of helping people enhance their emotional intelligence can be an exciting and a moving one, and in the process respondents may share things, and themselves, with the consultant in a way that it is a privilege to receive. The only down side of this is that sometimes in the process individual respondents may go through a period of emotional distress, and/or may discover that they need professional help to sort themselves out. This does not mean that an EI consultant needs to be a trained psychotherapist. What they do need is (1) to be able to recognise when they are reaching the limits of their competency and they need to refer on, (2) to know who to refer the client to, or at least how to find out who, (3) to be able to handle the process of referral professionally. Until that point, they just need to remember that they don’t have to fix anything, they just have to be there for the client. Active Empathic Listening, which they do need to have in their toolkit, will do the business. After all, that is probably what the trained psychotherapist would be doing too!

© Tim Sparrow 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

Developing emotionally intelligent teams is a bit like developing emotionally intelligent leaders. There are models such as Belbin Team Roles that seek to describe what a ‘high performing team’ is, but having the right distribution of skills, attributes, or roles within the team isn’t the differentiator. The differentiator is what enables a team to adapt to continually changing conditions and demands. This happens when each individual within the team has the personal flexibility to adopt a different role or approach depending on what the team itself needs at any given time.

How does a team gain such flexibility?

As with individual EI development, the answer will be the same. It’s down to the interferences that are inhibiting the team’s performance (see Timothy Gallwey’s “Inner Game” series, and his development formula: Performance = potential – interference). As our own Tim Sparrow described in his article EI and other psychological constructs in issue 04 of AppliedEI, “the chief determinants of the level of performance, in teams as well as in individuals, are attitudinal… If people are emotionally intelligent, and in particular if they are high in flexibility, they will not always do their standard thing in every team setting, but will have a range of behaviours to call on, will use their Awareness of Others to diagnose which particular way of working will be most needed in that particular team, and adapt their behaviour accordingly.”

What if the emotional intelligence of the individuals has yet to be developed. Where do you start in developing sustainable quality performance in a team?

First you need to be sure that you understand what the current attitudes of the team actually are. And this must not be confused with current outcomes or even the behaviours of certain individuals. When you look at the emotional intelligence of a team what you are really looking at is what is going on within the team, and within the individual relationships within the team. A standard team development will take an external view of the team – it will tend to be focussed on what the team is having to deal with – external factors such as policy, organisational culture, and leadership styles. A good team development will also explore internal outcomes such as lack of trust and personality clashes. These of course are important – but addressed on their own will not create a sustainable high team performance.

In our view what creates real synergy and cohesion within a team is not so much how the team deals with the outside world and the internal outcomes this generates – the outside world will always be there with its opportunities and its threats. But on what foundation is the team built? How does the team handle its internal world – what is actually going on within the team that may be hindering or helping its development and its performance?

The qualities of a high performing team

Time after time, when we work with teams on experiential programmes, the same learning outcomes present themselves (trust, effective communication, respect, etc). And when we crunch these down, ultimately it’s about creating true interdependence – the belief by everyone in the team that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – that by working together towards a common goal, they can achieve far more than any one of them could achieve as an individual, whilst enabling each individual to achieve their own goals too. And in order to create this, the team needs to have the trust, the respect and the open communication going on amongst its team members. It’s easy to understand why this needs to be so. But far less easy to put into practice. To be in a team where this truly is a reality is rather special. For a team to reach this state, its internal world needs to be free of the interferences that inhibit this potential. Ultimately, it needs to dismantle any controlling or limiting individual egos which drain the energy of the team, and which inhibit smooth flowing communication and intent towards achieving agreed common goals – hence Tim’s reference (above) to the requirement for emotionally intelligent individual members.

What do we mean by the term ‘an emotionally intelligent team’? What does it mean to actually live by emotionally intelligent team values?

We know of a team that demonstrates the emotionally intelligent qualities measured through the Team Effectiveness questionnaire, on a day-to-day basis. In fact, its high performance as a team is not just apparent through the breadth and depth of its success, but this has also been fed back to them numerous times by various parties who have interacted with them, and experienced this for themselves.

When this team held a team day to identify where it was currently, and where it was going, here are some of the beliefs the team identified that it held about itself:

	Leading, not conforming
	Warm, friendly and supporting
	Limitless potential
	Still open to learning
	High performing team
	A centre of excellence
	It has an excellent core team that are the essence of its strength
	Innovative and pioneering
	Facing an exciting and incredible future
	Enthused by development
	A young butterfly
	The kiddies!

The culture that these team beliefs demonstrate is also down to the regular reviews on performance that the team engage in – this reflective learning process is an important part of the team’s continued development.

If you would like to explore the emotional intelligence of your team, we’ll be delighted to share with you the secrets of our own Activate team! You can contact Matt or Amanda at Activate on 01590 688011 or by email to ei@activate-training.co.uk.

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Principle No. 4
However you, and they, are is OK.
(Though this does not mean that whatever you and they do is necessarily OK.)

Here we meet the crucial distinction between being and doing. How people are is beyond judgement or reproach. It just is, and is to be accepted as such. If it is not the result of their genes, which they did not choose, it is the result of their history, and in particular their history as children, when they were primarily done-to rather than doers. What they do, on the other hand, as we have seen in Principle 1, they are in control of, and they are responsible for. Their actions, therefore, may be judged, criticised and resisted. However awful their actions, however, their being still needs to be respected and unconditionally accepted, though this can sometimes be quite a test of emotional intelligence!

© Tim Sparrow 2005
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

Realising A Vision

Matt has always had a passion for human development and for the outdoor environment through his own experience as a climber and mountaineer. Believing wholeheartedly in the concept of unlimited human potential, Matt decided to ‘follow his own star’ and create a company that combined these two passions to facilitate the exploration of human potential in others. He set up Activate in 1996, at the tender age of just 23, to bring the benefit of personal growth through emotionally engaging experiences to a wide range of people.

His first achievements were to design and build two unique products – a mobile climbing wall and a mobile high ropes course, both of which received patents for their design. To this day, these products travel the length and breadth of the UK, bringing the climbing experience to a large number of people, through events ranging from corporate team developments to family fun days.

In the early days, whilst working as a sub-contractor and outdoor facilitator for a number of leading training companies, along with his fellow director and partner Philippa, he realised that most development training failed to offer a cohesive, integrated experience. And the vision for the Forest Experience was born. From a standing start 5 years ago, Matt now runs a centre of excellence for experiential learning in the heart of the beautiful New Forest. The Activate team manage the complete experiential process from arrival to departure, meeting the emotional and physical safety and comfort needs of their clients at every moment.


Qualities

Matt’s achievements are a mirror of his qualities. Unquestionably a visionary, with a ‘can do’ attitude, he has turned his ideas into reality. With a fervent belief that you can achieve anything that you put your mind to, his drive and passion for creating emotionally engaging development experiences for his clients has led to him establishing a second smaller residential centre in North Wales giving direct access to a very serious outdoor learning environment.

He was one of the youngest people ever to achieve the Mountain Instructor Award (MIA) which demands a high level of leadership ability, personal awareness and inner confidence, and is ‘technical expert’ for a number of southern-based outdoor activity providers. Because of their serious approach to Health & Safety, and with an impeccable record, Matt and Philippa run the only privately-owned southern based outdoor learning training centre currently licensed by AALA, the Adventure Activities Licensing Authority.


At The Leading Edge

On discovering the concept of Emotional Intelligence, and with further investigation, Matt realised the opportunity he had to put Activate at the leading edge of human development training. Investing in his own personal EI development, he partnered up with a highly qualified EI consultant (Amanda Knight, who subsequently became the CAEI’s Director of Programmes) to explore how EI could be combined with outdoor experiential learning to provide true sustainable personal and organisational learning.

Activate now underpin all of their development programmes with EI, and Matt and his team run training interventions at all levels, from graduate programmes with Exxon Mobil and the McKechnie Group, to junior and middle management development modules at Skandia, to outdoor experiential programmes with senior executives within Orange, and leadership and team modules for management teams within the NHS. Activate’s latest success is being selected as a training provider for the NHS Leading Modernisation programme, running an EI-based personal awareness programme for chief executives and clinical directors.

Matt’s business focus over the last two years has turned to expanding the company’s network of like-minded associates. This process is already well underway with a partnering with the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence, helping to grow the pool of top level EI practitioners available in the UK. He is currently working on setting up a charitable trust fund to supply bursaries for EI-related personal development opportunities.

Fritjof Capra PhD is a physicist and systems theorist. He is on the faculty of Schumacher College, an international centre for ecological studies in Devon, England. He delivers management seminars for top executives on business and sustainability. Capra’s first principle of sustainability is interdependence:

Interdependence – All members of a community are interconnected in a vast and intricate network of relationships and are mutually dependent on one another. The success of the whole community depends on the success of each member and the success of each member depends on the success of the community. Understanding ecological interdependence means understanding relationships. Nourishing the community means nourishing the relationships.

Whether we interpret ‘community’ to mean team, department, workplace, family or company, the issues are the same – we are social animals who are mutually dependent on one another for our societal, personal, business, financial, technical and service interactions both in-house and in our global village. Effective interpersonal relationships are therefore crucial to success.

If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most common basic link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.  - John F Kennedy (1963)

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