• The new Organisational Effectiveness tool
• Individual Effectiveness Scale 5: Emotional Resilience
  
• Get Your Team Out by Matt King

Authentic Leadership Presented by Amanda Knight

The most significant influence on an organisation’s performance is its leaders and the most impactful leaders are authentic leaders. How closely the perception of an organisation’s brand by people outside of the organisation matches the core values defined by the organisation itself is very dependent on the organisation’s leaders being authentic. Similarly, authentic leadership is a crucial requirement when inspiring and encouraging others during uncertain times. Living the values and ‘being the change’ are easy to say, but not easy to do.

Elaine Latham, Director of Improvement at the SW Peninsula NHS Strategic Health Authority, and Carla Ginn from the Skandia Group join Amanda to share their experiences of building applied emotional intelligence into their leadership development programmes to promote authentic leadership.
This includes:

•	Why they built AppliedEI™ into their leadership development programmes, and why they continue to do so
•	The processes they went through from programme redesign to practical implementation
•	The challenges they have experienced in measuring the training outcomes to demonstrate tangible performance improvements

Benefits to you
•	Discover the crucial factors required to live the values and ‘be the change’
•	Assess the challenges and benefits of values-based leadership in today’s business climate
•	Find out how to apply EI to your leadership development programmes in ways that can be measured

Congruence at the Core EI and developmental coaching for top teams Presented by Maureen Bowes

The climate of an organisation is created by the organisation’s top team. Therefore to set about maximising an organisation’s potential through EI development, the top team need to be developed first. In this session we consider two case studies to show the highs and lows of creating an emotionally intelligent top team.

Geoff Atkinson, CEO, South Somerset Homes, Kevin Dey, Managing Director, Weymouth & Portland Housing and Catherine Laing, Group Director of Corporate Services, Synergy Housing Group share their experiences of a 6 month EI based management development programme with their top teams – the CEO, directors and senior managers – in which group members:

EI Coaching for Sustained Success Presented by John Cooper

Currently coaching is the most fashionable performance intervention. On the one hand, coaching is the intervention of choice for developing EI and on the other, EI is the basis of choice for effective executive coaching.

In this session we focus on:

•	Why coaching is popular today
•	The key emotional factors that ensure coaching has impact and delivers value
•	The impact of using the Team Effectiveness questionnaire, the Individual Effectiveness questionnaire and 360º on attitudes, behaviour and performance
•	Leadership coaching for success – what works and what doesn’t?
•	The 21 day method of managing behaviour change

We will explore applying EI in a range of organisations and hear of the impact and value of EI coaching from a managing director.

What EI is and What it is Not Presented by Tim Sparrow and Jo Maddocks

If you are not clear what emotional intelligence is, it is difficult to set about increasing an organisation’s effectiveness by raising the emotional intelligence of the organisation and the teams and individuals within it. Yet a perennial problem with EI is finding a common agreement among experts on its definition.

Views vary from EI being a set of personality traits, or a bundle of competencies, to it being a combination of cognitive abilities. In our view, it is none of these, which is why EI actually adds value over and above these three aspects. In essence EI is not our personality but how we manage our personality. It is generated by a set of values, attitudes and habits that enable us to manage our behaviour so as to be personally and interpersonally effective.

This presentation will challenge many myths about EI, will present clear definitions that explain what EI is from a theoretical, biological and practitioner perspective, and will spell out the implications of this for setting out to apply the benefits of EI in organisations.

If you are not clear what EI is, or if you are under the (to us) misleading impression that it is an aspect of personality, just a set of competencies, or a bundle of cognitive abilities, then this is the session for you.

•	Improve morale and productivity during the journey
•	Deliver successful change outcomes
•	Increase the collective EI in the organisation and its capability for ongoing adaptation.

Anyone who has to grapple with introducing change into organisations (and who doesn’t?) will benefit from this session.

•	What exactly is the nature of stress - the causes and symptoms in ourselves and others
•	How our mind and body are connected - a short overview of the fascinating subject area of Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI)
•	How the ability to manage your inner demands and resources will allow you to optimise your human performance
•	How stress is linked to our emotions - developing your EI can prevent stress and aid the handling of stress and stress related disease
•	How developing your EI and applying it in today’s business environment will increase your individual effectiveness and the effectiveness of your organisation as a whole.

This seminar is for you if you want to help people in your organisation to reduce their stress to maintain good health and high performance.

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The concept of AppliedEI™ was created by Tim Sparrow in the late 90s following the upsurge in interest in the application of emotional intelligence in organisations.

The latest research into emotions and neuroscience presented in Dan Goleman’s book ‘Emotional Intelligence – Why it can matter more than IQ’, along with how this was impacting us at work, explored in his follow-up ‘Working with Emotional Intelligence’, had stimulated members of the HR and training sectors on both sides of the Atlantic. Here was new information about how our emotions impact on our behaviour, and possibly a new ‘answer’ to the age-old challenges of people development. From Tim’s perspective it defined the work he had been doing as an organisational psychologist and psychotherapist for the previous 25 years.

EI profiling tools became available in the States to measure levels of emotional intelligence, and Tim took himself off to America to learn all that he could about how EI was being measured and implemented there.

What he found was a confusing message. There were differing views from the American experts as to what emotional intelligence actually was, with definitions and models describing EI as either an aspect of personality, or a range of skills and competences demonstrated at a behavioural level.

Coming back to the UK, with a bevy of accreditations under his belt, Tim set himself up as an ‘honest broker’, making these new EI tools available to the UK market. He also set about dissecting the various profiling tools and models of EI, and comparing these with his own understanding of emotions informed by his work as a humanistic psychologist

And the concept of ‘applied emotional intelligence’ was born. The conclusions that Tim came to are summed up in his ‘5 Crucial Aspects of EI’.


THE 5 CRUCIAL ASPECTS OF EI
Our understanding of EI and why it is important can be summed up in five key points.

1.	EI is multifaceted
2.	EI predicts performance
3.	EI is measurable
4.	EI is changeable and developable
5.	EI is an aspect of the whole person.

1. EI is multifaceted
“Emotional intelligence” is not a thing; still less is it one thing. It is a handy label for a bundle of related but separate variables which together constitute what we conceive of as EI. Thus, whenever we use the term “emotional intelligence” or “EI”, we are using shorthand for “all those related but separate variables which together characterise the behaviour of those people who integrate their feeling and their thinking when choosing what to do, and therefore excel at self management and relationship management”, which is a bit of a mouthful. Similarly, whenever we say “it”, we should strictly say “they” or “them”. Hence, as we have seen, it is misleading nonsense to reduce somebody’s emotional intelligence to a single figure and say “Your EQ is X”. People may be strong in one aspect of EI, yet relatively weak in another. We are all of us unique, and have our own unique experiences and view of the world, and hence our own unique pattern of emotional intelligence.

2. EI predicts performance
This is, of course, the key reason why interest in emotional intelligence and its application is not proving to be the flash in the pan that some people expected it would be. Whatever we do, we are interested in performance improvement, and that means we should be interested in emotional intelligence.

The connection between good life outcomes and emotional intelligence is not surprising when you consider the following syllogism:

1.	Emotional intelligence is composed of intrapersonal intelligence and interpersonal intelligence.
2.	Intrapersonal intelligence is what you need for effective self management
3.	Interpersonal intelligence is what you need for effective relationship management
4.	Effective self management plus effective relationship management leads to effective overall performance.
5.	Therefore, emotional intelligence leads to effective performance.

Obviously there are some jobs where the need for emotional intelligence is greater than others: all jobs involving a significant element of person management and/or leadership, all jobs involving direct contact with the public (therefore, other things being equal, service jobs rather than production jobs), all sales jobs, all jobs involving development of others (all management jobs again, all jobs in education, in HR & training, consultancy ) and so on and so on. But in the end, it is hard to think of a job where emotional intelligence is not one of the determinants of success: whatever our job, we have to manage ourselves, and in the vast majority of jobs we also have to manage relationships, with colleagues, with bosses, with subordinates, with customers, with the general public, with suppliers, and so on. Professional hermits (and they are not very common these days) may be immune from the need for relationship management, but not really anybody else. So, in short, emotional intelligence is an important determinant of performance, to a greater or lesser degree, in all jobs. And also in no job at all: since we are talking about health and happiness as well as about success, we are inevitably talking about life outcomes as a whole as well as job performance.

3. EI is measurable
That is to say, all those variables which go to make up emotional intelligence are in principle measurable (although there are some difficulties about the process). We can measure the current emotional intelligence of individuals, of teams, and of organisations. The point of this is not to evaluate and judge, but to find out where we are starting from: since everybody is different, and will have a different pattern of emotional intelligence, we need to measure all the various aspects of EI in each individual involved before we, or rather they, can embark on a change programme. And by doing a retest further down the line, they can see how they have developed, and what may remain to be tackled. Similarly for teams and organisations.

While, for the sake of clarity, we have broken down the crucial aspects of EI into five separate points, they are of course far more valuable in combination than they would be on their own. For example, having something which predicted performance would not be much practical use to us if we couldn’t measure it. And having something which we could measure would be of only academic interest if it bore no relationship to performance. And even together, these two points wouldn’t help much if it weren’t for the next following point as well.

4. EI is changeable and developable
Our EI changes over time – with age. This is not automatic. How much we learn from our experience in the school of life depends, rather like ordinary school, on how much attention we pay: if we reflect on our experience and draw conclusions from it, then it will contribute to enhancing our emotional intelligence. If not, then not.

And we can accelerate the process by taking action to develop aspects of our emotional intelligence. All aspects of EI are changeable because they depend not so much on innate capacities as on the number and degree of the interferences, particularly the internal interferences, that prevent us from realising our potential in our actual performance. Therefore enhancing our EI will consist largely in identifying our interferences and then learning either to dismantle them or at least to manage them.

The connexion between EI being measurable and being changeable and developable is very intimate, as well as powerful. Measurement allows a person to decide where to concentrate their development effort, and can be used to monitor the success of it. But also the fact that EI is changeable rather than fixed means that being measured is not such a scary process. Many people are reluctant to undergo intelligence or psychometric tests, because they fear that the tests, and the testers, will tell them how they are and will always be. And if they score “low”, as they may fear, that will be an eternal condemnation that they can do nothing about. By making clear to people, both in advance of their completing the measure, and in the process of exploring the results, that all the things being measured here they can change if they want to, we can go a long way towards reducing this fear and this reluctance.

5. EI is an aspect of the whole person
Because we see emotional intelligence as being to do with attitudes and feelings, rather than to do with skills, or with particular abilities, we see it as being intimately bound up with our very being. If aspects of our emotional intelligence change, we change – to that degree, we become a different person. Whereas when you acquire a new skill or develop a particular ability, you are the same except when you are using that skill or that ability. So this means that if we facilitate someone to develop their EI, it is not just that their job performance is likely to change between 9 and 5 on weekdays: they will be different in the evenings, at weekends and on holiday as well: at home, at work, at play.

The corollary is that emotional intelligence practitioners need to behave in a professional and ethical manner as they go about their work, in a way that they would not have to do if they were teaching someone cost-accounting or French. This is particularly true because feelings are part of their stock in trade, and a person’s feelings are involved with their very sense of themselves.

ETHICAL PRACTITIONERSHIP
And this very last point highlights one further potential problem with the upsurge in interest in EI in organisations experienced in the late 90s that Tim was keen to address.

With all this new-found knowledge about emotions, and the EI label to boot, everyone was rushing out to become EI accredited, and setting themselves up as ‘experts’ in EI. This concerned Tim greatly with his psychological and psychotherapeutical background. Working with people at an emotional level requires a depth of skill and understanding not required for standards soft skills development which works purely at a behavioural level.

So Tim formed the Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence (CAEI), an organisation that he hoped one day would become the recognised body for EI practitionership. A code of ethics was created, along with a 9-month practitioner programme.

The CAEI has evolved since its inception in 1999, from an organisational and training consultancy into an association of like-minded practitioners, responsible for promoting learning about applied emotional intelligence.

AppliedEI is now a trademark – AppliedEI™.

AppliedEI™ represents our approach to EI development – the importance of attitudes in the development of EI. Attitudes are our evaluative position towards something, someone (including ourselves), or some idea, and are predominantly made up of feelings. Understanding our feelings, and how they form our attitudes, with their impact on our behaviour is therefore essential to the effective development of emotional intelligence.

Tim and I have written our book ‘AppliedEI’ to be published by Wileys this summer.

AppliedEI™ is also to become a recognised kitemark for practitioners who have not only done the 9 month certificate programme, but who have gone on to complete a diploma course, and who continue to develop themselves personally and professionally, whilst promoting the attitudinal approach to EI development. Similar in structure to the NLP qualifications of Practitioner and Master Practitioner.

And of course, we are holding our first ever conference on 20 September: Applied Emotional Intelligence – maximising your organisation’s performance.

More news about the CAEI will follow a bit later in the year, as we move towards establishing the Centre as a charitable trust and a membership body. But in the meantime, the concept and validity of ‘applied ei’ continues to grow since Tim’s original research and creativity some 10 years’ ago.

© Amanda Knight
Centre for Applied Emotional Intelligence

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