How Do You Help Leaders Assess their Emotional Intelligence?
In the quest to enhance leadership effectiveness through emotional intelligence, we've gathered insights from six top professionals, including CEOs and Executive Coaches. They share strategies ranging from assessing and educating using personal strengths to illuminating personality traits with Hogan Assessment. Discover how these approaches have made a real-world impact in our comprehensive guide.
- Assess and Educate Using Personal Strengths
- Integrate EI Development into Corporate Training
- Show Value of Emotional Intelligence for Growth
- Guide Leaders with 'What's In It For Them'
- Benchmark EQ and Create Custom Development Plans
- Illuminate Personality Traits with Hogan Assessment
Assess and Educate Using Personal Strengths
It's important to start with a range of assessments, both formal and informal. These help provide objective measurements of someone's current level of emotional intelligence. Then, educating on where the gaps are can help the leader understand how they can use their personal strengths to improve their emotional intelligence skills.
One leader I coached struggled with how to be assertive because he didn't know how to be aggressive. After some assessments, we identified his natural strengths as empathy and harmony. Knowing that, and after some education, he was able to learn how to be assertive with his team by leaning into his strengths instead of his preconceived notion of being aggressive. This leader was able to communicate his expectations while being more thoughtful and communicative with his team.
Integrate EI Development into Corporate Training
Leaders enhance emotional intelligence through a comprehensive approach involving corporate training, team-building, and role-playing games. Corporate modules emphasize self-awareness and effective communication, fostering emotion management. In a specific instance, a team leader, Sarah, improved her emotional intelligence through training and a team-building retreat. Engaging in a role-playing game addressing workplace conflicts, Sarah applied her skills, resulting in a cohesive team, reduced conflicts, and heightened employee satisfaction. This exemplifies the impactful outcome of integrating emotional intelligence development into corporate practices.
Show Value of Emotional Intelligence for Growth
Helping leaders assess and improve their emotional intelligence can be easy when you help them see the value behind it. Too often, people throw soft-skills training at people, hoping it will magically stick. Most people aren't fully comfortable, let alone aware of the depth of their emotions, and tend to shy away from subjects about them. When we see the pain points each person feels by NOT intentionally growing their emotional intelligence, we can begin to show them the value. Emotional intelligence helps to make life better and supports an overall quality of life, including how we influence others and make decisions. When leaders realize they are hindering their own influence and quality of life, they get on the EI bus quickly. This has been beneficial with my clients, especially one who had to use EI to beat out a leader who had gender stereotypes that impacted the way they worked.
Guide Leaders with 'What's In It For Them'
Emotional intelligence often takes a back seat in the minds of leaders, relegated to a mere item on their never-ending to-do list or a buzzword they hear repeatedly without fully grasping its significance.
However, emotional intelligence is a dynamic aspect of personal growth that requires continuous evolution and learning throughout our lives. It's crucial for individuals to assess where they stand on their emotional intelligence journey and identify areas for improvement.
When I guide leaders through discussions on emotional intelligence during my consulting engagements, I don't dwell on their shortcomings. Instead, I focus on identifying their gaps and showing how addressing these gaps can unlock greater opportunities within their organizations, teams, and personal lives. By framing the conversation around the 'What's In It For Them' (WIIFT) concept, leaders become more receptive and engaged.
I encountered a situation during a technology engagement where I worked closely with a brilliant but emotionally challenged leader. His struggles with effective communication, short temper, and lack of control were hindering team cohesion and productivity. By gently guiding him to recognize the impact of his actions and offering alternative approaches, he understood how his experiences had shaped his behavior. Confronted with the mirror of emotional intelligence, he realized the need for change. Together, we embarked on a transformative journey not only to enhance his business but also to elevate his emotional intelligence status.
Benchmark EQ and Create Custom Development Plans
Improving emotional intelligence is critical for effective leadership, so it's an area I focus on closely with the executives I coach. Emotional intelligence refers to the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions—both your own and those of people around you. Leaders with higher EQ tend to inspire greater teamwork, loyalty, and performance. My approach includes having leaders complete an emotional intelligence self-assessment to benchmark capabilities like self-awareness, empathy, motivation, and relationship management. Together, we go over insights from the assessment report to create a customized development plan to enhance their people skills. One leader I worked with struggled to read the emotional and interpersonal dynamics in difficult conversations. People felt intimidated interacting with her. Through exploring scenarios from her background in our coaching sessions, we uncovered deep-seated assumptions that likely influenced how she related at work. She hadn't realized how aspects like her upbringing, culture, and social status shaped unspoken rules about expressing emotions. By raising self-awareness in areas like triggers, communication style, and emotional blind spots, she learned to be more attuned to others' verbal and non-verbal cues. We practiced having crucial conversations with empathy. As she applied learnings over time, I received unsolicited praise from her team about the stark positive changes in her leadership style. The enhanced EQ not only improved morale but also trust and engagement scores in her division. This example underscores why self-work by leaders to grow EQ can transform organizational culture and performance.
Illuminate Personality Traits with Hogan Assessment
Leveraging the Hogan Assessment has helped me in my Executive Coaching practice to quickly bring to light both the 'bright'—when individuals are at their very best—and 'dark'—when individuals are under stress and revert to default behaviors that are less advantageous—personality attributes. This shines a light on self-discovery through a tool with 35 years of data, and my clients find it truly enlightening, if not validating, to help them understand both the positive as well as more challenging impacts of their behaviors. I've seen this work with one of my clients where they became more self-aware of the impact of stress on how they show up at work. They were able to rectify it with a recent challenge that occurred and was informative in how to be more self-aware and impactful going forward. The Hogan Assessment can be a hugely valuable tool for assessing emotional intelligence and characteristics in assessing and developing talent.
