A few years ago I was on the coaching panel of a global services company. A relatively new Chief People Officer, “Maya*”, was leading an ambitious organisational redesign that would redefine the roles of many of the company’s middle and senior managers. There would be a greater emphasis on “soft” skills and the established practice of simply promoting the most commercially successful account handlers and marketing managers would end.
Maya had persuaded her colleagues on the executive committee to sign off on her proposals by demonstrating that too many of the company’s key, senior people were ill-equipped to handle the normal people dynamics that defined organisational life. And the bottom line was suffering for it. Employee churn was high (and expensive) at all levels; heavily invested new product development pipelines were being disrupted by personal squabbles; and key client relationships were suffering because account owners and marketing managers were clashing in plain sight of their customers.
It was decided that everyone between one and three levels below the ExCo would be given the opportunity to develop their soft skills, with the incentive that those who embraced the changes would be in pole position to thrive in the new cultural environment. Though it was unstated, the coaches took it as a given that not everyone would have a future in the company.
A 12-month senior leadership programme was designed in partnership with a leading international business school, with groups of 20 or so working in regional cohorts to develop qualities such as teamwork, problem solving, communication, critical thinking and interpersonal skills.
Each participant was also allocated six one-to-one coaching sessions. I worked with seven participants from the EMEA cohort. The brief for the coaches was to give our coachees the usual freedom to bring whatever issues or development needs they wanted to their meetings, but we were also asked to “hold” an emotional intelligence (EQ) agenda as the overarching theme. To that end each coaching programme kicked off with a 360 feedback exercise. We used the RocheMartin Emotional Capital Report (ECR 360), a psychometric tool modelled on a comprehensive framework for understanding and developing emotional intelligence (EQ) through the lens of ten traits: self-knowing, self-confidence, self-control, self-reliance, empathy, straightforwardness, relationship skills, optimism, adaptability, and self-actualisation. These ten traits correlate strongly with success and effectiveness in organisational life (and indeed in life generally).
I downloaded the ECR 360 reports of my seven coachees before I had met them, or even looked at their LinkedIn profiles. Yet drawing upon their ECR 360 scores and, complemented by my decades of experience supporting senior careers as a headhunter and then a coach, I was able to predict with 100% accuracy each coachee’s career prospects in Maya’s reimagined vision for the company. That is to say, which participants would definitely “make it,” whether they participated in the leadership programme or not (there were two in this category). Which of them clearly had some development needs in the emotional intelligence domain, but possessed enough of a foundation of EQ skills to actively engage with the leadership programme and reach the desired threshold (these totalled three). And, finally, which of them would probably either eventually resign of their own accord or get moved on (the remaining two).
The point to emphasise here is that these ten traits of EQ in no way diminish the importance of an individual’s professional or functional skills, whether they be strategic leadership, sales, marketing, operations, finance, IT, or whatever. But rather that without well-developed EQ, professional experience or functional skills alone are rarely enough to support a successful senior career. This is because organisational politics and conflict are a constant presence and under-developed EQ will almost invariably derail an otherwise promising career trajectory at some point along the way.
Coaching Using the Ten Competences of EQ
Let’s take a look now at a different coaching brief, also based on a real one I have worked with, to illustrate in greater detail how the ten EQ traits are vital leadership tools for navigating organisational politics and swerving conflict.
“Mark” reported directly to the Chief Strategy Officer (“Sandra”), an ExCo member, at a large, technology based consumer services business. The technology platform used to deliver many of its services had always been run in-house, on the grounds that the company wanted its developers and coders working “inside the tent” for reasons of commercial confidentiality and seamless working with the marketing teams. But cost pressures and loss of market share were putting that policy under scrutiny and Mark was tasked with reviewing it against potential outsourced alternatives and producing a paper, with recommendations, for ExCo. Mark had been at the company only six months, following five highly successful years with a leading management consultancy. He was still finding his feet in his new environment and hadn’t yet forged strong “anchor” relationships, either at his own peer level, or with the key senior players who had a very personal stake in the outcome of his review. Specifically the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and the Chief Privacy Officer (CPO). And of course his own boss Sandra was ultimately accountable for delivering a good outcome from the project.
When Mark first started working with me he characterised this motley crew of senior acronyms as displaying, in varying combinations, big egos, fear, brusque dismissiveness, pomposity, indecisive verbosity, compliance obsession, maverick recklessness and languid disinterest. And in one case even sabotaging tendencies. He was also concerned that team members working under their particular “Chief” had a tendency to mirror their boss’s behaviours, perceiving it to be in their own career interests to do so. Feeling out of his depth in the organisational politics and atmosphere of conflict, and at times quite panicky, Mark’s confidence was dipping fast and he increasingly sought refuge in his strong intellect and analytical skills to navigate a path through the project.
My first task as Mark’s coach was to land the point that neither his MBA Distinction, nor his top decile performance at a leading management consultancy, would be the most important critical success factors for him on this project. Instead he needed to hone his EQ skills. In the early days we paid particular attention to his self-confidence and self-reliance, rebuilding his trust in his own self-competence and giving him the tools to remember to like himself once again. He increased his self-reliance by tackling a corrosive preoccupation with feeling judged and scrutinised and needing constant reassurance from others. Instead he resolved to relish taking personal responsibility for creating something important and worthwhile.
His confidence growing, Mark became more receptive to acknowledging that he had probably been too hasty to demonise the key players in the project, when the reality was that he was simply encountering the entirely normal process of people playing out their own demons, insecurities and agendas when confronted with the threat of change. So we moved on to do some very productive work around empathy, self-knowing and relationship skills, which are all closely linked.
Empathy involves the ability to read the emotions of oneself and others. Active listening, and showing curiosity and emotional connection (e.g. by summarising back to show understanding of another’s point of view) are the anchor skills. Mark learned that if you can calm your interlocutor’s emotional brain using these skills they will be more readily able to engage with you on a rational level, which in turn produces constructive conversation.
Relationship skills complement empathy and I encouraged Mark to regard his relationships with each of the key players as a partnership. This meant that it was important to make his senior colleagues feel that they were taking some “wins” from their conversations and, crucially, that their self-respect, agency and status were not being undermined.
Underpinning these emerging new EQ skills, Mark was also encouraged to focus on becoming more self-knowing, by learning to monitor his feelings, thoughts and behaviours in a more detached way, including his impact on others, so that he could reflect and adjust.
Another valuable EQ skill, freqently overlooked, is the art of straightforwardness. All too often people suppress, conceal or obfuscate for the sake of “a good relationship” or, at the other end of the spectrum, become abrasive and dogmatic in the mistaken belief that this will advance their cause. Mark was prone to the former tendency (and was often bumping into senior colleagues displaying the latter) and we worked together on how he could deliver his messages and ask his questions with clarity, honesty and directness, showing authenticity and an absence of agenda beyond a good outcome for the project. Another of the traits, self-control, was addressed along the way and I gave Mark some tools and techniques for staying calm, managing anxiety and disturbing feelings and rebounding from set-backs.
All of the EQ traits discussed so far involved honing introspective processes and the mechanisms for successful relational skills. The three final EQ traits measured in the ECR 360 are more about competencies that enable you to take on new challenges and respond creatively and effectively to opportunities. Optimism is about enhancing the ability to see the bigger picture and to have a clear vision of what a great outcome looks, without getting discouraged by day to day incidents and set-backs. Mark found this challenging to sustain at times, but he was bolstered by his growing self-confidence and self-reliance to remain optimistic. I also encouraged him to keep an eye on his adaptability. The challenges of finding himself an active and highly visible player in a corporate community, as opposed to a transient consultant, proved stressful at times and I encouraged Mark to work on being more open to new experiences and ideas. This involved developing greater flexibility, open mindedness and, crucially, acceptance that there were things he could not change and he needed to be at peace with that.
Finally, self-actualisation is the tenth and final trait in the ECR 360 model. Despite its rather “woo-woo” connotations, self-actualisation completes the EQ jigsaw by inviting us not to stray too far from what we are passionate about and ensuring that our life goals are aligned with our values. Work/life balance is also an important component for self-actualisation. In Mark’s case, our self-actualisation conversation elevated his perspective to a higher and more energising level, in a similar way that the optimism conversation had also refocused him onto the bigger canvas and broader horizons. Not getting lost in the weeds is a vital component of maintaining healthy EQ.
There is nothing new about appreciating the importance of emotional intelligence in organisational life. Daniel Goleman popularised the subject as early as 1995. What I have tried to do in this article is to offer a reminder in an age when we are all increasingly focused on artificial intelligence that emotional intelligence remains as important as ever. There is therefore huge mileage to be gained from tackling organisational politics and workplace conflicts through an EQ lens.
*Names and details have been changed to preserve client anonymity.
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