Leading with Emotional Intelligence

Photo by Олег Мороз 

We recently worked in partnership with a public sector agency to support their staff to build an understanding of the importance of emotional intelligence and develop their skills to enable them to build and maintain healthy and effective working relationships within their teams and externally with stakeholders and clients.  Agility and resilience were identified as important especially as staff move around the organisation joining new work streams, projects and teams, and each team then has its own hybrid working arrangement and may operate within a matrix management system.  Emotional Intelligence was identified as a way to help staff consider the complexities of their work-based relationships through developing awareness of EI and learn that how we think and feel may affect how we communicate and behave with colleagues, clients and stakeholders.

The intervention was designed to facilitate a systemic approach to leadership, that is the learning supports the development of Personal, Team and Organisational Leadership Development.  It encourages participants to inquire into their own ways of working and explore their part to play in building trust, showing respect and working collaboratively. 

The workshop focuses on creating a safe learning environment for participants to feel comfortable assessing their own EI through a strengths-based approach while understanding where they may have areas for development and what to do to close the gap. The workshop was designed to give time for individual and peer group reflection, and the design is intentionally theory light with a focus and emphasis on ‘how’ (we are working together) rather than the ‘what’ (we are doing). The content includes key EI and communication concepts and behaviours. Also, how we think from a neuroscience perspective and how individual our approaches to problem identification and solutions are, which helps broaden the discussion about diversity in relation to different working styles. This contributes to collective understanding and the well-being of staff.

The Emotional Intelligence (EI) workshop was piloted with the Executive Leadership team who felt, after evaluation, that it would be useful for it to be cascaded throughout the whole organisation and so far over 200 staff have participated. The participant groups were organised to include different grades and specialties to generate discussions across the organisation.

Impact

Reports from participants said the workshop helped to develop self-awareness: their strengths and stressors; and to develop strategies to expand their choice of how to communicate and influence others, especially in challenging situations. They commented on how transferable the content was to all aspects of life. Examples of feedback comments gathered included:

• Building a common understanding 

• Increase in organisational awareness, learning with peers from different parts of the business

• Helping to understand others in a compassionate way

If you think your teams could benefit from similar development, please get in touch to talk to one of our leadership and emotional intelligence experts.