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Four Key Parts
Any organization can help its employees or its leaders increase their emotional intelligence by offering a systematic training that works. There are distinct parts to emotional intelligence training and development. One is knowing what motivates the person, where they want to go in their life. The second is giving that person a good profile of their strengths and limits across the spectrum of emotional intelligence. The third is helping that person choose something that they truly want to work on and get better at, And then giving them a specific behavioral sequence they can practice to change a bad habit and supporting them in repeated practice in that habit, whether it’s through a coach or a learning circle. Doing it over time regularly at every naturally occurring opportunity, that’s what changes the brain.
Three Best Practices
We have the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory that looks at the behavioral indicators of emotional intelligence and gives a person feedback based on the ratings of people they choose, who know them well and whose opinions they trust. They get a feedback because they’re rated anonymously. It may be the first time in their life they get an honest look at how they seem to other people around them. Where are they good? Where could they grow? Then you know where to focus your effort.
In our research, we found that the optimal organization, one which really facilitates learning and improving emotional intelligence, will, for example, have a learning circle. This is a group of people who meet regularly, each of whom is trying to work on one or another aspect of their emotional intelligence. They can talk about bad days when they’re too time pressured and they blew it and how to use that as a learning experience for the next time it comes along. In other words, they can support each other in this. At the top of the house, you might have a coach who does this. So these are elements of the very best trainings in emotional intelligence, and I think it’s important for coaching emotional intelligence.