Why is this topic important?

Developing our emotional intelligence may be the accomplishment that helps the ship of civilization right itself amid the current storms of chaos. Scientific research has shown that it can increase the profits of organizations that intentionally develop these competencies through all levels of leadership. The stories of thousands of successful coaching clients compellingly attest to the increased meaning, connection, and effectiveness they enjoy in their personal and professional lives as a result of improving their emotional skills and understanding of emotion.

What can you achieve with this book?

You can learn to help your clients change the way in which they relate to everything that is valuable in their lives. As you help them become increasingly familiar with their emotional control panel and how the dials for each of the strategies and competencies are currently set, they can learn how to change the behaviors and make their lives more effective and satisfying. Without this knowledge, they are left with their faces pressed against the window to the candy store of life simply because they do not know how to open the door. As your clients become more and more successful at connecting with their worlds in the ways that make a meaningful difference, they will naturally model these skills for others, and our evolution will be accelerated.

How is this book organized?

This book is organized with an introduction and four parts. The Introduction shows how coaching can be matched with emotional intelligence to prevent or repair the emotional rifts, issues, blocks, and catastrophes that undermine our collective mental health and human progress. Part One is composed of two chapters that demonstrate how the competencies of emotional intelligence and the principles for applying them balance to form the perfect foundation for a sound coaching methodology. The second chapter specifically makes the business case for developing emotional intelligence through the coaching process. Part Two contains five chapters specifically designed to teach coaches the five specific strategies that are necessary to help their clients develop emotional and social effectiveness. Part Three, Developing the Coach, was contributed by the leaders of Newfield Network as a unique example of the creative methods for developing emotional intelligence they utilize in their coach training program. Part Four includes one chapter of specific examples of how emotional intelligence coaching programs have been used to rebuild emotional effectiveness and team performance in federal agencies such as NASA and one chapter with two more detailed case studies on the application of coaching for emotional intelligence, one is with a team and one with an upwardly mobile executive.

About Pfeiffer

Pfeiffer serves the professional development and hands-on resource needs of training and human resource practitioners and gives them products to do their jobs better. We deliver proven ideas and solutions from experts in HR development and HR management, and we offer effective and customizable tools to improve workplace performance. From novice to seasoned professional, Pfeiffer is the source you can trust to make yourself and your organization more successful.

Essential Knowledge Pfeiffer produces insightful, practical, and comprehensive materials on topics that matter the most to training and HR professionals. Our Essential Knowledge resources translate the expertise of seasoned professionals into practical, how-to guidance on critical workplace issues and problems. These resources are supported by case studies, worksheets, and job aids and are frequently supplemented with CD-ROMs, websites, and other means of making the content easier to read, understand, and use.

Essential Tools Pfeiffer’s Essential Tools resources save time and expense by offering proven, ready-to-use materials—including exercises, activities, games, instruments, and assessments—for use during a training or-team-learning event. These resources are frequently offered in looseleaf or CD-ROM format to facilitate copying and customization of the material.

Pfeiffer also recognizes the remarkable power of new technologies in expanding the reach and effectiveness of training. While e-hype has often created whizbang solutions in search of a problem, we are dedicated to bringing convenience and enhancements to proven training solutions. All our e-tools comply with rigorous functionality standards. The most appropriate technology wrapped around essential content yields the perfect solution for today’s on-the-go trainers and human resource professionals.

Essential resources for training and HR professionals

We dedicate this book to the coaches, coachees, teams, and organizations throughout the world who commit that their work and the work of their organizations will help create sustainable ways to live together on this planet, ways that reduce human suffering, promote joy, and expand our care for the precious diversity of life. We fervently advocate for the application of all practices that can advance humanity’s development of emotional and social intelligence, twin forms of awareness that reliably lead to peace.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank all of the following people:

The many coaches, coachees, teams, and organizations we have had the great honor to work with. You teach us daily.

Steven Stein, David Groth, Diana Durek, and all our brilliant colleagues at Multi-Health Systems who promote emotional intelligence daily. Reuven Bar-On, Peter Salovey, John D. Mayer, David R. Caruso, Daniel Goleman, Cary Cherniss, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee for your pioneering emotional intelligence work.

Martin Delahoussaye, former senior editor at Pfeiffer, for guiding and encouraging us with such good cheer; Lisa Shannon, our helpful editor; Kathleen Davies, director of development; Dawn Kilgore, Pfeiffer production editor; Rebecca Taff; and Michael Snell, our agent, for creating an excellent interface with our publisher and orchestrating a win-win process and continuing down the publishing path with us.

Robert Carkhuff, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Leslie Lebeau, Judith DeLozier, and Robert Dilts and all their teachers for the phenomenal contributions they have made to our understanding of human communication and how to improve it.

Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., and Richard Lannon, M.D., for writing A General Theory of Love. It is one of the most valuable scientific contributions to understanding how we can be better human beings and why that is often such a challenge. The grace and beauty of its elegant prose is breathtaking.

Our daughter, Julia, who smiled, encouraged us, and demonstrated infinite patience with long hours and late dinners. Our brother, Don Hughes, and all of our parents, families, teachers, mentors, clients, and adversaries, and the grace and pluck that have gotten us each this far along the crazy paths we call our lives.

Julio and Terrie would like to acknowledge the Newfield community of graduates, learners, and colleagues for enchanting us with their presence and enriching us with their thinking, passion, and thirst for learning. We are want to thank the Newfield team for their many gifts, but especially for the mood of joy and service they bring to work every day.

G. Lee Salmon would like to thank his senior coach colleagues for sharing their client case studies and the senior managers at NASA, EPA, the Intelligence Community, and the Department of Treasury for their generosity and willingness to share material from coaching interventions in their organizations.

Introduction

What is the connection between coaching and emotional intelligence? How important is that connection, and how powerful? Why would you want to help your clients improve their ability to consciously apply what are basically subjective communication skills?

There is only one reason why you would want to help your clients develop their emotional intelligence, but it is a very good one. Emotion is the power that connects human beings to everything they care about! Without emotion we cannot tell what is valuable, or why it is, or how much time and effort we should spend trying to get it or get away from it! Throughout this book we will present compelling evidence that emotion is what makes our lives exciting and meaningful and worth the enormous amount of effort it takes to enjoy authentic success.

We wrote this book on the process of coaching your clients so you can help them further develop their emotional intelligence. We developed and organized this specific material to help that group of dedicated men and women called coaches make their best contributions to transforming the social, economic, and spiritual evolution of human civilization. This is not a grandiose description of their work, but is in fact what effective coaches do, and if we look honestly and unflinchingly at the world today we will see that this transformation is the superordinate task that must be accomplished, and it cannot be left to them alone. Mere survival is no longer an option for our species and cannot happen if its thrival does not occur! This means that in order for our species to be able to survive it will actually have to reach the level of synergy and integration at which it is thriving! That makes this transformation everyone’s primary task: the coaches’, the clients’, senior leadership’s, the shareholders’, and the customers’

Coaching is an example of the critical cultural development process Alfred Korzypski called time binding. The father of general semantics realized that what made humans’ evolutionary success possible was their ability to use language to transmit the evolving vision and understanding of civilizations accomplishments from one generation to another so that the amount of time spent in reinventing the wheel was minimized. There is no time left for that today! Coaches must be able to effectively communicate the way to develop the enduring relationships of authentic success.

The need for the coaching profession exists because somewhere in the dark days of human history fear and superstition confused us. We misunderstood what was happening and built some false premises into our reasoning as if they were true. As we continued to build our history on this flawed understanding, we grew more and more distracted and the balance between advancing our collective needs and our individual desires tilted increasingly toward the individual.

We misinterpreted the meaning of our growing material success and the comforts we enjoyed became a kind of decoy that misled us. The problem and its solution both lie squarely with the authors and readers of this book and the clients who will seek us out to learn how to make more effective emotional connections with the people, causes, and things they care about. As it is today, huge numbers of the most affluent and best educated people in the United States (and elsewhere) are conditioned to spend their time desperately pursuing a false, inauthentic version of “success.” It has become a collective habit, and perhaps the most destructive aspect of this syndrome is that when we do seem for a moment to achieve the fleeting goals it offers, our very success nurtures further craving. This becomes the kind of profound insatiability that only an addict understands, “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” When we attempt to meet our subjective emotional needs through the acquisition of objects, the virus we now call consumerism spreads. It becomes more and more like a cultural cancer that increasingly requires objectifying the very people with whom we are in relationships.

Our focus in this book is to present an antidote, a prescription for treating this kind of spiritual dislocation. We believe you will be very happy to discover a number of elegant solutions with which you can help facilitate the development (in yourself and your clients) of the authentic emotional skills that will address these challenges. When you are successful at helping them learn how to engage their emotional energy and better communicate the emotional meanings of their lives they will be very grateful to you—and so will their colleagues at work and their spouses and children at home!

In the 1966 version of Alfie when Ruby asks of him, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” she is demanding to know why she should be expected to faithfully contribute to their relationship at the expense of her desire for commitment, when, instead of living by “that old golden rule” he is constantly seeking relationships with other women behind her back. Alfie hasn’t a clue what it’s all about, but if he wanted to learn and hired you for his coach and you had read this book, you could definitely help him discover his own answer, and it would assuredly include developing his emotional intelligence! But Alfie isn’t the only clueless client out there. Jenny in Forrest Gump and Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady would all live much happier lives if they could be your clients and get you to coach them on improving their use of emotionally skillful means.

When Thomas Hobbes described the life of man as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” he was observing the erosion of emotional intelligence that ensues when everyone comes to perceive that they are in competition with everyone else. (In his case it was within a pre-industrial economy.) Cognitively it seems that concern about the quality of our relationships is a luxury we cannot so easily afford when the pressures of hunger and poverty and sickness are constants in our lives. When we are able to sink into the more central awareness of subjectively organized reality, we can easily see that this is when it counts the most!

Now machines have relieved a vast percentage of the drudgery from our lives and almost everyone in the developed world enjoys a material opulence beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams, yet affluence leaves us feeling uncertain, inadequate, hounded by the constant pressure of time, and the sense of competition of each with every other has only increased.

There is a very delicate balance that our species must master in order to avoid its own self-destruction. We must clearly perceive and commit the correct amount of time and energy to achieving our individual well-being and correctly allocate the amount that must go to securing it for our families and communities. Spending too little on either side of the equation will cause the systems within systems to perturb and, if they go too far, to fall apart. Developing emotional intelligence is our insurance against these sorts of calamities because the process requires learning how to value ourselves and value others as well as cultivating an awareness and sensitivity for when this dynamic is getting out of balance.

What must be done when we notice that one side or the other is starting to run low? It takes real courage then to discipline our own desires and delay their gratification so we can attend properly to the needs of others. On the other hand, when we have grown accustomed to the appreciation and mutuality that come from attending to others and our relationships with them, it takes an equal but different kind of courage to pull back into the more solitary work of satisfying the personal and spiritual needs that are unique to our specific souls. It is only through learning to accomplish all of these that we can ever enjoy the authentic success of a human life fulfilled.

Until recently much of the human research project was devoted to discovering how our environment and the external “things” in it worked. We would then apply this knowledge on behalf of improving our life conditions by, for instance, making our ships sail faster with a new type of mast, or developing a vaccine for a previously untreatable disease, or engineering a heat-resistant coating that would enable us to cook without our food sticking to our cookware. Millions of improvements in hundreds of domains made our lives easier, longer, and considerably more comfortable.

But beyond a certain point, the abundance of new and better things could not serve our deeper needs. It gradually became apparent that the real work of human beings had much more to do with improving our ability to collaborate and work together than with facilitating the burn rate of our consumption. Now a radical shift in our capacities is required if we are to integrate our economic and social efforts in such a way that they deliver wisdom from our knowledge, justice from our abundance, and real freedom from the myriad of our opportunities.

This is the revolution we find ourselves in the midst of today. Whether it has been officially named yet or not, this is the Relationship Revolution and all the professional coaches who are helping individuals and teams increase their emotional effectiveness are central to what is fueling its success! The relationship revolution is not only transforming our relationships with the things and processes and people that are external to us in the world, but the most radical transformation that it propagates is in our relationships with our selves! It is only as we begin to discover our relationship with the whole field of being that constitutes and includes us as individuals that we can truly bridge the gaps and transcend the differences that now lure us into violently destructive competition instead of realizing and stewarding the self-renewing abundance that is this planet’s nature.

In order to solve the vast number of problems that our disorientation has caused, we must learn to work together effectively, understanding that our real motivations are all shared, discovering how to prevent conflict and how to resolve it elegantly when we cannot, learning how to help each other access the optimism and commitment necessary to succeed in the largest challenge our species has ever faced.

Within all of this complexity there also lies simplicity, for no matter what these challenges look like on the surface, at the core they are issues of emotional management. How we manage our influence on the single field of emotional energy that fills the workplace, the family, and all of our communities will determine the amount of flow and the amount of resistance we encounter in this work. It will determine the amount of time we spend or waste and whether or not we accomplish this sacred goal.

PART ONE

Emotional Intelligence as a Foundation for Effective Coaching

In the first part of A Coach’s Guide to Emotional Intelligence we establish how the competencies of emotional intelligence and the principles for applying them balance to form an excellent foundation for a sound coaching methodology. The second chapter specifically makes the business case for developing emotional intelligence through the coaching process.

We invite you to consider approaching the processes that we outline in this book as a developmental journey. The book will serve as a map that familiarizes you with the field of relationships coaches need to be proficient in if they want to succeed at the goal of helping their clients develop emotional intelligence. We expect that by the time you finish the book you will have a clear understanding of what emotional intelligence and emotional and social effectiveness are, why they are important, and specific steps to take in helping your clients begin their own developmental journeys.

A critical part of reaching any destination is being able to define it in such a way that you will know when you have arrived. We employ a highly successful technique known as “outcome specification,” which was developed in the early work of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). This method requires that you help your clients define what will be different in what they will see, what they will hear, and how they will feel when they have accomplished the changes they are seeking. This exercise actually provides their subconscious minds highly specific targets that, once set, they will then continuously pursue.

The business case for the interface of coaching and emotional intelligence reveals that executive coaching is a growth industry across the globe. In the UK, executive coaching has been described as one of the fastest-growing professions. Boyatzis (2006) described executive coaching as one of the few rapid growth industries in the last few years in the United States. In part this is because of the vast number of problems that coaching as a solution set effectively addresses. In Chapter Two we cite some of his work on EI practices that have demonstrated measurable success.

Researchers studying the impact of executive coaching reported that when managers, coaches, and coachees were surveyed and asked to select which topics they were most interested in developing, all three groups selected four common items as the most important: Developing Self, Self-Awareness /Self-Reflection, Career Advancement, and Building Relationships. Three of the four are direct emotional and social effectiveness (ESE) skills.

The numerous examples of research in this chapter drawn from literature strongly support the case that there is a direct relationship between the level of emotional intelligence competencies within an organization and their bottom-line profitability.

CHAPTER 1

Connecting Emotional Intelligence and Coaching

There is an urgent need to develop emotional intelligence in our organizations, teams, and families. For decades the contributors to this book have diligently studied and responded to the challenges of developing of a more emotionally and socially intelligent work, and we have done our best to synthesize the most valuable aspects of our discoveries here. It may be helpful to imagine the encounter we are about to share as a journey and this book as a guide that maps out the field of relationships you will need to understand in order to succeed at the goal of helping your clients develop their emotional effectiveness. We will do our best to familiarize you with the territory and the road signs, as well as help you develop the skills for negotiating this journey, both on your own behalf and for the clients whom you serve.

First, we will describe the destination we are seeking to reach and how we will know when we get there. Second, we will talk a little bit about who is welcome on this journey and who we are likely to be meeting along the way, and third, we will define some of the ideas and concepts that serve as signposts along the way.

THE DESTINATION

As we said, this book is about one thing—helping you help your clients become more emotionally effective throughout all aspects of their lives. This means that by the time you finish your journey through this book and we have explored the territory of coaching for emotional intelligence, you will have a clear understanding of what emotional intelligence or, as we prefer to call it, emotional and social effectiveness is, why it’s important, and what specific steps you can take in working with your clients to help them begin their own journey of exploration and development, or if they have already begun, to accelerate it, or guide the journey into destinations that are even more interesting and satisfying to them.

The fact is human beings don’t change unless they feel discomfort or the hope of greater comfort and satisfaction somewhere else. Your clients will engage in the transformational process of developing their emotional and social effectiveness (ESE) only if they believe it will help them accomplish those two sorts of changes. How will you know if you’re making any progress? Because both kinds of change involve a certain amount of stress, as your clients become more authentically successful, their faces and bodies are likely to look more relaxed, particularly around their eyes, shoulders, waists, and hands. They may walk more gracefully, and they will probably speak in voices that sound calmer, more confident, more relaxed, less tightly wound. The tonal range in their voices will increase, you will hear lower and higher tones, and their voices will likely sound less dry, less brittle. In their bodies they may report feeling softer, freer, with a wider range of motion, moving more slowly, gently, and certainly being more relaxed. Emotionally you can expect them to feel happier, more optimistic, and most likely better about who they are and the level of influence they are able to exert over their worlds.

But these are only the general kinds of landmarks that you will be able to detect as a result of your clients reaching their coaching destination. If you want the measures of your clients and your success to be even more specific, then you will need to ask them what the concrete, physiological indicators will be that most persuasively demonstrate an increase in their emotional and social effectiveness.

This strategy for outcome specification was developed in the early work of neuro- linguistic programming. It is a highly successful technique that calls for asking your clients to describe what will be different using the three primary sensory channels that organize social interaction. What will they see, what will they hear, and how will they feel differently when they have accomplished the changes they are seeking to achieve. As a result of having this discussion they will give their subconscious minds concrete targets and routes that they can then follow continuously day and night until the goals have been accomplished and their realities are remodeled. Moreover, it gives you and your client specific measurable points for charting your success. Of course, it’s normal for clients to shift their goals as they gain deeper understanding of what they really want. When that happens, be sure to update your map of success.

YOUR TRAVELING COMPANIONS

Coaches of all levels of accomplishment from the highly experienced and seasoned practitioners to the brand-new coaches who are just beginning their training—all are invited to join this expedition. Some of you may serve your clients as life coaches, helping them work through the personal issues in their lives, while others may coach in one of the many domains of business and leadership coaching. You may coach teams of engineers or teams of hockey players; the skills you will be learning here are equally relevant to all these groups of clients because it is their emotional energy and their ability to manage it that helps them achieve what they value in their lives.

SIGNS ALONG THE WAY

Now if you will, allow us to familiarize you with some of the terminology that will serve as signposts for our exploration. Doubtless we should define what we mean by coaching and emotional intelligence. Both of these terms have many definitions, and we certainly do not claim that ours are the right ones, but they are specific enough to help you make the best use of the instruction that follows.

Coaching facilitates a specific kind of teaching and learning relationship in which the coach has a higher degree of experience and expertise in certain areas that the client wants to develop for him or herself. In order for it to be effective, the relationship cannot be a one-way street, both coach and client need to encounter each other openly and honestly, willing to accommodate and incorporate the changes that their relationship will entail. The responsibility for initiating the change lies most squarely in the client’s court, while maintaining the momentum is a responsibility that each party must fulfill. The relationship can take place in person, over the telephone, or both, and it is never sexual in nature. There are specific International Coach Federation ethical guidelines posted at www.coachfederation.org/ICF/For+Current+Members/Ethical+Guidelines/. All coaches should familiarize themselves with these principles and consider sharing them with their clients.

Emotional Intelligence (EI or EQ) is the name of a field of inquiry that explores how human beings apply their subjective, non-cognitive behavioral skills to successfully manage and improve their relationships and life conditions. It is a term of art that is broadly recognized throughout the academic and professional communities. EI distinguishes between learned behavior and the inherited characteristics which are measured in part by IQ assessments.

Emotional and Social Intelligence directly includes the realm of social wisdom and engagement. It has been a part of much of the EI research from the beginning, such as that by Reuven Bar-On, creator of the BarOn EQ-i®. Boyatzis and Goleman have added it to their measure, which is now the Emotional and Social Competence Inventory (ESCI). Because the focus of coaching centers on your clients’ engagement with themselves and the world, we believe that the “social” part of this concept is indispensable to effective coaching.

Emotional and Social Effectiveness (ESE) is the term we primarily emphasize in this book and in our work. We find that in practice the term “intelligence” is often intimidating. On the other hand, the term “effectiveness” implies can-do possibilities. We can authentically emphasize effectiveness because, unlike the elements of IQ, the elements of ESE are based on competencies that can be learned and enhanced.

While emotional intelligence (EI), emotional quotient (EQ), emotional and social intelligence (ESI), and emotional and social effectiveness (ESE) are intended to be interchangeable for purposes of this book, we will primarily focus our discussion on ESE and the generic name for the field, emotional intelligence or EI.

Clients is the term we use to refer to the people being coached. You might also use other terms, such as coachee or co-workers if you are an internal coach.

Observer-self is a term used to refer to the practice of metaphorically stepping back and neutrally observing your active engaged self. It heightens awareness and supports more intentional choices.

Life Conditions refers to the opportunities, resources, and limitations that make up the field of engagement in which living creatures conduct their lives. A snail and a horse and a human all have life conditions, and they are drastically different, however a well educated white man working in America and an equally well educated African-American woman working in the same company can also have radically different life conditions that have nothing to do with the qualifications we mentioned. The man could be a single parent of a child with disabilities, while the woman could be single, and unaware that she just picked the winning lotto numbers.

Ontology is a philosophical term referring to how we think about being and existence. Because emotional intelligence is measuring subjective capabilities that profoundly influence how successfully we exist in the world, the ontological viewpoint provides a powerful complement. Because emotional intelligence contributes so much to how we understand who we are in the world, how we communicate those aspects of our nature, and how we engage those aspects of others, it can be considered an ontological concern. We want to familiarize you with the notion of ontology along with our other definitions because it is an important landmark we will visit in the material about Ontological Coaching™ presented by Newfield Network later in this book.

Here is the simplest “official” definition we could compile (thanks greatly to Wikipedia). Ontology is a point of view from which philosophy considers questions like: “What things really ‘exist’ and what is their nature?” It studies how we conceptualize reality and the nature of being. To support this with a tiny bit of context, there are four categories of questions that philosophy asks: “How should one live?” (ethics), “What counts as real knowledge?” (epistemology), “What are the principles of correct reasoning?” (logic), and “What things really ‘exist’ and what is their nature?” (metaphysics). Ontology is a central branch of this last category, which investigates being and what types of things can be said to exist in the world, and how they are related.

Most significantly perhaps, ontological investigation helps us distinguish our being from our doing, who and what we are from what it is we do. In a world that places entirely too much emphasis on the latter, assuming an ontological vantage point can liberate us and restore balance to our perspective. (See Observer-self above.)

Somatics is the field of study that considers the degree of bodily awareness that is active in a persons life and the amount of influence it contributes to their authentic success. Balance, proprioception, and spontaneous right action are some of the topics it may address.

COACHING TO BUILD EMOTIONAL AND SOCIAL EFFECTIVENESS

Coaching for emotional and social effectiveness is a process of helping others learn how to express and receive emotional energy in ways that strengthens their connection with others and builds more effective relationships. This requires that both people be able to recognize and accurately decode the meaning of the emotional energy patterns in the conversation. It includes helping your clients learn effective strategies for managing their own emotional energy and that of the others around them. While the communication can be done through intimidation or obsequiousness, there are far more forthright, elegant, and effective ways that can be learned through helping your clients increase their emotional effectiveness.

In our relationships with other human beings, we exchange emotional energy and information that lets the other person know two very important things: (1) how socially receptive we are. Are we interested in engaging with another in conversation and interaction, or do we want to be quiet or even left alone? and (2) how motivated we feel. Do we feel a driving need to accomplish some goal, or are we peaceful and content? Relating to another individual requires attention, energy, and a willingness to regulate our behavior, respectively, in ways that facilitate meaningful exchange, for instance, holding up our end of the conversation without being dominating.

In order to be open and sensitive enough to recognize and understand what others are feeling emotionally, we need to have a certain amount of curiosity and trust in ourselves and the environment. We have to be able to encounter others and relate to them with minimal defensiveness. We also need to hold as a fundamental position that our relationships with others are intrinsically valuable, rather than existing only for what we can get from them to benefit ourselves.

Another excellent practice is to assume that everyone (including our clients and ourselves!) always makes the best decisions available at the time. Humans are not wired to be able to choose against their immediately perceived best interests, even though ideally they could have or “should” have made different evaluations and taken different actions. This helps us keep our own judgments from further impeding our clients’ progress in the change process.

CONNECTING THE FIVE ESE PRACTICES AND EI MEASURES

Coaches assist clients in myriad challenges that are usually complicated by a variety of life conditions. It could be learning to manage up with a difficult boss, influencing an unmotivated employee, or deciding on a career shift or whether to get married or divorced. Given the breadth of potential coaching relationships, we highlight five central emotional and social effectiveness practices that will help you address the EI development challenges you encounter in your coaching work. These are bigger-picture concepts than the specific behavioral skills measured by EI assessments. In coaching you’re called upon to assist your client in effectively applying clusters of these skills, and based on our experience and research, we believe the clusters most central to coaching for ESE are: Valuing Self, Valuing Others, Responsive Awareness, Courage, and Authentic Success. These practices take the concepts measured by the three primary emotional intelligence measures and pull them together into the five practical outcomes you and most coaches are likely to focus on with your clients.

Reuven Bar-On, creator of one of the most popular EI measurements, wrote “The Bar-On Model of Emotional-Social Intelligence (ESI),” an articled published on the EI Consortium website at www.eiconsortium.org/research/baron_model_of_emotional_social_intelligence.pdf. This article presents a useful overview of his instrument and in it he describes the three major EI models thus:

The Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology (Spielberger, 2004) recently suggested that there are currently three major conceptual models: (a) the Salovey-Mayer model (Mayer & Salovey, 1997), which defines this construct as the ability to perceive, understand, manage and use emotions to facilitate thinking, measured by an ability-based measure (Mayer et al., 2002); (b) the Goleman model (1998), which views this construct as a wide array of competencies and skills that drive managerial performance, measured by multi-rater assessment (Boyatzis et al., 2001); and (c) the Bar-On model (1997b, 2000), which describes a cross-section of interrelated emotional and social competencies, skills, and facilitators that impact intelligent behavior, measured by self-report (1997a, 1997b) within a potentially expandable multi-modal approach including interview and multi-rater assessment. (Bar-On & Handley, 2003a, 2003b)

The topic of measurement is extraordinarily relevant to the field of emotional intelligence, because until EI could be measured accurately and proven to exist, it was discussed (and often dismissed) as soft skills, people skills, warm fuzzies, group hugs, and the like. These three reliable and scientifically valid assessment instruments changed all that. Those three are the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory, the MSCEIT developed by John Meyer, Peter Salovey, and David Caruso, and the ESCI developed by Richard Boyatzis and Daniel Goleman. And there are other instruments that have also contributed to development in this field.

The research to develop and evaluate these instruments demonstrated that emotional intelligence is a feature of being human that can be measured. Next it became a matter of demonstrating, particularly to the business community, that improving the emotional intelligence of leaders and followers within an organization could be measured as real dollar savings to the bottom line. Over the past ten years this has also been increasingly well documented by such organizations as Multi-Health Systems, which publishes the BarOn EQi and the MSCEIT assessments and regular articles on the topic of R.O.E.—Return On Emotion. You will learn more about the business case in the next chapter.

Many coaches find it vital to use EI instruments as a part of their coaching practice; and we respect that many coaches work without using instruments. That’s your choice. If you do work with one of the major three, the following chart provides an overview connecting the scales of the three EI instruments with the five ESE practices Each practice is shown with the constituent competencies from each of these models. These choices are based on our many years of experience. If you work with any one of these measures, you might list the skills differently. That’s fine. This is presented as a guideline for working with any of the three primary measures and understanding how they influence development and application of the five ESE strategies. Our recommendation to you is to read our chapters on them, consider our suggestions, and then add in your own experience, training, and awareness of your clients. This will help you focus on the specific skills each client most needs in order to develop competency in the practice you are working on.