Emotional Intelligence Case Studies

If we consider the fact that the single most important factor that is reported by employees as having a bearing on whether they love or hate coming to work is their working relationship with their manager then we can very quickly see why emotional competencies are so important in being able to motivate employees to achieve their best.

These recent coaching cases illustrate how these managers identified that their respective strengths and weaknesses in emotional intelligence were having a direct impact on their ability to manage their people effectively and improve outcomes.

Roger

Roger is a very senior executive who has been rewarded throughout his career for being a tough negotiator and ‘can do’ performer. He has brought a great deal of success to his employer through this approach and has also received a lot of personal satisfaction and financial reward for his successes.

The Situation

Roger had recently been head-hunted by a different organisation after being with the same firm for some 10 years. Within the first two years with his new employer he was not producing the same results that he had become known for in his field. Roger had offered a whole range of explanations for this all of which had deflected responsibility away form his own actions or behaviour and after conducting an analysis with his managers about what was happening they could not find any conclusive reasons for the problems being experienced.

What’s the problem?

It then became apparent that Roger had lost three key people from his team as a result of resignations or requests for transfer. When this issue was examined more closely it seemed to indicate that Roger was experiencing some difficulty in adapting to the organisational culture of his new employer who placed great value on their managers being collaborative and creative with colleagues.

What did Roger do?

Roger agreed to a feedback exercise using the ECI and attended a number of coaching sessions with a ScotCoach accredited EI coach. To Roger’s amazement he discovered that the same uncompromising approach that had been so successful for him previously was now working against him and that he needed to acquire some new approaches and strengthen his competencies in managing his own responses with colleagues and managing his working relationships.

After some brief coaching input Roger reported that he had gained some key insights into his behaviour at work and realised that in his previous job his behaviour had been tolerated or excused because he was achieving results. However Roger now reports experiencing improved results as he is better able to capitalise on the talent of his team and adopt different approaches when working with clients that has translated into securing more contracts and opening up further opportunities for his employer.

[ Top of page ]

Catherine

The situation

Catherine, Bill and John are all team members working in a key policy area of a local council. They all accused each other of bullying behaviour and after submitting grievances against each other they refused to work with each other until their co-workers were reprimanded and/or removed to another section.

What’s the problem?

Following an internal investigation into all three grievances it was found that none of the team members had been in breach of the organisation’s policy on bullying but that clearly there were on-going behavioural problems occurring and it was recommended that these be addressed.

It was felt that it was not operationally viable to split the team up as they had each had specialist knowledge that was important to the policy team function and so they needed to find a way to assist these team members to identify what was happening and prevent any further conflict from escalating out of control.

ScotCoach conducted a mediation process with the team and as a result the team were able to agree on a way forward. However it became apparent that if the agreement was going to work and be successful one member of the team needed to receive some additional coaching input on aspects of her behaviour and interactions.

What did Catherine do?

After completing the ECI Catherine was able to identify that whilst she was highly respected for her technical knowledge she lacked a necessary level of social awareness when interacting with her other team members such that she would not listen effectively and did not appreciate how her actions were having a detrimental effect on the way in which her team were able to deliver work on time. In particular she realised that by being inflexible and overly controlling or perfectionist about certain aspects of the work she was not allowing the team to work to its full capacity and this was then generating further conflict between the other two members who would disagree about how to cope with Catherine’s behaviour.

Following the brief coaching with Catherine she reported feeling supported by the 360 ECI feedback process in that it provided her with a safe and encouraging way in which she could come to terms with the way in which her behaviour was affecting her colleagues and allowed her to address these issues and learn some practical new approaches for how to collaborate more effectively with her co-workers.

You may be interested in our special offer for individual managers or professionals to measure their Emotional Intelligence and receive Feedback using the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI)

Download our full EI Fact Sheet (324kb)

[ Top of page ]