PART THREE

Emotional Intelligence Exercises to Build Effective Skills

Part Three contains the experiential learning scenarios we call “exercises.” There are four to five exercises for each of the EI skills discussed in Part Two. In using these exercises, it is important that you understand the EI skill you are seeking to grow, are sensitive to the potential vulnerability of your clients when addressing these topics, and understand the process of behavioral change.

BE INFORMED

We recommend you refer to the appropriate content in Part Two before using any exercise. Depending on the circumstances and your knowledge about the skill, you may need to do additional reading and research. The References and Resources sections at the back of this book contain information to assist you in your developmental effort.

FACILITATOR SKILLS

Pay careful attention to the necessary facilitator skills and to the best practices recommended when working with emotional intelligence. We have indicated the level of skill usually needed for each of the exercises. However, what will be easy for some clients could be difficult for others. Thus, you will need to apply your own judgment and knowledge about the specific situation you are working in as you use these exercises.

Working in this field requires that the trainer, facilitator, coach, therapist, or manager be particularly attentive to his or her client’s skills, capabilities, and needs. Fortunately, there are two excellent sources of best practices for training and development with emotional intelligence. The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations provides Guidelines for Best Practice, which are found at www.eiconsortium.org, and Promoting Emotional Intelligence in Organizations by Cherniss and Adler (2000) is entirely focused on this topic.

While all the points in these best practices lists are valuable, a few of the most important aspects to address include the following:

• Provide a safe environment. Work at a pace that is comfortable for your clients. Use strategies to empower them to influence their learning process and acknowledge their concerns and their successes.
• Establish and observe rules governing confidentiality and disclosure. From the first time your client(s) become aware of the work they will be doing, they should know what, why, and how any information about them will be used. Be certain that you are clear about what you will discuss and with whom after your interventions. The norm is that you will not discuss any information with anyone else. This norm creates an environment of trust that is essential for the deep work of change to be addressed successfully. If you are working with a team or group, the first ground rule is usually “What is said here, stays here.”
• Get the learning in the body. It takes concrete experience to make change. Cognitive understanding of new concepts complements this work, but behavioral change is based on a repeatedly reinforced experiential process. Practice number 16 in the EI Consortium list correctly states: “Rely on Experiential Methods: Active, concrete, experiential methods tend to work best for learning social and emotional competencies. Development activities that engage all the senses and that are dramatic and powerful can be especially effective.”
• Pace your clients. Just like the saying in real estate—that it’s all about location, location, location—to successfully guide transformative EI development, you need to pace, pace, pace your client(s). If they are concerned about doing the work and don’t have any experience, go slowly. Start with simple challenges and move to more difficult ones as understanding and trust grow. If they already have considerable experience in this area, keep your work at a more challenging level to maintain their interest.
• Follow through. Long-lasting behavioral change happens only when there is a neuronal change. Old habits must be extinguished and new ones developed. This is possible, but it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes repeated practice and reinforcement.
• Evaluate your work. Some of the first questions to ask when you begin working with your client(s) are, “How will you know your objectives have been accomplished?” and “What specifically will be different?” Be alert to the situations in which research on the results might be possible. The more data we can gather on the benefits of this work, the more reliable and relied on the field of developing emotional and social intelligence will become.

CHANGE

Perhaps the most critical ingredient in the work to build emotional intelligence skills is the ability to facilitate change. As discussed above, follow-through is essential to support effective change. Other key practices listed by the EI Consortium include the following:

• Build in support, such as support groups.
• Use examples of people well known in society or in the organization who exemplify the skill.
• Encourage using these skills and the language of EI on the job.
• Develop an organizational culture that supports learning. To the best extent you can, seek to have your work supported by the organization where you are working and to be role modeled by the top leadership. After all, the phenomenon of “monkey see, monkey do” is still the fundamental learning strategy for us homo sapiens.

If you are working with an assessment tool, you may be able to measure your results using that tool. For example, you could use the EQ-i2.0 or one of the other measures for a pre-test and post-test.

USING THE EXERCISES

The exercises can be used with intact teams, groups, or individuals. The instructions are written for teams/groups, but most activities are easily adapted for use with individuals. Where necessary, we provide additional instructions to help with the adaptation. You may also have special dynamics for your group or a team that must be anticipated and addressed carefully. For example, if you are running a session across teams, you’ll need to be aware of all the issues discussed above and work with any situations where you find differing levels of capability or buy-in. Go slowly and pay attention. This can be tricky. Further, addressing issues of confidentiality can be even more important. If you are working with a group of individuals who do not work together, you will need to address the near certainty that they will be at different levels of readiness for your work, and, again, it will take careful work to establish a safe environment so that they will open up with one another.

The first three sections of each exercise—Purpose, Thumbnail, and Outcomes—explain the following:

• Purpose answers WHY you would have the people do this exercise;
• Thumbnail tells you HOW participants will engage with the instructional material to generate the learning experience;
• Outcome explains WHAT your target is—the desired results they can achieve.

The exercises contain reproducible handouts (also available at www.pfeiffer.com/go/Hughes/EIAction2) that you may copy for your participants. When reproducing handouts, please be sure to retain the copyright footer. Although the instructions precede the handout, it will always prove helpful to familiarize yourself with the handout before expecting to understand the instructions at the level of fine detail in which they were written!