Emotional Intelligence Training Course for Managers and Professionals

Why does a manager need emotional intelligence (EQ) training?

In his well-known book on this subject in 1996 Daniel Goleman brought Emotional Intelligence to the attention of the public and defined it as an array of skills and characteristics that drive leadership performance. On this course we help you improve your communication and leadership performance by developing your emotional intelligence. Here's why emotional intelligence matters:-

• Many of the relationships, conversations and meetings you have to handle as a manager or leader are tricky. What makes them tricky is strong emotion. That's why as a manager you're severely handicapped without emotional intelligence training.
• Emotional intelligence training offers the ability to put how you feel into words so that they can be talked about calmly and managed rationally and safely. If we can’t talk about them they don’t just go away. They remain beneath the surface even if we're not consciously aware of them, swamping the mind and driving us to behave irrationally. Talking about how you feel helps us let off steam safely, calm down and recover our rational minds.
• Becoming more communicative about how you feel, in other words, emotional intelligence, is therefore the key to connecting better with others. It can’t fail to bring you greater success and satisfaction in handling even your most tricky relationships, conversations and meetings.
• Human beings, whether we're conscious if it or not, have evolved with a high degree of alertness to one-another’s emotional states. A very large proportion of the human brain is engaged in enabling us to pick up and respond to clues about the attitudes and intentions of our fellow human beings. Our survival has depended on this inate emotional intelligence.
• But many of us have learned as a result of upbringing and social conditioning to suppress or ignore our emotions and to keep our inate emotional intelligence dormant. This habit is hard to break.
• On this course we'll help you break the habit of suppressing how you feel by helping you practise and develop the two central skills of emotional intelligence training. Others already have these practical skills to some degree, or at least the potential to develop them. The first we call listening with empathy. It's a way of helping others to put their feelings into words. The other we call speaking assertively.
• Even if you think you've never been very aware of your own and others' emotions, by paying more attention to the presence of emotion in yourself and others - through practising these two skills - your emotional intelligence will increase. It's never too late to improve this ability.

What will enhanced emotional intelligence training enable me to do more successfully?

We'll train you to use the practical skills of emotional intelligence (EQ) when handling your most challenging situations. The reason why they're challenging is precisely because of the emotions they arouse. It vital that people focus on emotional education.

You can pick the best items from the list below, and you'll be able to practise applying your EQ skills to them as much as you like in safety and with expert coaching:-

• gain people's co-operation and win their confidence when they are resisting or objecting, more...
• deal with tricky people, more...
• calm people down when they are aggressive or complaining, more...
• persuade, sell or negotiate strongly but in a win-win atmosphere without becoming entrenched in fruitless argument or appearing arrogant, more...
• resolve conflict and disagreement in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, more...
• confront tricky issues without being aggressive or over-familiar, more...
• stand up for what I think or want without getting a reputation for being arrogant or tricky, more...
• disagree without getting into conflict, more...
• say "no" without causing resentment, more...
• be firm but fair – "tough on the issue but soft on the person", more...
• give really bad news without appearing arrogant or heartless, more...
• give genuine praise without being over-familiar or making others feel patronised, more...
• criticise without making others feel attacked, more...
• receive criticism without appearing defensive or arrogant, more...
• appraise, counsel, coach or mentor helpfully, more...
• handle resistance and negativity in a meeting with confidence and grace. more...

What kind of a learning experience will I have on this emotional intelligence (EQ) training course?"

Our intention as trainers is to help you develop and improve your emotional intelligence education in as relaxed and practical a way as possible. We're not trying to change you as a person, though this training will almost certainly make a difference to how you're perceived by others. Nor do we tell you how you ought to behave, though we do aim to give you a wider choice of ways of behaving than you previously thought you had.

A central part of this emotional intelligence training is the feedback you receive. All the feedback is geared to increasing your emotional intelligence. The course is a kind of safe laboratory in which you're encouraged to experiment as much as you like and collect feedback. The feedback is about your behaviour, i.e., what you say and the way you say it, and its emotional effect on people. The feedback is factual, specific and constructive - it's all about how others feel when you're communicating with them.

Can this emotional intelligence training be done in-house?

Yes. We take a lot of trouble to identify precisely what the need is by speaking first on a private and confidential basis, with both individuals concerned and also with their managers. Our aim is to make sure the training is totally relevant to the needs both of the organisation and the individuals. Here are three examples of common organisational needs for which emotional intelligence training is highly relevant:-

The need for senior managers to be able to give effective feedback to staff There are few things with more power to motivate others to improve their performance than genuinely constructive feedback. Unfortunately many managers are afraid to talk straight to their staff. Their approach is either too soft, in which case it fails to get through. Or it's too tough, in which case it also fails because it puts others on the defensive. What works is to be simultaneously tough on the issue and soft on the person. This calls for emotional intelligence education. It's not beyond the reach of most managers to develop these skills.

The need to improve the quality of the customer experience. This is now a highly competitive issue for many companies. Customers quickly sense whether or not they're being handled with emotional intelligence when things go wrong (although they probably call it emotional intelligence). When they are handled with emotional intelligence their experience is positive. When they're not it's negative. Training in emotional intelligence for customer liaison or technical support others can therefore be a very worthwhile investment.

The need to be more successful at the management of organisational change It's not uncommon for others to become irrationally resistant. Managers' instinct is often to try to suppress resistance, but this only makes it stronger. It requires emotional intelligence training to alter managers' approach to a more understanding and less repressive one - but the results can be dramatic.

Yet more reasons why you might benefit from management training in emotional intelligence

• Talking openly about how you feel goes against the grain for you. It's something you've always avoided doing.
• You've always thought the ability to communicate about feelings was an aspect of your personality, not something you can learn to do with emotional intelligence training.
• In your family of origin others never talked much about how they feel, and you've naturally acquired the same habit to avoid talking with emotional intelligence.
• In the organisation you work in others rarely talk about how they feel. If you start doing it won't you stick out like a sore thumb as someone who's just come off an emotional intelligence training course?
• You believe feelings are seen as a sign of weakness. It's better to keep quiet about them, or others will take advantage.
• You realise that the emotional atmosphere at work affects the quality of the work others do, but you've no idea how to improve it.
• You don't know whether it would be worth your while learning to talk about feelings, to manage feelings, to pay more attention to your own and other people's feelings by improving your emotional intelligence.
• Far from learning to be more transparent about your feelings, your habit is to try to conceal them.
• You're never been very confident in your social awareness or in your ability to manage relationships.
• You don't trust your feelings.