The following article was contributed by Heather Anderson, President of Leading Challenges and Chair of Vistage International. Heather joined us for ICEI™ 2007, where she spoke on the subject of the intellectual and behavioral differences as they relate to understanding and embracing EI. In this article, she outlines an EI coaching program that she implemented at Clif Bar.
The project began when I was contacted by the President of Clif Bar—makers of natural energy bars—who with her executive team was asking themselves the following question: What does it mean to be a leader at Clif Bar? In my opinion, the leadership team at Clif Bar realized that for the organization to grow into “healthy adulthood” they needed leadership at all levels of the organization. What they had to do next was to define the “it” that made a successful leader in their organization and figure out a way to recognize and develop “it” in their leaders.
After hearing one of my presentations on Emotional Intelligence, and after taking the EQ-i®, the President of Clif Bar found there to be a strong link between the 15 EQ competencies measured by the EQ-i and what the organization expected and wanted from its leaders.
The project began with each of the 50+ managers taking the EQ-i assessment and participating in a 2-hour coaching call focused on their assessment results. The focus of each call was to help managers become more “self-aware.” The organization believed that in order for managers to manage and develop others, they had to know and manage themselves more effectively. At the end of each call, each managers was asked to identify one of their most significant insights from the call and turn it into an action, to practice over the next 30 days. These commitments were followed up on in the next step of the Clif Bar leadership development journey: a one-and-a-half-day training that took place off-site.
The off-site training consisted of three separate half-day training workshops that were developed to be taken sequentially and run by outside facilitators. This was a bigger challenge than it may seem. The facilitators were from different organizations and had to learn one another’s material so we could build on one another’s work and present an integrated training to all of the participants.
I remember the following marching orders from Clif Bar’s President: she told me to “make all the chunks fit,” which reflected the need to have an integrated training that also aligned with the mission, vision, and cultural values of the company.
The training consisted of the following “chunks”:
- Emotional Self-Awareness – a workshop devoted to building on the work done in the EQ-i development calls and creating a common language around Emotional Intelligence.
- Listening with Empathy – a skill development workshop designed to understand the dimensions of Empathy while practicing skills of Empathy in one-to-one conversations.
- Applied Learning in Coaching and Mentoring Others – a workshop where participants were asked to take what they learned in the previous two workshops and apply it to a work project/problem. The work project/problem they were trained to address was, “coaching and mentoring a direct report.” Participants got the opportunity to prepare and practice a real coaching situation with one of their direct reports.
The project ended with Clif Bar committing to up to 6 follow-up coaching sessions, for all 50 managers, with any or all three of the facilitators. This was optional and managers could design their coaching sessions as they chose. This step was taken to ensure that each manager had the resources necessary to successfully implement what they had learned as a result of the EQ-i and the follow-up training. In doing this, Clif Bar sent a strong message to its leaders: that the organization is committed to leadership development and to providing them with the resources and support necessary for them to become successful, emotionally intelligent leaders.
