Coaching Fundamentals

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Emotional Intelligence can be developed. Is it easy to develop? Certainly not! Change does not happen overnight and improving upon EI skills is no different. Individuals embarking on personal growth in the area of EI benefit from ongoing and extensive understanding, commitment, practice and feedback that results from the relationship with an EI coach (Hughes, Thompson & Terrell (eds), 2009).

This page contains an overview of coaching strategies and techniques that align with the EQ-i® 2.0 and EQ 360® 2.0. Strategies presented will include both individual and group-based coaching techniques along with best practices to ensure that both you and your client receive the greatest benefit from the EQ-i 2.0 experience. When used as part of an intensive development process, coaching interventions based on EQ-i 2.0 skills have been shown to increase participants’ EI in post coaching assessments (Dulewicz & Higgs, 2004; Fletcher & Leadbetter, 2009). Following the best practices provided on this page will set you up to experience the same success in your coaching practice.

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The EQ-i 2.0 model (see The EQ-i 2.0 Framework) is an easy way to visually describe what emotional intelligence is and which skill areas contribute to your overall emotional effectiveness. Coaches can leverage the EQ-i 2.0 model in several ways:

• To introduce the concept of emotional intelligence to clients.

• To review the components of emotional intelligence before providing feedback on the client’s assessment.
• To highlight areas where the client will focus their development after providing feedback.
• To clarify any questions clients have about what emotional intelligence is and is not.

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Your role as a coach is to facilitate a process where clients understand where they are in the present, where they need or want to be in the future, and what steps, or development opportunities, they need to take to get there. It is about development and maximizing potential.

Counseling is a process that enables a person to sort out issues and reach decisions affecting their life. It is focused on helping clients overcome or fix problems in their lives, usually by looking back at their past to determine how to get better in the future. Many times we seek counseling when we are in a crisis in our lives. For example, couples will go to a marriage counselor when they are experiencing difficulties in their marriage and need some outside intervention.

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As an EQ-i 2.0 Coach, your role is to work with your client on the areas of the EQ-i 2.0 he will develop. If you have education and experience in counseling, you may, in certain circumstances, choose to counsel your client. If you do not have a background in counseling, you will refer your client to a professional if appropriate (many times this is accomplished through an organization’s internal Employee Assistance Program) For example, as you are providing feedback to a client on his EQ-i 2.0 results, he tells you that he’s been feeling overwhelmed and depressed lately. If you are a coach, and not a counselor, your response would be to refer your client to a professional.

As a professional who uses psychological tests you should confine your testing and related coaching activities to your area of competence (as demonstrated through your education, experience, training and credentialing) (APA, 1999). If the time comes when you feel unequipped to discuss a particular matter with your client, you are ethically responsible to ensure that client has another professional to seek help from. You may never need to use a referral, but if you do, you should be able to easily provide your client with that contact information.

According to the ICF (“Core Competencies”, 2011), a coach's responsibility is to:

• discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
• encourage client self-discovery
• elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• hold the client responsible and accountable.

If you are not a professional coach, there are still some foundational principles you can demonstrate in order to effectively debrief your client’s results:

• Follow your client’s energy. You may want to better understand your client’s responses to the Impulse Control subscale, but if your client would rather start at Independence, then that’s where you start.
• Listen more than you talk. Asking open-ended questions helps because it forces your client to give you more than a one-word response.
• Come from a place of curiosity, not judgment. We make judgments all the time; asking non-judgmental questions and making non-judgmental statements goes a long way to ensuring you stay on the curiosity path. Some good examples are: How do you find yourself using Assertiveness at work, what does it look like? It sounds like you get frustrated when you don’t speak up in team meetings, is that right?
• Add suggestions for development strategies only after your clients come up with some ideas of their own. What works for one person may not necessarily work for another and you may need to tap into what each client is willing to do – otherwise you will find at your next coaching session that little progress has been made.
• Hold your clients accountable for their progress. Help keep them accountable by ensuring they identify a support network of people who will give them feedback as they work on their development, and help share their successes.

You can do this by:

• Listening actively (maintain eye-contact, recap what you’ve heard, nod to acknowledge understanding).
• Paraphrasing back what you heard, both what the client said and the emotion behind what was said.
• Guiding your client through a self-discovery process - many ‘a-ha’ moments come from what we are led to self-discover.

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While these are some general guiding principles, there are many different approaches taken by coaches when working with clients on developing their emotional intelligence using the EQ-i 2.0. The following are three examples of how the EQ-i 2.0 can be used with different coaching approaches.

Client-Centered Approach

This approach puts the client in the driver’s seat. The coach acts more as a facilitator helping the client come to their own conclusions rather than guiding or steering the client in a certain direction. While many coaching models incorporate certain aspects of client-centered coaching within their approach, this model is entirely client-centered.

When coaching a client on their EQ-i 2.0 results, a client-centered approach means that the client will determine where they want to focus their development. The coach asks a lot of questions to help the client establish their development plan, but the questions are self-discovery questions rather than leading questions. Examples, of good client-centered opening questions during an EQ-i 2.0 feedback session are:

• Where would you like to start?
• What strikes you when you look at your results?
• What jumps out at you?

These questions allow the client to determine the direction of the conversation rather than the coach. The coach follows the client’s lead.

Benefits of a Client-Centered Approach

This approach is the best way to ensure client buy-in and gain commitment to following through on EI development. Your questions will help your client decide on the most important development areas as well as strengths to leverage. For example:

You say that Empathy is a clear strength for you. How do you know? What examples do you have to support this? What feedback have you been given? How does that play out with your direct reports? How has that helped you be successful in your role?
Or
You said that your low levels of empathy have held you back from advancing in your career. Tell me more about that. What feedback have you been given to support that? (and eventually) What do you think you can do to develop your empathy further? Who can you ask to observe your development and provide you with feedback on how you’re doing?

Both of these situations place the client at the center. The client is responsible for determining the areas of development and, with the guidance of the consultant, the process by which development will take place. Your role is to facilitate development by asking good questions in order to help the client decide on the best course of action.

Drawbacks of a Client Centered Approach

There are a number of benefits to the application of the Client Centered Approach as outlined above. Equally important however, are the potential limitations of such an approach. Table 10.1 highlights the drawbacks to the Client Centered Approach.

Table 10.1. Drawbacks of a Client Centered Approach

Strengths-Based Approach

According to Peter Drucker, “one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths…these strengths are the true opportunities.”  (Drucker, 1967, p.60)

The premise of this approach is that it is easier to build on a strength than to try to develop a weakness. Because something is a strength, we are familiar with it, we are comfortable leveraging it, and we get success from using it. Working on a weakness is difficult and may not give us the same payoff in the long run. An individual can work on her Social Responsibility for years, but if it is not critical to her role, she may not see any value in spending so much time developing it. Conversely, if she has good Reality Testing and gets rewarded and praised for her ability to see things objectively and realistically, she will want to keep doing that and leverage that skill often. As they say, that which is rewarded is repeated.

Appreciative Inquiry (Kinni, 2003) is an approach that works very well with a strengths-based coaching model. AI looks at what is working well and then examines how to capitalize on it, or make it better. With a client’s EQ-i 2.0 results, this would translate as focusing on the strengths (as identified in the report and validated through the feedback process), and looking at how to leverage those strengths further.

AI is comprised of four stages: Discover, Dream, Design, and Destiny (Kinni, 2003). From an EQ-i 2.0 perspective, this is how each stage might look:

• Discover: What is working well with your client, and what are their EQ-i 2.0 strengths?
  Dream: What do they imagine as a positive outcome from your EQ-i 2.0 coaching?
  Design: What are the concrete actions that will give them that positive outcome?
  Destiny: Implementation of the actions in order to realize the dream.

Here is an example of what the four stages might look like in an EQ-i 2.0 feedback session:

You are working with Gerry, a Call Center Manager, providing him with feedback on his EQ-i 2.0 results. His results show clear strengths in the areas of Empathy, Stress Tolerance, and Impulse Control. Gerry has provided you with good examples of how these particular skills are strengths for him. You’d like to go through an appreciative inquiry process to help Gerry further develop these strengths.

• Discover: Gerry’s strengths are Empathy, Stress Tolerance, and Impulse Control.
• Dream: Gerry would like to be more proactive in his role. He finds himself spending the majority of his time fighting fires, and dealing with crises that he feels could have been avoided with a more proactive approach.
• Design: You and Gerry create an action plan based on his strengths in order to decrease the amount of time he spends in a reactive mode. You focus on leveraging his three strengths so that he can work with his employees to become more proactive.
• Destiny: You work with Gerry to ensure he leverages his strengths in order to put that action plan in motion.

Below are some questions you can ask through the AI lens:

• Discovery: What do you see as your primary EQ-i 2.0 strengths? How do those strengths contribute to your success? What positive feedback have you received with regard to those skills?
• Dream: If you leveraged these subscales, where do you see yourself in six months? In one year? How do you see leveraging these strengths will contribute to a successful outcome?
• Design: What do you need to do in order to meet that outcome? What are some strategies you can employ in order to get your there? What are some tangible actions you can take to meet your goals? (see Action Plan in the EQ-i 2.0 Workplace Report)
• Destiny: How will you ensure that you’ll follow your action plan? Who can you involve in order to ensure you work on what you’ve committed to? (See Development Commitment in the EQ-i 2.0 Workplace Report)

Benefits of a Strengths-Based Approach

The EQ-i 2.0 lends itself nicely to a strengths-based coaching approach since you can start with confirming that the areas your client has self-reported as strengths are indeed your client’s strengths. Once you have agreement and examples to support this, you can easily look at ways to further build on these strengths.

This approach is also a very positive experience for your client. Focusing on things he does well already is much less overwhelming than looking at a deficit and trying to determine what, if anything, can be done to develop it. Research in the field of positive psychology supports this notion that individuals who are involved in development activities where they are encouraged to leverage their strengths in new and interesting ways report higher levels of happiness and lower levels of depression for a sustained period of time (Seligman et al., 2005).

The EQ-i 2.0 subscales do not work in isolation of each other. They work together to produce the results that your client sees in their day-to-day use of the skills. Often, you can leverage a strength to help compensate for a weakness.

Case Studies Using a Strengths-Based Approach

CASE 1: John leverages Interpersonal Relationships to better manage stress

John’s results show (and he confirms) that he is highly skilled at Interpersonal Relationships – he builds and cultivates relationships at work and outside of work, keeps in touch with former colleagues and is up-to-date with friends. People tell John that he is good at building and keeping relationships. However, in the debrief process John tells you that he is struggling in dealing with stress (and the EQ-i 2.0 Stress Tolerance results confirm this). He also mentions that his health and well-being are beginning to suffer with high blood pressure, weight gain, etc. A potential way to build up his stress tolerance would be to leverage his network of support. Some examples of doing this would be suggesting that he join a gym with a friend, go for a walk with a coworker at lunch, etc. Additionally, because John’s relationships are likely built on trust, he could confide in a friend (who manages stress well) about the stress he is experiencing and perhaps seek some new coping strategies. By leveraging his interpersonal strengths, he will be in a better position and have more resources to manage the stress he experiences.

CASE 2: Susanna leverages Emotional Self-Awareness to be more assertive

As you are providing feedback on Susanna’s EQ-i 2.0 results, she focuses  on her lower Assertiveness score. She tells you that she has taken Assertiveness training courses but with very limited results and she believes this deficit has held her back from moving to the next level of management at work. As you are discussing the results further, Susanna shares several examples of her ability to recognize and name her emotions. She is very aware of what she is feeling in the moment, and most of the time can identify the cause. In this case, you can work with Susanna to help her identify the emotions she feels in the moments when she would like to be more Assertive. What is holding her back? Once she is able to name those emotions, she can start working on strategies to overcome them, which will lead to increased assertiveness.

Limitations of a Strengths-Based Approach

There are a number of benefits to the application of the strengths-based approach as outlined above. Equally important however, are the potential limitations of such an approach. Table 10.2 highlights the drawbacks of the strengths-based approach.

Table 10.2. Drawbacks of a Strengths-Based Approach

As a practitioner, you have to guide your client down the fine line between leveraging a strength and possibly misusing that particular strength. Although as a general rule higher scores are better on the EQ-i 2.0, you can imagine contexts where doing a particular behavior (e.g., voicing opinions) “always” could be ineffective to teamwork. Howard Book (2009) has some recommendations for coaches when determining whether over relied upon strengths have become weaknesses:

• Look for balancing skills for any enhanced strengths. Balancing skills help complement the enhanced skill and should be sufficiently present (e.g., high assertiveness needs high empathy for balance).
• Explore with the client whether or not the strength has any associated costs. You might ask for some examples of where your client’s empathy might have derailed him from making a tough decision.
• If balancing skills are low, development efforts can be aimed here to help ensure the enhanced strength doesn’t become a liability in some situations for your client.

Model Approach

This approach demonstrates that there is a logical progression to your coaching session based on a particular model you are using. The EQ-i 2.0 model fits well with this approach. The model starts with the emotional intelligence subscales that make up Self-Perception – how does your client see himself? Once he understands that, the model moves on to the subscales that make up Self-Expression. It goes from how he sees himself to how he expresses himself. That moves into how he interacts with others. Based on his interactions, how he sees and expresses himself, he makes certain decisions. And that directly impacts his ability to manage stress. Each of the composite areas builds on the one before it. The different components of the model work together to establish overall emotional intelligence and well-being, and your client needs to understand how they work together in order to understand his results.

Benefits of the Model Approach

This approach helps your clients understand how their results on the individual subscales fit into and impact their overall emotional well-being. It is a highly structured approach which clients will appreciate and understand easily.

Because of the structured nature of this approach, you can determine how much time you’d like to spend on each composite scale and the subscales within it. In this respect, you can ensure that you cover everything you want to cover in your session.

Drawbacks of the Model Approach

The simplicity of the Model Approach is a clear strength of this feedback process, especially for novice consultants. However, there are potential limitations to the Model Approach which are highlighted in Table 10.3.

Table 10.3. Drawbacks of the Model Approach

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The strategies presented so far pertain primarily to one-on-one coaching. There are times, however, when you might be in a situation where you need to coach groups of people on specific development areas. For example, if you are working with a senior team who, as a group, need to be strong in certain subscales or composite areas, you can work with them as a group on their development plans. What do they need to do as a team to ensure they are leveraging those skills they feel are important?

Setting the Stage

Here are some guidelines to keep in mind when planning a group coaching session:

1. Set ground rules at the beginning. What is confidential? What isn’t? How will we handle conflict when it comes up? How do we ensure everyone is engaged and participating in the discussions and action plans? These are just some of the questions that need to be addressed and agreed to at the beginning of the session in order to set it up for success.
   
2. Ensure there is trust on the team. There will be some fairly candid and open discussions, so people need to be comfortable with each other in order to open up and share information
3. Get agreement on what’s important. The group needs to agree on which composite scales or subscales are important to their roles. You can facilitate this process at the beginning if they don’t already have something in place. If you are given the information, you need to validate it with the team at the beginning of your session. That way you ensure there is buy-in right from the start.
4. Clarify your role. You are a facilitator of the process, and you will provide expertise in emotional intelligence and the EQ-i 2.0. You cannot tell them what to do and how to do it. Each group is different and they will know what works for them much more than you will. Allowing them to take the lead will increase the chance that they will follow through on what they have commit to.
5. Structure activities but be flexible. As with facilitating a workshop, process facilitation requires clear instructions around what you expect them to accomplish and how much time they have in order to accomplish it. Where it differs is that with process facilitation the team may decide that they want to spend more or less time on a particular activity than you had planned for. When this happens your role is to raise the issue (e.g., “There’s great discussion going on right now and I sense you want to continue talking this through. The downside is that we won’t get to X by this afternoon as we previously discussed. Is everyone okay with that?”). Once you get agreement from the team on the direction they want to go in, you can proceed.

Structuring the Group Coaching Session

Prior to conducting a group session, each individual should have one-on-one feedback debriefs on their EQ-i 2.0 results. Giving them personal feedback does a few things: it helps them understand where they are at personally and where they want to develop, it gives them an understanding of what emotional intelligence is and what the different subscales mean, and it starts them thinking about their team and where they are as a group.

Here are some ideas on how to structure your group coaching session:

Opening the session

• Open with high level objectives and confirm them with the group. This approach ensures a shared understanding of what they are there to accomplish.
• Show the agenda so participants are aware of how much time they can spend on any given piece of the session. This agenda can be flexible, but refer back to it when need to determine with the group whether or not to spend more time on a topic than previously allocated. It also shows the importance of each area; the areas you spend more time on should be the ones that are the most important.
• Go over group protocols. Set your protocols for the group up front so that everyone knows what is expected of them and they can hold each other accountable.

The middle of the session

• Review the EQ-i 2.0 and quickly go over the model and definitions. This review should be a refresher since they each had a one-on-one debrief. Ensure everyone understands the foundation of the session.
• Review the group subscales that you will be focusing on in the coaching session. The group subscale results should have been given out prior to the session. You need to ensure everyone is on the same page with which subscales are the ones pquired for themrimarily re to be successful.

When results are shared

• Create smaller groups to work on strategies that they can employ as a team to increase and develop in each area that identified as important to their success. The teams should consist of no fewer than three people and they should be relatively high in that subscale. For example, if they have identified Social Responsibility as a key area for them, one idea might be to create a culture of recognition. They do not need to decide the details for what that looks like or how they would implement it (or what the budget might be). This stage is just about brainstorming ideas. For smaller groups, you would work on all the strategies together as one group.
• Each team comes up with as many ideas as they can on their one or two subscales and then reports back to the larger team.
  During this debrief, participants listen, take notes, and ask clarifying questions. No one is allowed to shoot down any ideas at this point. You want as many ideas on the table as possible.
• Next you can put them in groups where they are relatively low in a particular subscale. This group needs to look at the ideas and determine which ones they can realistically commit to. By having the lower group determine what strategies they will implement, you have a greater chance of obtaining buy-in and commitment.
• Once the second round of group work is complete, have each team prepare an action plan for implementing their strategies. You can use the template provided in the report or use your own. Either way, ensure they come up with a concrete, realistic plan to start working on the subscales identified.
• Each team shares their action plans with the larger group, refining and adjusting the plan as required. Once the plan is in place, each person must commit to it and add it to their personal development plan.

Closing out the Group Coaching Session

• This coaching session will most likely take place over a number of sessions. Once the team has created their action plan, they need to identify checkpoints when they will review their progress as a team. They may have divided the development opportunities amongst the group, having subgroups each work on a few areas. They may have decided to all commit to working on everything. Whichever approach they take, they need to evaluate their progress along the way. Have them create a schedule of milestones:
  • How quickly can they start working on the identified areas?
  • Who will take the lead?
  • When can they expect to see changes taking place?
  • How will they hold themselves and each other accountable?
  • How will they reward themselves for progress?
• Remind them of the objectives of the session, and confirm whether they have met the objectives set out at the beginning.

Group Coaching Example

Susan is the V.P. of Human Resources at one of the largest banks in the U.S. She has completed an EQ-i 2.0 and has been given her personal feedback. She has twelve directors working for her whose teams provide human resources consulting services to the front line managers. While all of the subscales are important, Susan and her team have identified the following subscales as the most critical to their success as HR leaders and also as partners to their internal customers:

• Emotional Self-Awareness
• Emotional Expression
• Self-Actualization
• Empathy
• Social Responsibility
• Impulse Control
• Stress Tolerance
• Optimism

Her team is a high-performing team, winning several awards and recognition from their clients. Their employee survey results have been good overall, but there are some areas that come up year after year, specifically with regards to communication, workload, work/life balance, and providing advancement opportunities. The team has been together for at least 5 years, and they are generally a close and supportive team. They have developed a culture of openness and are eager to get some assistance in how to tackle the noted areas of the employee survey.

In the session, the EQ-i 2.0 consultant divided the group into four teams of three. Each group would take on a subscale  that was identified as important to success as HR managers. They brainstormed ideas on how to develop that subscale and presented their ideas back to the larger group. They then were divided again into four groups of three, again given a subscale that was deemed important to the team. Again they brainstormed ideas and presented them to the group. This process was repeated until all of the important subscales were covered. Everyone examined all brainstormed strategies. Their job was to determine which of these strategies was within their ability to implement, based on their ability to stretch outside of their comfort zone, but not so far out that they would not be able to accomplish it. Once these action plans were developed further and committed to, the group put timelines in place for review.

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If you coach people one-on-one, you will most likely incorporate development planning into your coaching sessions. When you are working with groups, however, it may be better to run a development planning workshop with the entire team. Aside from the obvious time-savings, there is a lot to be said about the synergies that occur when people are in a room together working towards a common goal: improving their emotional intelligence. People can be held accountable if they all hear the same message in the same way at the same time. They can also feel the shared accountability when they are ‘all in this together’. As well, commitment and buy-in increases when your leader is an active participant in the process.

Table 10.4 presents a sample agenda for a half-day development planning workshop:

Table 10.4. Sample half-day development workshop agenda.

Here is an amended outline for times when you only have one hour to do development planning. In that case, you will need to provide participants with some pre-work:

• List the 5 or 6 subscales that are the most critical to your role
• List your top 5 or 6 subscales as reported by your EQ-i 2.0 results
• Compare your top five with the ones required for your role:
  • Where are the gaps?
  • Where is the agreement?

Have participants bring their pre-work to the session and spend the time in class focused on the coaching piece. Have them peer-coach to further develop their strategies. After the session, they will need to:

• Finalize their development plan, ensuring that they follow the SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time Bound).goal setting method.
• Bring their development plan to their next one-on-one with their manager:
  • Share the plan with their manager
  • Discuss what role the manager will play in the action plan (e.g., providing an opportunity, removing obstacles, observing behavior and providing feedback and guidance).

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Individual Coaching

How do you know when an intervention has worked? How do you know that a particular activity will give you the result you want? How do you know that if you work on this skill by using that strategy, you will be able to develop a particular skill? It is vital that you set up a process to evaluate the progress of your clients. Below are some best practices you can engage in to get you there:

1. Before debriefing results, have clients identify areas that they believe they are strong in, and areas that are more of a struggle. Provide them with a focused set of questions such as:
   • Which of the 15 subscales do you believe you leverage regularly? How do you know?
   • Which of the 15 subscales do you believe you leverage less frequently? Why do you think that is?
   • Which of the 15 subscales do you believe are critical to your success as a leader?
   • What feedback have you been given that confirms your self-assessment?
2. Review responses to the questions above and compare them with results on the EQ-i 2.0:
   • How accurate were they in their self-assessment?
   • How will you address the areas that they were not accurate in?
   • How do their EQ-i 2.0 results compare to the subscales they have identified as critical to their success?
   • How will you address the gaps with them?
3. During the feedback session, focus your client on validating the information by asking for examples. The more examples they can provide, the better.
4. Ensure that any development plan they create is SMART (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time Bound).
5. Ensure your client does not focus on more than 3 development opportunities at one time. Too many will increase the chances of becoming overwhelmed and discouraged.
6. Ensure your client has someone who can can observe them executing their action plan. That way they can provide instant feedback and the client can learn from that as they continue to try out their new skills.
7. If you have an ongoing relationship with this client, make sure you discuss their EQ-i 2.0 development plan every time you meet, even for just a few minutes at the beginning of the session. Revisiting the development plan keeps it top of mind and goes a long way to ensuring success.
8. Ensure your client comes up with ideas for further developing their skills first, before you offer up suggestions. Your client will commit to their ideas more readily than yours.
9. While there is no black and white answer to when it is a good time to retake the EQ-i 2.0 to check progress, a good rule of thumb is to re-assess your client no sooner than two to three months after they have implemented their development plan.
10. Ensure you have complete commitment from your client when they are embarking on a development plan. If they are not committed, ask what needs to change in order for them to commit.

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If you are working with an organization looking to increase the emotional intelligence of teams rather than one-on-one, there are different ways to evaluate success on an organizational level:

• Link development plans to competencies: ensure that whatever competency model they use is clearly linked to the emotional intelligence skills they need to develop.
• Link development plans to clear measures: perhaps the group is looking to increase employee engagement and they measure this through a series of questions on the annual employee survey. Once you know which pieces of the survey are linked to the EQ-i 2.0, you can focus the clients on increasing their skills in those particular areas.
• Compare the pre-intervention survey results with the post-intervention results to see whether there was an increase in scores.
• Examples of hard data that can be used to measure the effectiveness of an intervention include absenteeism, sick time, turnover, promotions, and hiring effectiveness.

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Competency models are used in many organizations. They typically consist of a combination of hard skills (e.g., business acumen, degrees) and soft skills (e.g., communication skills, interpersonal relationship skills). When you engage with an organization to build the emotional intelligence of their workforce, looking at their competency model is a good way to get a sense of which emotional intelligence subscales are most important to their organization. It makes it easier to speak in language familiar to them. If they use the term change management, you can connect it to the EQ-i 2.0 Flexibility subscale. If they refer to confidence, you can connect that to Self-Regard. Good communication skills could be connected to Interpersonal Relationships or Empathy.

Here are some typical competencies and how the EQ-i 2.0 connects with each of them:

Communication skills

• Empathy
• Interpersonal Relationships

Confidence

• Self-Regard
• Assertiveness

Life long learner
Focus on continuous learning/improvement

• Self-Actualization
• Problem Solving

Self-Awareness

• Emotional Self-Awareness

Adaptable/Change agent

• Flexibility

Problem-solver/decisive

• Problem-Solving
• Independence

Interpersonal skills

• Interpersonal Relationships
• Empathy
• Social Responsibility

Team-focused

• Social Responsibility
• Interpersonal Relationships

Ability to deal with multiple demands/work well under pressure

• Stress Tolerance
• Optimism

Customer service focused

• Empathy
• Interpersonal Relationships

Coaching Resources

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