Part II: Administering a Self-Report EQ-i 2.0

Planning the EQ-i 2.0 Assessment Process

Step 6: Follow-up and Evaluation

Evaluating your EI initiative is crucial to sustaining individual, team and organizational commitment to long term EI growth. Like any development program, you need to follow-up with participants and key stakeholders to assess whether the EQ-i 2.0 was successful in achieving its intended goals. As mentioned earlier in Steps 1 through 4, having clearly defined the outcomes expected from using the EQ-i 2.0 will now allow you to measure the impact of your initiative on either individual or group level performance.

Individual Follow-up and Evaluation

In an ongoing coaching relationship, re-administering the EQ-i 2.0 after development efforts have been made is a standard method of measuring specific, quantifiable growth in your client’s EI skills. For example, if you are working with your client on developing her empathy, retesting after 3 months of practicing and honing various empathy skills should reflect an increase in your client’s empathy results on the second administration.

Follow-up can also take a more informal approach by placing checkpoints along your client’s development path. Particularly if you are using an action plan and/or development commitment (like those presented in the Workplace Report), you can assign specific dates to check in on your client’s progress in achieving his or her personal goals. If goals were initially created to be measurable and time-bound, then determining whether your coaching has been instrumental in reaching these goals should be relatively simple at this point. The following questions will help to inform your evaluation:

• How well do you feel you are tracking against your EI development goals?
• Which goals do you believe you have achieved? How do you know?
• What indicators (e.g., job performance, decreased stress) suggest that your goal has been reached? Have you experienced any unexpected benefits?
• Can you seek feedback from your manager, colleagues, friends or family to verify your improvements in a particular skill?
• Now that you have reached this goal, what will be your plan for maintaining this higher level of performance?
• How do you think this coaching relationship is going? What would you like us to keep doing, stop doing or start doing in order for it to be more effective?

Large Scale Follow-up

For initiatives where the EQ-i 2.0 has expected organization, department or team level outcomes, ongoing follow-up is particularly important to determine whether adjustments to the initiative need to be made and whether in the end, the initiative delivered the expected returns.

Circle back to the Project Objectives you outlined in the Contracting Phase to determine which outcomes need evaluation. If the EQ-i 2.0 was administered as part of a larger leadership training program and the objective is to produce stronger leaders, how will you evaluate whether “stronger leaders” are the end result? Or was your EI intervention expected to produce economic returns (e.g., reducing attrition rates and hiring expenses for a high risk position)? In either case, these outcomes are unlikely to be measured by re-administering the EQ-i 2.0. Instead, you will need to use metrics available within the organization to measure whether improvements have been made. For example, consider whether you can make theoretical links between the EQ-i 2.0 subscales and the competencies that define stronger leaders in your client organization. You would expect to see improvement in performance review data on those competencies that are linked to EI development (e.g., strengthening Assertiveness, Empathy and Impulse Control should in turn strengthen leaders’ conflict resolution skills).

If a post measure of the EQ-i 2.0 is desired, follow the same guidelines for re-testing individuals and aggregate results to measure EI growth at a group level.