Case Studies
Teaching Emotional Intelligence
Jeanne Farr, 05-09-2010
Partnerships in Community Living, a nonprofit organization serving people with disabilities, wanted to be sure it grasped diversity beyond its core mission.
In many workplaces, the differences between people are glossed over in order to avoid any discomfort, or worse, discrimination. But it’s important not to turn a blind eye to these differences. When differences in the workplace are not acknowledged, people feel excluded.
People know where they feel welcome and where they do not. Work settings are cultural organisms that are ever changing and complex. Using emotional intelligence as it relates to diversity in the work environment gives leaders a tool to navigate through change and bring people together as a team. Developing intercultural sensitivity within organizations increases morale, fosters personal responsibility and enriches corporate culture.
Partnerships in Community Living (PCL) is a nonprofit organization serving people with disabilities. For 23 years, it has fostered a culture of dedicated employees who have chosen to work with people with disabilities as a lifelong profession. There is a presumption of diversity awareness in the company because the staff and leadership of the organization are ethnically diverse and the mission of the organization is focused upon advocating for people with disabilities, a long “othered” group.
But Joanne Fuhrman, PCL’s associate director, wanted to create opportunities to move managers to a deeper level of professional competence and maturity. “I wanted my colleagues to have an expanded understanding of diversity beyond the disabilities community and build upon their interpersonal skills,” she said.
In March 2008, Fuhrman consulted with Coexistence Collaborative (CC) about its leadership and diversity courses. After exploring the options, she decided to send members of her executive team to a five-day leadership course focusing on emotional intelligence and diversity. Her intent was to see how her staff responded to the training and then determine how to coordinate an initiative that would impact more of her managers.
“I was hopeful that the course would give my managers new skills and be a valuable use of their time,” Fuhrman said. “Because it was such a commitment of time and resources, I needed to make sure that it was a success before expanding the training to others in the organization.”
The main challenges she faced in launching this initiative were communicating to staff why it made sense to take five days away from busy schedules to attend the training and ensuring that the training would have far-reaching impact for both the participants and their management teams. She said, “I told the folks we sent to think about how to apply the training to their day-to-day work.”
Diversity Day to Day
The course fostered the development of an intimate team learning process. The class size was limited to eight people so that participants could experience a trusting learning community with each other, harnessing the breadth and depth of their individual experience, wisdom and insights.
The major source that the facilitators of this course use in their work is a model addressing emotional intelligence and diversity (EID), developed by Lee Gardenswartz, Jorge Cherbosque and Anita Rowe in their book, Emotional Intelligence for Managing Results in a Diverse World. Each of the first four days of the course are dedicated to the EID model and the fifth day is focused on using case studies drawn from participants’ experiences to illustrate the use of the model and review the application of the skills acquired over the course of the training program.
Each day included examples of current scientific research related to the EID model, content-focused discussions, experiential learning in individual, partner, and group activities and the exploration of a world leader who embodied specific characteristics of emotional intelligence. The training site was organized so that there were private places for people to explore the material with a partner or in small groups.
The training days were each separated by a week so that course participants could process, integrate and use the newly acquired skills and insights in their day-to-day jobs. The facilitators e-mailed the participants in between each class, inviting them to integrate the material learned into their work lives, with specific suggestions on how to do that.
Building Emotional Intelligence
The course material began with an introduction of basic concepts — emotional intelligence, leadership, culture and diversity. The first day of training focused on affirmative introspection, which involved an internal exploration so that trainees had the opportunity to begin to think about and become conscious of their reactions to others. They discovered biases and assumptions they had that influence their way of viewing the world and drive their attitudes toward others.
The focus then moved to self-governance, which involves managing those reactions and identifying ways in which trainees react to different norms and values. This part of the training gave people specific approaches to consider in using their emotions as a powerful and positive resource. During this part of the course, participants began to develop strategies to consciously deal with reactions so that they could become more adaptable in dealing with uncertainty and change.
The course then moved from internal to external perspectives — to intercultural literacy, where course participants explored the complexity of diversity and how it informs norms, attitudes and behaviors. Here, they began to expand their capacity to move beyond their own perspective. They gained an understanding of how to be more empathetic and work effectively with others across lines of difference. In this section of the course, they explored the cultural “whys” behind behavior and the benefits and limitations of all norms.
The final quadrant of the EID model, social architecting, invites people to think about and teaches specific strategies on how to build inclusive and synergistic work environments that elicit the commitment and creativity of all team members.
Learning about leadership and cultivating individual leadership style and vision was woven throughout each day of the course so that by the end of the five days, all of the trainees had articulated their personal vision and had a set of goals and mentorship plan for themselves going forward.
Getting Feedback
According to Fuhrman, the course allowed her staff members to access diversity within themselves that they may not have known they possessed or may have felt was beyond their reach. She said, “One thing that really touched me was when one of my staff said that she had no idea that, as a Caucasian, she was so diverse.”
One of PCL’s managers told Fuhrman that the course allowed her to look honestly at her own biases and voice things she may have been hesitant even to tell herself. “They talked about how the experience not only helped them grow as leaders but as people who are committed to live both their personal and professional lives in a manner that is consistent with their core values,” Fuhrman said. “They spoke of realizing how social, personal and family prejudice was influencing their daily actions and in some ways holding them back from achieving their goals.”
