• Self-Awareness: recognizing and understanding our own emotions
• Social Awareness: recognizing and understanding the emotions and needs of others
• Self-Management: effectively managing our own emotions
• Relationship Management: applying emotional understanding in our dealings with others in order to effectively develop, maintain and nurture relationships. Relationship management is where emotional and social intelligence (or the lack thereof) becomes most visible to others. The competencies in this cluster impact on the motivation and performance of others, but they depend on strengths in the Social Awareness and Self-Management competencies. These clusters provide direction, energy, restraint and skill to the way we use Relationship Management competencies.

The ESCI incorporates perspectives from others selected to provide feedback, on a series of research-validated behaviors that profile emotional and social intelligence.

• Each participant receives a 22-page personalized feedback report, detailing level of proficiency in each of the 12 competencies.
• Competency details: level of proficiency in each of the 12 competencies as rated by self, manager, direct reports, peers and others.
• Personal summary of emotional and social competence: a display of ratings for the entire portfolio of 12 emotional competencies by self and combined total of all raters. Indicates competencies that exceed the tipping point and competencies that need further development.
• Validation of data quality in the feedback report (familiarity of the raters with the subject and inter-rater agreement).

Contact us for more information or to request a sample report.

ESCI Group Report
Organizations can use the ESCI to diagnose an entire team, department or organization, profiling its overall strengths and development opportunities. Pooling the individual assessments of an entire work unit provides a comprehensive profile of the organization’s emotional intelligence. This Group Report can reveal key gaps that may be limiting performance effectiveness.

• Single-page overview of competency gaps for the group.
• Index of the need for organization-wide attention.
• Recommended strategy for closing the competency gaps.
• Degree of urgency of attention for each competency.
• Recommendation of “development” or “selection” to close the organizational gaps.

Administration Process:

Step 1: Pre-assessment meeting (approx. 1 hour). Consultant meets with the candidate or group who will be receiving the assessment. The purpose of this session is to explain the objective and benefits of the ESCI, review the administration process and answer questions. Participant identifies his/her feedback providers/raters to provide anonymous feedback in Step 2. Note: this is not an Emotional Intelligence overview or educational session; see below for more information about that component.

Step 2: Administration – Each participant and all raters (feedback providers) will receive an e-mail with special passwords to access and complete the assessment. The ESCI is administered on-line, with complete anonymity.

Step 3: Delivery of report and feedback session – In approximately 3 weeks, the feedback reports are ready. Consultant meets with each participant to review his or her feedback report. Each one-to-one feedback session is 2.5 to 3 hours. Participant then takes time on their own to review the feedback report and insights from the feedback session at their own pace over the next week.

Phone follow-up: Within a week, a 30-45 minute phone session is conducted to answer any new questions and provide further clarification on insights from initial feedback session.

Step 4: Development planning – Consultant meets with each participant to identify their development goals and objectives and, if desired, schedules individualized coaching (Step 5). Approx. 1.5 – 2 hour meeting. This session can alternatively be done via phone.

Step 5: Individualized coaching with identified staff members; 6 – 18 mths.

Process when part of Comprehensive Development Program for building EI competence in Leadership:
If your organization or group is engaging in our comprehensive learning and development program, the five-step process listed above is integrated into the program.

Overview session on Emotional Intelligence and Leadership:
Typically, prior to a group of participants completing the ESCI, they will have attended an Overview or Introductory session about Emotional Intelligence and Leadership. These sessions vary in length from 2.5 hours to half-day to a full day and are designed to introduce participants to the background research on emotional intelligence, the foundational competencies, and the relevance to their success in the positions they hold. Time is taken to identify the linkages between the EI competencies and your organization’s business goals, performance competencies and core values.

When participants, and especially their feedback providers/raters, have completed this overview session they are able to answer the ESCI questions from a more knowledgeable perspective and the subsequent feedback they provide is typically more accurate.

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Leadership and Managerial Style

Everyone can recall their best leader or manager – and their worst – and the specific things they did to boost (or dent) morale and performance. This workbook gives leaders and managers a chance to understand, and improve, their own managerial style. Hay Group has identified six styles that leaders and managers use to bring out the best in their teams. By matching the right style to a given situation, leaders and managers can make a positive impact on the business.

The Leadership Styles Workbook is a simple tool that introduces the six leadership styles, which are:

• Authoritative / Visionary
• Affiliative
• Coaching
• Democratic / Participative
• Pacesetting
• Coercive / Directive / Command

Use this tool to help your leaders:

• understand which of the six styles they use most frequently
• compare what they do with what their situation requires of them
• get tips on when a particular style is more, or less, effective
• start to think about areas for action and improvement.

This workbook gives leaders a chance to understand their own leadership style, reflect on whether it suits the situations they face, and make appropriate changes.
It enables leaders to identify their intentions and think about whether they are using the leadership styles to best effect. This tool is most effective when used in conjunction with the Organizational Climate Workbook as managerial style impacts the climate a manager creates for their team.

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Influence Strategies Exercise

Understanding the techniques people use to influence colleagues and key decision makers will help them make their point more effectively – and get the results they need.

Use the influence strategies exercise (ISE) to:

• help your professionals and leaders to understand themselves better
• widen their repertoire – the behaviors they use to influence others
• enhance one-to-one coaching and group development programs
• complement other 360º feedback resources to provide a bigger picture of individual behavior and impact.

We’re all under pressure to get things done more effectively. This exercise helps people to identify the influencing strategies they use and evaluate how effective they are. By understanding this, they can improve their ability to influence others and achieve workplace objectives. In 1959, French and Raven published a historic study of managerial power, which inspired researchers and theorists to study influencing tactics. Hay Group combined these studies with 15 years of its own applied research to identify the most common and effective strategies for influencing others.

These are the specific behaviors that help us influence most successfully.

• Empowerment: making others feel valued by giving them praise
• Interpersonal awareness: identifying other people’s concerns
• Bargaining: gaining support by offering to exchange favors or resources
• Relationship building: taking time to get to know others personally
• Organizational awareness: identifying and getting the support of key people
• Common vision: showing how one’s ideas support the organization’s goals
• Impact management: presenting ideas in such a way as to gain people’s support
• Logical persuasion: using logical reasons, facts, and data to convince others
• Coercion: using threats or pressure to get others to do what you want.

The influence strategies exercise (ISE) is a quick, easy-to-use tool that comes in the form of a paper-based booklet or an online tool. It helps individuals identify the strategies that they tend to use, evaluate their effectiveness and developing alternative strategies where needed. There is also a feedback questionnaire so that individuals can learn how others perceive their influencing behavior.

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Values

Personal Values Questionnaire

Why do people do what they do? What do people look for in their work? What tells us that we’re doing something that matters? If people’s values are out of step with their work, they will be less happy and productive. Deeper insight into what’s important to them can help people maximize the fit between their values, their job and their organization.

Any mismatch between personal values and job demands can hit your organization, cutting productivity and raising staff turnover. If managers know where gaps exist, they can close them by reassigning employees to other departments or roles, developing employees within their existing roles, or redesigning jobs.

Based on the research of the renowned psychologist Dr David McClelland, the HayGroup designed the PVQ to guide people through various steps to measure the importance they attach to three social values: achievement, affiliation and power. These values – or conscious drivers of behavior – explain the extent to which we want to achieve tasks or standards, maintain close, friendly relationships or have an impact on others. The personal values profile will describe how people rate these values at a conscious level. (Note: the Picture Story Exercise is used to measure the corresponding sub-conscious motives – the need for achievement, affiliation and power that shape people’s social behavior).

Use the personal values questionnaire to:

• help your professionals and leaders to understand themselves better
• help them think about the choices they make in fulfilling their roles
• enhance one-to-one coaching and group development programs
• complement other off-the-shelf or 360º feedback resources to provide a bigger picture of a person’s behavior and impact.

Contact us for more information or to request a sample report.

Behavior Style – DiSC®

DISC is the four quadrant behavioral model based on the work of William Moulton Marston Ph.D. (1893 – 1947) to examine the behavior of individuals in their environment or within a specific situation. DISC looks at behavioral styles and behavioral preferences. Marston, the father of the DISC, was a graduate of Harvard University. Among his contributions in his profession Marston was a consulting psychologist, researcher and author of five books, which he either wrote or co-authored. He was published in the American Journal of Psychology, The Encyclopedia of Psychology, and The Encyclopedia Britannica.

Marston’s 1928 “Emotions of Normal People”, introduced DISC theory to the public. He defined four categories of human behavioral styles, types or temperament, now know as “D” for Dominance-Drive-Direct, “I” for Influence (Marston chose the term inducement, “S” for Steadiness or Stability (Marston used submission) and “C” for Compliant, Conscientious, or Cautious, (Marston used compliance). Interestingly enough Marston never developed his D.I.S.C. theory into the present four quadrant model, yet now a days DISC has become one of the most popular and user friendly four quadrant models for understanding behavioral styles and personality types, with various companies offering models with quadrants, circles, wheels, and diamonds to graphically represent the positioning of these behavioral and personality styles and types.

D – Dominance: Emphasis on shaping the environment by overcoming opposition to accomplish results
I – Influence: Emphasis on shaping the environment by influencing or persuading others
S – Steadiness: Emphasis on cooperating with others within existing circumstances to carry out the task
C – Concientiousness: Emphasis on working conscientiously within existing circumstances

DiSC profiles help individuals and teams:

• Increase self knowledge: how one responds to conflict, what motivates, what triggers stress, and how one solves problems
• Learn how to adapt one’s own style to get along better with others
• Foster constructive and creative group interactions
• Facilitate better teamwork and minimize team conflict
• Develop stronger sales skills by identifying and responding to customer styles
• Manage more effectively by understanding the dispositions and priorities of employees and team members

DiSC is a registered trademark of Inscape Publishing. For just about 40 years DISC has continued to evolve. From Marston’s original development of the D.I.S.C. model; to the research conducted by the University of Minnesota’s Dr. John Geier’s and his creation or the first DISC personality instrument offered through Performax Systems Int’l, which later becoming Carlson Learning Company, who offered the DiSC® Personal Profile System™ and is now Inscape Publishing with the latest incarnation of the original disc profile, called the DiSC Classic™ Profile the continuous development and validation of the DiSC profile remains foremost.

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Resilience

Resiliency Map®
Resilience is the ability to bounce back after failures, disappointments or setbacks; to be adaptable and flexible; and to incorporate life experiences into new ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Constant and relentless pressures can wear us down, burn us out, or hurt us physically and mentally. But once we learn how to use resilience, our resilient natures can buoy us during setbacks or times of difficulty, and bring us health and personal vitality throughout our lives.

Essi Systems®’ Resiliency Map® moves beyond stress and burnout to help you explore your resiliency demands, assets and current levels of functioning. Resiliency Map pinpoints your strengths and vulnerabilities, detects areas of caution and strain, and helps you chart new strategies for enhancing personal health and overall performance.
Resiliency Map includes a comprehensive questionnaire, scoring grid and interpretation guide that measure resiliency factors, pinpoint your strengths and vulnerabilities, and bolster a “take charge” attitude.

Resiliency Map Features

• Comprehensive – measures resiliency factors on 21 scales
• Quick and easy – completed in less than an hour
• Confidential and self-scoring
• Visually maps personal patterns

Resiliency Map Benefits

• Identifies your resiliency demands, assets and current levels of functioning
• Pinpoints your strengths and vulnerabilities
• Enhances personal health and overall performance
• Bolsters a “take charge” attitude
• Gives tips for learning that build skills and enhance competencies

Resiliency Map is a registered trademark of Essi Systems, Inc.

Contact us for more information or to request a sample of this tool.

Team Effectiveness

Team development programs include surveys and assessments to measure how the team perceives itself on a number of attributes of high-functioning team behaviors and performance outcomes. Depending on the structure of team, appropriate instruments are selected to capture the team’s perception of its functioning in some or all of these elements:

Learning Style and Problem-solving style

Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI)
Use the Kolb learning style inventory (LSI) to help your employees:

• understand how their learning style impacts upon problem solving, teamwork, handling conflict, communication and career choice
• develop their learning styles to fit their roles
• find out why teams work well – or badly – together
• strengthen their overall learning.

As a leader in a group you need to be aware of your own learning style, because it has implications for the impact you make on the team. Understanding your learning style will also reveal your problem-solving style. Without acknowledging your own style you may encourage your team to focus on issues from a certain perspective and miss the opportunities that result from different approaches. A team has a collective learning style all of its own. For example, if you have a group of sales managers who all share a preference for action, they are less likely to stop and think about the underlying framework and rationale for their actions (with a tendency for headless chicken syndrome!). As their leader, your job is to guide this group and help them to understand the strengths and potential weaknesses or blind spots associated with their learning styles.

The Kolb LSI can help you look at your own learning style and problem-solving style, and those of your team so you’re better able to tune into the needs of others, to the aims of the group and to the optimal way of using your collective time, resources and capabilities.

Based on experiential learning theory, the learning style inventory was developed by David Kolb Ph.D. with research that began in 1971. It identifies four phases in the learning process.

• Experiencing: learning from experiences, being sensitive to feelings and people.
• Reflecting: reserving judgment, taking different perspectives, looking for meaning.
• Thinking: logically analyzing ideas, planning systematically, using concepts.
• Acting: showing an ability to get things done, taking risks, influencing.

Everyone has a tendency to learn from one of these preferred phases. The Kolb LSI helps your employees understand their unique learning preference and develop a well-rounded approach to their learning and problem solving.

Four learning styles:

• the do-er (Accommodating style)
• the creator (Diverging style)
• the decision maker (Converging style)
• the planner (Assimilating style)

Boyatzis-Kolb Learning Style Profile (LSP)

Match the skill to the job. Understanding learning skills can help people ensure that their personal skills suit the demands of their job.

Use the Boyatzis-Kolb learning skills profile (LSP) to help your employees:

• assess the match between their personal learning skills and their job demands
• identify which skills are critical to satisfactory performance, which need development and which are under-utilized
• gather feedback from their peers or managers to augment skill-gap information
• create a learning agenda to develop the skills that they enjoy, or to work on the skills that they need to use more often.

The LSP helps participants identify their personal skills and the skill demands of their jobs. It assesses four skill groups:

• Interpersonal
• Information
• Analytical
• Behavioral

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Organizational Coherence

Organizational Coherence Survey (OCS)
The OCS is designed to provide insights into the extent to which an organization is coherent. Organizational coherence is defined as the degree of consistency and efficiency with which all organizational systems function smoothly and harmoniously together – such as recruitment, appraisal and promotion, pricing and client support in sales and marketing, reliability and quality control in manufacturing. The degree of coherence within an organization determines people’s attitudes toward their work and their employer. The elements that underlie employee motivation, commitment and loyalty are the basis for the design of the organizational coherence survey.

The OCS assesses 6 areas:

• Taking Care of Business – the extent to which each key group of employees takes care of the interests of its customers, staff and shareholders.
• A Sense of Well-Being at Work – how employees feel in their workplace.
• Relationships at Work – how employees feel about their relationship with key individuals and groups.
• Managing People – the style of management that brings out the best in the employees surveyed and sustains their efforts in the longer term.
• Managing the Organization – how people feel about the balance between their work effort and the rewards they receive.
• The Working Climate – how employees feel working for their manager.

Coherent organizations do better than their misaligned counterparts. They outperform the market and bring out the best in their people. In the public sector, they provide consistently superior service to their constituents.

Employees spend a great deal of time at work. They give work many of their best years and the best hours of most days. It is not surprising that many bring high expectations to the workplace. In many organizations, however, there is a gap between employees’ expectations and their perceived day-to-day reality. This inconsistency perpetuates disharmony and incoherence, leading to an accumulation of energy drains that affect every level of the organization.

Organizations do not usually become incoherent by deliberate actions. They are undermined by subtle factors that are not easily recognized. It is as if an insidious virus infects the bloodstream of the organization and attacks the emotional climate. The virus invades the gap between legitimate expectations and the perceived reality, and feeds on valuable organizational energy. Early detection can help prevent them from spreading.

The OCS is generally administered prior to any intervention to help identify specific organizational issues that may be affecting individual performance and other bottom line measurements and is often administered semi-annually and/or annually to track climate changes.

The OCS was developed to provide an early detection mechanism and to help identify the appropriate actions to be taken to restore healthy, coherent function. The survey provides a view of “current reality” vs. “perceived reality” based on the feelings and perceptions of the respondents. The distinction between respondents’ feelings about a given item’s importance and their perceptions of the item’s current performance shows the gap between their expectations and reality.

Content: Importance and Current Performance
The six topics contain questions asking for two responses: Importance and Current Performance:

• How important is it to you personally to feel good about this? (1-4: Unimportant to Extremely Important)
• How do you feel about it right now? (1 – 10: Extremely Bad to Extremely Good)

Importance is rated on a four-point scale, and feelings about current performance on a ten-point scale. (Degrees of perceived importance seem to be less extensive than the subtleties of current feelings.)

Each of the six topics is reported with a Priority Index score and a Coherence Index score. The Priority Index reflects the percentage of respondents scoring that particular item high in importance and low in performance. The higher the percentage, the less coherent the organization is in addressing that item. The Coherence Index reflects the percentage of respondents scoring that particular item high in importance and high in performance. The higher the percentage, the more coherent the organization is in addressing that item.

The diagram below is a guide for the interpretation. The graph displaying the scores for each topic plots importance on the vertical axis and current perceptions of performance on the horizontal axis.

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Personal and Organizational Quality Assessment (POQA-R)
The POQA-R is a self-report inventory designed to reflect a group report of the key psychological and workplace elements that contribute to the overall quality of an organization, and provides a detailed analysis of the workforce in several key dimensions of personal and organizational quality and effectiveness.

The POQA-R addresses individual and organizational performance issues and provides a textured portrait of the workplace effectiveness, vitality, social attitudes, emotional stressors and physical symptoms of stress. It also assesses interactional aspects between the employee and the organization, such as “intent to leave”. The instrument provides a concentrated yet comprehensive assessment in the two main topic areas listed below.

The POQA-R consists of 85 questions designed to measure key elements of personal and organizational quality, and key factors of organizational climate. Of primary consideration are the employees’ self-management competencies (foundational Emotional Intelligence competence), which interact with the organizational climate to influence and affect individual or personal quality. This, in turn, affects Organizational Quality indicators such as employee satisfaction and work effort, which produce important organizational performance outcomes such as customer satisfaction and profitability. (See diagram below)

Personal Quality scales are comprised of questions that examine areas that directly reflect employees’ day-to-day moods, attitudes and stress-related symptoms. The stress symptom items possess clinical relevance as valid measures of stress, which can exert a significant negative impact on work performance and employee health.

Organizational Quality scales are comprised of questions that examine key areas that influence employee job involvement, performance and important factors related to employee behavior, attitudes toward work, and ability to perform well.

Scores of the participants are compared to a reference group consisting of responses from a variety of Fortune 500 companies and public sector organizations, representing a diverse sample according to age, gender and job level. The comparison with this norm database is just one method and option of analyzing the data. Norm is 50%.

The group’s average standardized scores are summarized by quartiles as follows:
Substantially Below Average “poor” <25th quartile
Below Average “caution” 25th – 49.9th quartile
Above Average “good” 50th – 74.9th quartile
Substantially Above Average “commendable” 75th – 100th quartile

This assessment tool is delivered pre and post training, providing a detailed analysis of a workforce in several key dimensions of personal and organizational quality and effectiveness.

Contact us for more information or to request a sample report.

Organizational Climate Workbook

Research shows a better climate can increase bottom line performance by up to 30 percent, so helping managers to understand and improve it can make a real difference.
What’s it like to work in your organization? Are people committed? Clear about goals? This workbook enables managers to rate the climate they experience and the one they believe they create, and then reflect on the impact they have on their team.

Use the organizational climate workbook (OCW) by The HayGroup to:

• introduce the concept of organizational climate and the climate dimensions
• get managers to think about ways to improve both the climate they experience and the one they create
• enhance leadership and management development programs or one-to-one coaching
• provide a bigger picture of managerial behavior and impact alongside the managerial style workbook (MSW).

The OCW introduces managers to six organizational climate dimensions, which are:

• clarity
• rewards
• standards
• responsibility
• flexibility
• team commitment.

The OCW is most effective when used in conjunction with the Managerial Style Workbook as managerial style impacts organizational climate.

Disclaimer: The organizational climate workbook is not a diagnostic tool. For a comprehensive assessment of organizational climate, we recommend the organizational climate survey (OCS), an internet-administered, 180° assessment.

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