From Dependent and Time-Sucking to Self-Reliant and Autonomous – How One Organisation Upskilled their People

Want more self-reliant and autonomous team members?

Want more collaboration across your organisation and less silos?

Do your leaders create positive, solution-oriented, self reliant employees?

For the last 4 months The EQ Leadership Formula Duo of Sue Belton & Anne Taylor have been working with an SME to develop their senior and middle leaders; upskill them with coaching, feedback and collaboration tools – with the underlying result being growth mindset and emotionally intelligent leadership group.

Proud to say it’s been a success with more growth and development still to come but we’re jumping ahead of ourselves. Learn how you too can have the same positive result as their case study…

Situation – Too Reliant on Senior Leaders

A medium size, fairly flat organisation approached us wanting to develop more of a coaching and feedback culture in their organisation with the target of training 20 middle and senior leaders.

The presenting problems were:

? Staff were overly-reliant on the executive team for helping them find solutions and make decisions

? Staff were issue-oriented, seeing obstacles, and feeling uncertain

? Staff were silo’d in their problem-solving and impact across the organisation

Action – Building EQ (Emotional Intelligence)

Through the lens of our proven EQ Leadership Formula Model, we did a needs assessment to determine the impact and outcome they wanted. We then designed the interventions that would be best suited to achieve those outcomes.

Development was needed across all four quadrants of our EQ model, with the specific desired outcomes for staff:

1. To develop their own solutions and be less reliant on the executive team.

2. To practice more coaching behaviours such as listening and asking questions and “tell” or give advice less.

3. To realise the benefits of working collaboratively and become less silo’d in their thinking and behaviour.

The needs assessment determined the following highly experiential interventions were necessary:

? Workshops on how to Coach in the workplace

? Workshops on how to Give Feedback – both constructive and confidence-building

? Observations of executive leaders coaching with each other with full debriefings

This last invention of training, observing and supervising key executive team leaders had two benefits:

? For the executives to role model the ideal coaching behaviours and growth mindset to the middle and senior leaders.

? To have the executive leaders realise their role in creating the ‘reliance’ of the senior leaders on coming to them for solutions and decisions.

Result – Development of EQ across all four quadrants, leading especially to Self-Awareness, Self-Reliance and Autonomy

Qualitative feedback was:

? Really useful skills that can benefit work and home life

? Clear explanations, with great practical activities

? Engaging, interactive, interesting and useful

? It was more relevant to my role than I initially thought

Average post-intervention score for:

? Quality of training was 9/10

? Quality of instructors 10/10

? Relevance of the training to the workplace 9/10

? Net Promoter Score of 78

Our programme sponsor said this at the end of the programme:

“The feedback I have received has been really positive, and they have got a lot out of the sessions. We have noticed them using the methods shared in your sessions and I know for sure that they have started using the feedback during professional growth and monitoring sessions”.

Next Steps – Culture Change & Growth Mindset

The key decision maker said they want us to continue working with them to further embed the learning, and to support the culture change.

Anne & Sue will celebrate the work and the feedback (we practice what we preach!) while reflecting on what was learned.

With the participants’ feedback we are now designing the next intervention with this now engaged and enthusiastic group.

**As any sustainable culture change needs to happen top-down, part of the design will include 1:1 coaching of the key executive team. This will enable them to lead the change, be the change, and ultimately create the mindset and culture they want.

What Else?

What aspects of EQ would you or your people benefit from developing?

Would your organisation benefit from having more resourceful and self-reliant leaders?

What bottom-line benefits would this give you and your organisation?

Book a complimentary coaching session with me here to explore how you could develop your emotional intelligence further to motivate and inspire your teams to achieve.