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Your team sees something you don’t.

What the leader does becomes the team’s norm. So we show managers how others experience them, for instance with ESCI 360, and work with them and their team on what needs to change afterwards.

What we mean by leadership.

Giving direction towards the goals and creating the conditions for development. Leadership connects the goals with the four domains and influences the conditions.

In our model, leadership is the line that connects everything, and you see it come back in every other area of our expertise. What managers do decides whether a new structure, culture or technology is going to work.

See how our expertise fits together

Leadership in every domain.

Leadership connects the goals with all four domains of our model. In each domain we look at the example managers set, and at what they make possible.

  • Craftsmanship

    Do managers give professionals room to practise and develop their craft, and do they ask for their input?

  • Shared vision

    Can managers explain the course in their own words, and do they make clear what it means for their team’s work?

  • Team learning and collaboration

    How do managers react to a mistake or bad news? Do they show that it’s something you can learn from?

  • Systems thinking

    Do managers look beyond their own department, and do they seek out the colleagues their team does the work with?

Sound familiar?

How do you develop leadership that moves both people and the organisation forward?

  • Managers are mostly busy with day-to-day problems and hardly get round to development.
  • Employees take little initiative and keep passing decisions back to their manager.
  • The way people lead differs a lot between teams or departments.

How we can help

Leadership doesn’t stand apart from the organisation. Unclear mandates, conflicting goals or ingrained patterns of behaviour can get in the way of effective leadership. That is why we also look at structure and culture.

How we work on leadership

For each part of our approach, the examples from our work that relate to leadership. Click one to read how we tackled it; it opens on the services page, with the leadership examples highlighted.

Topic

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise your own feelings and those of others and to handle them well, in yourself and in working together. It shows in behaviour, which is why you can measure it: with ESCI, a 360-degree assessment of twelve competencies.

It has little to do with knowledge.

The manager with the best plan in the department, who talks louder in the meeting when someone has doubts. The colleague who senses exactly when a conversation is turning, and still does nothing with it. None of that has much to do with knowledge or intelligence.

In 1990, Peter Salovey and John Mayer gave it a name: emotional intelligence, the ability to notice feelings in yourself and others and let them guide what you think and do. Daniel Goleman brought it to a wide audience in 1995. Together with Richard Boyatzis, he then worked it out into behaviour that other people can see, and can therefore assess.

That last part is what matters to us. Emotional intelligence is something you do, on a Monday morning, in the meeting and in the corridor afterwards.

The leader’s behaviour becomes the team’s norm.

In 2011, O’Boyle and colleagues brought together the research on emotional intelligence and performance. However you measure it, with a test or with a questionnaire about behaviour, the link with how well people do their jobs shows up every time. And emotional intelligence predicts something that intelligence and personality together don’t yet explain.

In 2008, Koman and Wolff looked at 81 teams. The more emotionally intelligent the team leader, the more habits the team had for how people treat each other and deal with feelings. And those teams performed better. So behaviour at the top trickles down, even when nobody agreed it would.

How we measure it: ESCI

ESCI stands for Emotional and Social Competency Inventory. Boyatzis and Goleman developed it, and Korn Ferry publishes it. According to Boyatzis it is the most widely used measure of emotional intelligence as behaviour. You rate yourself, and your manager, colleagues and direct reports say how often they see the behaviour in you.

ESCI measures twelve competencies, grouped into four clusters.

  • Self-awareness

    Knowing what you feel and what that does to your work. Everything else builds on this.

    • Emotional self-awareness

  • Self-management

    Directing your energy and handling your frustration.

    • Emotional self-control
    • Adaptability
    • Achievement orientation
    • Positive outlook

  • Social awareness

    Sensing what is going on with other people, and how the organisation works.

    • Empathy
    • Organisational awareness

  • Relationship management

    Bringing out the best in others. This is where other people notice it first.

    • Coach and mentor
    • Inspirational leadership
    • Influence
    • Conflict management
    • Teamwork

For individuals

The report puts your own view next to that of the others, by group and by competency, and compares it with a large international benchmark group. Then come the answers per question and what your colleagues wrote in their own words. In the feedback conversation we look at where other people’s view differs from yours, what you recognise and what surprises you. You choose one or two competencies to work on.

Self-awareness

Self-management

Social awareness

Relationship management

An example with made-up scores, redrawn from the competency profile in an ESCI report. The number on the right is the average score from others. Here someone sees themselves as more empathetic and better at handling conflict than their colleagues experience them. That is where the conversation starts.

For teams

If several people from a team take part, there is also a group report. It shows where the team as a whole is strong, which behaviours are seen most and least often, and where managers, colleagues and direct reports see things differently. Nobody can be identified in it. The group report is a good starting point for team coaching: you talk about the team, and nobody has to defend themselves.

How the four perspectives see the team

What the team shows most often

  1. Works towards shared goals4.5
  2. Looks for ways to do the work better4.4
  3. Stays calm when things get busy4.2

What the team shows least often

  1. Discusses disagreement openly2.7
  2. Asks what is really on the other person’s mind3.0
  3. Gives colleagues feedback that helps them move forward3.1
An example with made-up scores, redrawn from the ESCI group report; the behaviours are described in our own words. On conflict management, participants rate themselves far more favourably than their own direct reports do, and discussing disagreement openly scores lowest. That is a conversation you have as a team, without anyone having to defend themselves.

Questions we often get

Is emotional intelligence something you’re born with?

ESCI looks at behaviour, and behaviour can be learned. That is why an assessment only makes sense with a conversation afterwards and a couple of things you are going to practise. If you only read the report, you know more and carry on doing the same.

Why a 360 and not a self-assessment?

A self-assessment measures how you see yourself. ESCI also asks your manager, colleagues and direct reports how often they see the behaviour in you. The gap between those two pictures is usually the most interesting part of the report.

Who sees the results?

The report belongs to the participant, and the feedback conversation is confidential. You decide what you share. Answers from colleagues and direct reports are anonymous; a group too small to stay anonymous is not shown separately. A team report only shows the results of the team as a whole.

From our blog

Short pieces from practice. They open on the blog.

Culture

Agile: where leaders make the difference

Agile and SAFe succeed or fail on leadership, structure and behaviour, and another tool won't fix that. What you as a leader can do differently today.

· 3 min read

Sources

  1. Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211. doi.org/10.2190/DUGG-P24E-52WK-6CDG
  2. Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ. New York: Bantam Books.
  3. Koman, E. S., & Wolff, S. B. (2008). Emotional intelligence competencies in the team and team leader. Journal of Management Development, 27(1), 55–75. doi.org/10.1108/02621710810840767
  4. O’Boyle, E. H., Humphrey, R. H., Pollack, J. M., Hawver, T. H., & Story, P. A. (2011). The relation between emotional intelligence and job performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 32(5), 788–818. doi.org/10.1002/job.714
  5. Boyatzis, R. E. (2018). The behavioral level of emotional intelligence and its measurement. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1438. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01438

ESCI is a Korn Ferry instrument. The model and the reports are © Richard Boyatzis, Daniel Goleman and Korn Ferry.

Other expertise

See how our expertise fits together

How do others see you?

We work with managers and management teams. In a first conversation we look at what you want to develop.

Portrait of Laura Stam