As usual, when I run these sessions, the issue with which nearly all the practitioners struggle, irrespective of sector, is how on earth they can persuade managers to manage in the emotionally intelligent way that is now generally accepted – by HR people at least – to be the key to achieving a highly engaged and high-performing workforce.
I heard the all too familiar stories of the managers who are technically proficient, but selectively deaf to any suggestion that they might take their people management responsibilities seriously.
Also, the tales of senior staff members who aren't interested in upsetting their best technocrats by demanding that they appraise their staff properly, or even stop shouting at them.
Interestingly, the only participant whose seniors really seemed to get it works in the Middle East for a petroleum company that is descended from Shell, that early pioneer of organisational development. He talked about how important relationships are seen within his company.
Later on, I went to a networking event and listened to two women, both working for high profile executive search companies, swapping notes about how frequently they deal with what one described as "alpha males who are highly competitive and without a teamworking bone in their body". The other added that she had dealt with many females who were just as bad, if not worse.
The next evening I went to see a talk by Peter Cheese of the CIPD on the future for HR. He spoke very engagingly about how CEOs and finance directors are now starting to get how important culture, leadership and values are to the success of organisations.
The concept of left and right brain thinking also came up during his talk. In the Q&A session, I asked how he saw the following paradox playing out: line and senior managers need to be universally and consistently emotionally intelligent and yet all the evidence suggests that at least half the managers out there are predominantly right-brained and have a very strong inclination to focus on tasks rather than people.
His response was that he doesn't believe that people aren't capable of developing what he described as their 'EI muscle', although he added that this needs to start much earlier on than has been the case, starting with school.
Personally, I think there is a major paradox here and that it's something of a holy grail to imagine that engaging leadership will ever become the majority experience of people being managed in the workplace.
However, I've also been struck by the idea that we try to teach people leadership skills far too late in their careers. With this in mind, I developed a one-day leadership module for frontline workers whose job it is to support homeless people to change their lives. It's a day that involves analysing what engaging leadership looks like and self-reflection using various tools and exercises to assess emotional intelligence and preferred leadership styles.
Every time I've delivered this it has been more openly received and, therefore, rewarding than when I've done something very similar for groups of senior managers who have managed to get by without such self-reflection for their entire careers and clearly find it profoundly uncomfortable to start learning new tricks.
So, I would most enthusiastically endorse the view that if we are to have a serious chance of promoting better leadership and greater employee engagement, we have to catch people before they get promoted to positions where lack of awareness or capability in these areas poses a major hazard to others.
Helen Giles is HR director of Broadway Homelessness and Support and managing director of Broadway's real people HR consultancy
