Australian Business Training - Case Studies - Leading with Emotional Intelligence - Increased self awareness and responsibility

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Attitude & Action for Leadership Achievement

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Leading with Emotional Intelligence
Increased self awareness and responsibility

Argent Money * is an international bank that fosters a people culture. With its Australian and New Zealand business growing rapidly, Argent Money wanted to ensure its managers had the skills to help its people achieve their best.

Challenge

Argent Money saw a need for its managers to move towards a coaching culture to get the best of their people. Managers would benefit from developing their abilities more in how to mentor, coach and empower their reports. The managers would become better leaders by improving their emotional intelligence.

The business was at the stage where the addition of a positive coaching culture would help it continue its growth in Australia and New Zealand. Argent Money asked ABT to help develop their managers to bring about the attitudinal and behavioural change required to improve their self management, coaching and leadership skills.

Solution

A coaching style of leadership is often regarded as the new paradigm for management. Coaching focuses on discovering actions that enable and empower people to contribute more fully and productively to the business. Coaching is becoming recognised as a better way to manage employees, especially as the workforce becomes more experienced and educated.

Studies from excellent organisations show that coaching is a significant feature of the management style of successful businesses worldwide. Coaching offers managers a methodology for enhancing the individual or team's current skills. Coaching may be used for any or all management interactions.

To help Argent Money's managers become coaches, ABT first measured their explanatory style. This self-assessment tool looked at how optimistic each participant's thinking was. The rationale for this is that optimistic managers, on average, make better leaders and produce better results. Optimism is a style of thinking that can be developed, such as by realising that bad events are temporary.

ABT designed a two day training workshop tailored to match the needs of Argent Money's managers. The training focused on giving the managers the attitude and tools to coach and support their people. The workshop combined research into coaching strategies and its link to emotional intelligence with practical skills and experience. It aimed to help managers understand their people better, including their motivation.

The training was followed up with coaching which focused on supporting the managers in their new role as coach. This gave managers an opportunity to discuss the integration of their new skills and any performance issues.

Results

As a result of the training, the managers have become better at dealing with people by listening, asking the right questions and empowering people. The managers developed the skills to build the motivation of their teams. They increased their ability to deal with performance issues and negotiate improvements. Their comments following the workshop indicate they have improved their confidence and communication skills. And, they are prepared to deal with problems and difficult tasks immediately, rather than putting them off or ignoring them.

Here are some of their comments:

"The biggest thing I picked up was how to get people to solve their own problems."
"The most important thing is to realise the highest pay-off activity is coaching your people."
"Take a deep breath and analyse my thinking and the problem then move on. The best result I've achieved so far is with a branch manger who had an issue. I asked a lot of questions and listened to him and by my doing this he was able to successfully deal with the issue himself."
"I'm finding it truly relieving to deal with issues straight away and not carry them forward like I used to."
"I've encouraged team participation. The concepts from learned optimism have helped me focus on getting the best out of my people. This is already happening."
"The concepts have provided me with better communication tools to gain more understanding of my people and issues."
"I'm now more effective in getting results to improve overall performance."
"This workshop has delivered one of the best approaches to managing staff."
"I've been more effective in the allocation of my time. I now have more focus on staff direction and I'm more productive."
"By applying the workshop tools I'm able to give more ownership of problems to my staff. This is freeing me up to do more strategic issues."
"I'm now better able to coach my staff and I'm getting them to utilise their own knowledge."

The Evidence

The managers were asked to evaluate their skills before and after the workshop. The graphs below illustrate their perceived level of improvement since the program.

skills comparison 1