TGG STORY PUBLISHED IN OREGON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
After being named the #4 Best Company to Work For in Oregon (medium business category), Oregon Business connected with us to publish an article highlighting The Gunter Group’s story.
We were excited to share our holistic, Non-Negotiables approach to client delivery with Oregon Business and to be highlighted in their magazine alongside the other 2020 winners on the ‘100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon’ list. Congratulations to all these awesome organizations! Read the full story at OregonBusiness.Com to learn more.
TGG RANKS AGAIN AS ONE OF THE FIVE BEST MEDIUM COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN OREGON
A couple months ago we learned that The Gunter Group ranked on the Oregon Business ‘100 Best Companies to Work for in Oregon’ list for the 6th year in a row!
Specific rankings were announced at the annual awards celebration dinner hosted by Oregon Business on March 5, 2020 at the Oregon Convention Center. We are excited to share that we have been recognized as the #4 Best Company to Work For in Oregon – in the medium business category!
Check out the full list on OregonBusiness.Com.
TGG RELEASES NEW COMPANY VIDEO
As part of our recognition as one of the nation’s Best Small Firms to Work For by Consulting Magazine, we put together this short video summarizing our unique, “listen first” approach and showcasing some of the people and values that make The Gunter Group such a rewarding place to work. We are so grateful for our team of talented consultants, the clients we get to serve, and the communities in which we live and work. Together, they create meaningful opportunities to solve problems and grow a thriving business. Special thanks to Magaurn Video Media for their outstanding production work that so beautifully represents The Gunter Group. We look forward to seeing how our firm continues to evolve and grow in the year ahead and remain deeply committed to the mission, values, and people who helped us get where we are today.
CAREERS IN CONSULTING: A RECAP
Last week, The Gunter Group joined a panel of management consultants to speak to a group of Portland State University business students. We owe much of our success to the encouragement of mentors over the years, so we welcome any chance to pay it forward. The future business leaders and problem solvers we met at PSU represented an impressive and thoughtful group of engaged and motivated students. For those unable to attend, we wanted to capture some of the themes and advice from the panel and invite ongoing discussion with anyone considering a career in consulting.
It Depends
The panel’s response to several questions was a resounding, “It depends!” As consultants, we sometimes chuckle at this answer because we share a common challenge of trying to explain what we do when it can be different things from day to day. “It depends” points to one of a consultant’s most essential skills – adaptability. From the solutions we propose and the methodologies we employ to the language we use and the tasks on our to-do list, consultants must be able to think on their feet, read the room, and simultaneously hold theoretical best practices and practical realities in mind at all times.
How can burgeoning consultants develop this seemingly ephemeral skill set? Experience.
Put yourself in situations that stretch your ability to lead a team, resolve conflict, apply data insights, and generally experiment. The world is your laboratory and you needn’t wait until you land your first formal consulting engagement to practice. Principal consultant, Matt Bader, shared how his military and athletic experiences prepared him for consulting more than anything else in his background. Consider hobbies, sports, volunteer work, and other extracurriculars not as boxes to check on a future resume but as playgrounds to gather lessons learned and examples to illustrate your ability to deliver on the job. Perhaps keep a list of these anecdotes and map them to the core competencies and strengths you most want demonstrate and practice talking about the value of these experiences.
Work & Life
The world of consulting is known for at times brutal hours and intense client demands. While the panel confirmed that client delivery is always top priority, they also shared how they approach work as part of a meaningful and enjoyable life.
The notion of “work/life balance” is a bit misleading. Work comprises such a large percent of our adult life; the lucky among us are able to spend those hours in ways we enjoy with a sense of camaraderie that is not separate from but a part of life. Work/life integration is a more useful way to think about any career, especially consulting.
At The Gunter Group, we view our work as vehicles to build great lives for ourselves and our families. Yes, we love to work hard and deliver outstanding results – that’s part of who we are. The opportunity to serve others, solve challenging problems, and see the positive impact of our work in our own community drives us; so too does the ability to pick up the kids, step away for a family emergency, and take that vacation sooner than later.
Over time, the hours will ebb and flow but they always even out. Our ability to sustain our best effort over long periods of time enables us to show up at our best. The cumulative gains of steady, consistent, and sustainable effort are much greater than grinding away without any rest. Like an elite athlete, rest becomes just as, if not more, important than intense training. In our line of work a relaxed and open mindset facilitates creativity, curiosity, and flexibility that fuels our best work.
Most B-schools fail to equip students with the skills or perspective needed to manage their energy and build the mental and physical resilience to sustain decades of work. How you tackle assignments and manage commitments in school builds the habits you’ll bring to the workplace. Practice now how you want to show up for your life and living in alignment with your values. Increasingly, employers like us recognize the value of employees who thrive in this way. They are the colleagues we most enjoy working with, the consultants our clients trust and adore, and the employees who grow into the leaders our business needs tomorrow.
The Dreaded Case Study
Whether part of a class assignment or interview process, several students expressed concern about facing the business cases or whiteboard sessions so notorious in the consulting world. The entire panel unanimously said the most important thing is to remember there is never any one right answer. Case studies reveal how someone thinks and communicates – are they systematic and deliberate or do they struggle to conceptualize a clear process in the midst of ambiguity? Can they adapt to the personalities and balance competing priorities or do they blindly prescribe tools without considering the people who will use them?
One of our non-negotiables at The Gunter Group is “thrives in ambiguity” which often means stepping into apparent chaos and creating order for a client. One of the worst ways to approach a case study is with a one-size-fits-all approach or trying to be the smartest person in the room. It is possible to go through the motions of Agile or PROSCI and get to the end to find that key stakeholders are caught off guard by the end result, sending you back to the beginning and costing a client precious time and money. You might be a genius who proposes an elaborate plan that no one else can understand, let alone implement. Sometimes common sense is the best way to add value.
Think of any scenario as real people who need guidance to solve a problem. How will you know you’re asking the right questions, involving the right people, providing the right level of information at the right time, and marking progress? Even in highly technical environments, the amount of time spent flexing technical skills is relatively small. Success in any arena hinges on the ability to understand and manage people so think like a human being first before turning to anything from a textbook.
We hope these highlights from the panel serve to inspire and prepare some of our future colleagues. We’re always looking for talented people to join our team and welcome the chance to answer questions about our work.
Reach out today if you’re interested in learning more and would like access to the full panel on video recording.
UPCOMING PORTLAND EVENT: APPLYING AGILE TO THE NON-IT PARTS OF YOUR BUSINESS
You love agile. You love the iterative approach to problem-solving. You love the way it empowers your IT teams to find solutions. You wish that you could see the same benefits in other parts of your business, but the problem is that agile seems stuck in the world of developers and technical teams.
Matt Jamison, Tech Services Lead at The Gunter Group, has been thinking about this problem for a few years. In conversations with clients and peers in various industries, Matt has started to break down the principles, roles, ceremonies, and functions of agile into a series of “Whys” that add value in a broader business context. By deconstructing the structures of agile into their purposes, Matt is able to apply aspects of agile to lines of business that fall outside of tech.
Excited to hear more? Join Matt as he explores how these agile concepts offer a fresh approach to building bridges between strategy, processes, and the realization of business goals. Matt provides examples that illustrate how agile can spill over the boundaries of tech into non-IT parts of the business, providing use cases from HR.
Come join the conversation! The event will take place at Puppet on Wednesday, November 20th from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Click here for more details, and to register for the event!
Matt Jamison is an experienced solutions architect with a results-oriented understanding of the intersection between reality and architectural theory. He has the ability to plan, develop, and implement large-scale projects while maintaining impeccable attention to detail. With 20 years of functional information technology experience, Matt has end-to-end IT knowledge from layer 1 networking to application API interaction. An expert in mapping technology solutions to business needs, Matt is also able to conform to required regulations while maintaining IT best practices. Matt’s experience spans multiple industries, including healthcare, telecommunications, and security and software. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect. Outside of work, Matt enjoys the outdoors and all things bike-related.
CELEBRATING OUR VETERANS
Veteran’s Day at The Gunter Group is pretty special. You see, 16% of our current employees are veterans so odds are good we have a front row seat for the incredible skills and experience they bring to their work as management consultants. When we say, “Thank you for your service,” to our friends and colleagues, we could just as easily be referencing their most recent success with a client or how they stepped up to lend a hand with our last project.
If we include military spouses, our percent of military-connected employees jumps to 22%. Several of us, like myself have direct experience as contractors for the military. In my case, I spent a summer living and working on a navy base in Italy years ago, directing programs for military families. Years later I provided career coaching for veterans and consulted for universities on how to tailor support services to meet the unique needs of military-connected students.
When we include all of the above military experience and affiliation, 27% of our organization has direct, first-hand experience with the United States Armed Forces, and that doesn’t include employees who grew up in military families!
This week, three of our veteran employees will join a panel at Portland State University to share how their military experience prepared them for various roles as consultants across multiple industries. At The Gunter Group, we know that diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives make us better as an organization. Hiring talent from less “traditional” consulting backgrounds has always been a priority for us (e.g., I represent one of two former archaeologists among our ranks!), and we have actively recruited veterans from our beginning in 2011.
We’ve learned veterans are uniquely suited for the work we do. From operating on imperfect information and having to improvise to solve a wide range of problems in changing conditions to showing up with the utmost integrity, grounded confidence, and the rest of our non-negotiables, in every situation. Veterans have much to offer the business world and they are among some of our most successful employees.
Part of our motivation for continuing to grow our business is that it allows us to provide opportunities for those who have served to apply all that they’ve learned to work in the civilian world. By reaching out to our local community, mentoring other veterans to translate their military experience, we hope to see more veterans join The Gunter Group. We also promote military-friendly practices among our clients. It’s not only serving those who serve but it’s really good for business.
THE WORLD NEEDS GOOD CHANGE MANAGERS
Ebola broke out in Congo last summer for the 10th time in 43 years. Doctors had a powerful toolkit for fighting the disease, but without change management their efforts would have had little success.
Doctors in Goma Use Change Management to Save Lives
This summer, an outbreak of Ebola raged through the Congo. On July 14th, the first case was diagnosed in Goma, one of the largest cities and transit centers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international public health emergency, and the response was an influx of funds, resources, and health workers.
NPR describes what came next. Citizens of Goma “threw rocks at health workers, suspicious that they were profiting off the response… They barricaded roads; they refused to wash their hands.” This was the same response health workers received in the countryside, but in a city of 2 million the stakes were far higher.
Here’s the thing: in the past couple years, scientists have made significant advances in the treatment and prevention of Ebola. In addition to two new treatments, an experimental vaccine looks to be highly effective. The last outbreak in the Congo was contained in a matter of months. Health workers had all the tools they needed to stop the outbreak, except for cooperation from the people in need of treatment.
Enter change management, stage left. Prosci, an international leader in change management training, lists 7 best practices:
— Mobilize an active and visible executive sponsor
— Dedicate change management resources
— Apply a structured change management approach
— Engage with employees and encourage their participation
— Communicate frequently and openly
— Integrate and engage with project management
— Engage with middle managers
To foster cooperation with the people of Goma, health workers embraced these best practices. “They went deep into the neighborhoods, explaining the disease and the treatments. They talked to leaders. They convinced more than 1,000 people to take an experimental vaccine.” Within months, they were able to control the outbreak in Goma.
With sponsorship by the WHO, health workers were able to dedicate adequate resources to the problem. They then engaged with the community and developed advocates for change. They communicated with citizens, educating them on the disease and the treatments. In doing so, they were able to build momentum and encourage enough people to receive the vaccine.
Health workers used change management to provide life-saving interventions to a community that was resistant to change, potentially saving millions. Change management is well-worth our attention.
Change Management: How Did We Get Here?
The field of change management is young but complex. How did we get here? It will help to briefly travel back in time to understand the foundations of the formalized practices that flourish today.
Rooted in Psychology
Change management has roots in the study of human behavior. The intellectual beginnings trace to the early 1900’s, into the work of the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. When looking at rites of passage in different cultures, Gennep began to notice common behaviors.
Even though he was looking at a variety of different cultures, he noticed that there were three overall states that ran common in the experience of social change. The first state was a “pre-liminal” stage, where the coming change was acknowledged and prepared for by the community.
The middle state was the “liminal” stage, which he defined as a threshold of ambiguity and disorientation. Change managers everywhere will chuckle at the accuracy of adjectives like “ambiguity” and “disorientation” when describing the liminality of change.
The final state in a rite of passage was “post-liminal,” where the transition in status was recognized and normalized in the community. Across cultures and belief systems, Gennep was able to identify these common movements in the human experience of change.
By the mid-20th century, when psychology began to blossom into a robust and complex discipline of study, Gennep’s three states gained popularity. In the 1940’s, Kurt Lewin became a pioneer in social and organizational psychology by turning his attention to understanding change. Lewin borrowed from Gennep’s structure and described a three step process for change: unfreezing, changing, and refreezing.
Business Consulting & Change Management: A Love Story
There was some academic buzz from several sources in the years following Lewin’s work, but no substantial leap from psychology to business had yet been made. This changed in 1982, when a consultant at McKinsey named Julien Phillips published an article in the journal Human Resource Management.
In his article, Phillips introduced a model for organizational change management specifically designed with businesses in mind. His model defines four steps that were intended to build momentum for change within an organization: creating a sense of concern, developing a specific commitment to change, pushing for major change, and reinforcing the new course of action.
In the years following, change management took off. Books were published; articles became more frequent; new models were advanced. Businesses were in need of assistance with change, and consultants pursued thought leadership that would help address this need and grow their business. Peters, Waterman, Kotter, and dozens more developed robust philosophies and methods for change, and organizations bought in and helped the field to grow.
Today, there are as many models for change management as there are consulting organizations. Looking for a 4 step process? Try PDCA. Interested in 5 steps? Try ADKAR. How about a 6 step approach? Try Pulse. Need more? Try Kotter’s 8 Steps, or Prosci’s 9 Steps. There are symposiums and communities of practice such as Prosci and ACMP; and naturally a veritable cornucopia of certifications abound. Change management is so saturated with models and approaches that some even try to push “beyond change management,” whatever that means.
100 Frameworks, 1 Idea
The Gunter Group does not subscribe to any one framework. Our clients are too unique for a single set of steps to be the answer. We proudly proclaim ourselves to be “methodologically agnostic,” much more interested in understanding the organization than blindly peddling a process that fails to fit the people it is meant to help.
That is not to say that we don’t know the methods. Our consultants have expertise in Prosci and ADKAR; we are trained in Six Sigma; we attend local ACMP events. We do not, however, learn a method to become disciples. Rather, we expose ourselves to frameworks and study methodological vocabulary to leverage those aspects of the frameworks that might be helpful for our work. Our clients appreciate a tailored approach that is grounded in the best practices of 100 frameworks.
This approach to consulting reveals something obvious: all change management methods are basically the same. Decades of scholarship and praxis have not changed the core phases of change, and wisdom that dates back a century still lies at the heart of responsible change. There are 3 basic phases in change (before, during, and after), and every change management framework simply iterates on the approach taken within those three phases.
So what runs common throughout all change management? What activities should you keep in mind as you tailor the process to your specific organization? We’ll run through the basics below.
Step 1: Pre-Change
Change is coming. Perhaps it is a changing regulation, a new technology, an upcoming merger, or a poor quarterly report; whatever the reason, you see change on the horizon and understand that preparation should naturally precede. Though the various frameworks approach this preparation differently, three key activities take place during pre-change: analysis, planning, and influencing.
Analysis comes first. Before you can plan for change, you have to understand the people and processes that will be impacted. Who will be your champions, sponsors, and resistors? Helpful tools for this phase include stakeholder matrices, process maps, and change impact assessments. The change manager must also understand the change itself. Without a powerful grasp on the “why” that is causing the change, planning and execution will absolutely fall short.
Plans come next. Change management often occurs somewhere between an intersection of strategy, people, and execution, and planning is the bridge that brings these three elements into alignment. This includes planning for the change itself, communication that will accompany the change, and the training that will make the change possible.
Influencing should follow. ADKAR describes this as fostering awareness and desire. Prosci speaks of sponsors and champions. Others schools of thought suggest using concepts like vision or need, and still others recommend introducing guilt and anxiety. We have found that a cocktail of all these approaches is usually the best way forward.
Step 2: Change
You’ve spent time interviewing stakeholders, mapping processes, and planning training sessions; now it’s time to introduce the change. This is messy, confusing, and difficult for the people impacted so change managers often rely most heavily on a methodology in this phase. However, mid-change is where a generalist approach could be most advantageous, adapting to the ongoing needs of the situation. There are four activities that always occur in any well-managed change approach: communication, training, changing, and reinforcement.
The most important activity surrounding change is communication. This is where you lean heavily on the results of your analyses. You know who needs communication, what they need to hear, and how it will affect their work flow. Armed with this information, you can plan accordingly, communicating the upcoming movements to the right people, early and often.
Another helpful activity is training. This often goes hand-in-hand with communication, and is best when designed from the viewpoint of those impacted. Recent developments of tools such as Human Centered Design help maximize the value of training.
At a certain point, the change will happen. Kotter recommends an approach of small-slicing the change to create short term wins, but often the change manager is not the one driving the project timeline. When it comes to go-lives, change managers serve a thousand roles. They become SME’s for elements of the change impact; they serve as blockers attempting to remove obstacles from stakeholders; they act as cheerleaders or bulldogs, whatever is called for in the moment.
As change occurs, another important activity is reinforcement. This activity truly begins in pre-change and extends through the end of post-change, but it becomes extremely important in the midst of the change. There are approaches coming out of organizational psychology that can be helpful here, such as Vroom’s Theory of Motivation, McClellan’s Theory of Three Needs, or McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y.
Step 3: Post-Change
Follow-through is a must. As Gennep would say: the new status must be confirmed and the change must be reincorporated as the new norm. This is done a little differently in each framework, but necessary activities include reinforcement and reanalysis.
As said above, reinforcement is heavily featured in post-change activities. The goal is longevity, driving the change through ongoing champions and dwindling resistance. Success is celebrated, momentum is reinforced, and improvements are consolidated. Through these activities, the new order is anchored in behavior.
One often-forgotten activity that takes place after the change occurs is reanalysis. Throughout this whole process, you’ve generated a mountain of information, from stakeholder input to process metrics. Current-state assessments performed before, during, and after the change are a great way to analyze that information, evaluating the effect of the change.
Let’s go back to Ebola in Goma. Upon review, we can find the three stages of change management in this case study. In advance of providing saving care, health workers analyzed the neighborhoods they would need to enter, planned ways to connect people with treatments, and influenced communities by winning over their leaders. They communicated the need and effect of the cure, trained communities to embrace treatment through a successful pilot of an experimental vaccine, and built momentum for changing attitudes. After change began to take effect, their efforts were reinforced by positive clinical outcomes and they reanalyzed future need for treatment with ongoing screenings.
Change management is the study of human behavior. Human beings hate change, yet change is unavoidable. As professionals in change management, we bring a people-centered approach to our work. This is undeniably good for business, as evidenced by a flourishing market of change management consultants and frameworks. But often the stakes of change management are higher than the bottom line, and the WHO’s heroic efforts in Goma are a testament to that.
THE ADVENTURES OF A GENERALIST
Birds of a feather flock together.
Like seeks like.
You are known by the company you keep.
How do sayings like these burn themselves into our brains? It helps that they’re short and pithy, but I don’t think that’s the only reason. Perhaps a statement like “birds of a feather” has power because it’s true. And what truth lies beneath the cliches above? It matters who your friends are.
There’s plenty of science to back this up. A number of studies expand on the concept of homophily (coming from the Greek for “love of what’s similar”). Study after study shows that we seek out, consciously or subconsciously, people who are like us. And even when we differ from those around us, we start to mold our actions to be more like them. The people we spend our time with will influence our opinions, speech, music preferences, and even our health.
All these studies point in one direction: the people around you literally help shape you into the person you are, and the person you will be tomorrow.
It really does matter who your friends are.
Looking at how a person spends their time will tell you a lot about that person. If I spend my evenings on hiking trails and in softball leagues, you would call me an athlete. If I get home from work most days and sit down at the piano for several hours of practice, you would call me a musician. If I head to the mountains every weekend with skis strapped to the top of my car, you would describe me as an avid skier.
But what if I do all of these things? What if I spend my evenings and weekends doing all sorts of activities that don’t have very much in common? What would you call me in that case?
You can call me a generalist.
A Generalist Fits Everything Into a Day’s Work
At TGG, we’re generalists. Our consultants come from different backgrounds: some come from healthcare or finance, others come straight from the military or academia. My own background includes a 6 year chunk of time in the seminary. Every consultant at TGG has a unique background, and we bring these backgrounds to our work, no matter the client or industry.
TGG also houses a diverse set of perspectives and approaches to business environments. We aren’t just project managers or data analysts; we do these things with a holistic perspective, one that spans industries, business cycles, and clients.
Here’s an example. A client in healthcare might hire us to perform the work of a business analyst, collecting requirements and mapping processes for a new service offering. The person we place, however, is never just a business analyst. We provide someone who also has experience in change management or project delivery. The client benefits from having a generalist instead of a specialist, because the result (such as requirements gathering, in our example) is better tailored toward successful delivery. We perform work within context, bringing together lessons we have learned in a variety of environments to maximize the value of our present work.
Generalists excel in all environments without having to master them. At TGG, we cultivate individuals who can thrive in ambiguity, rather than in any one particular familiar system. And the way we spend our time after the work day has a big effect on how we do that well.
A Generalist Networks Broadly
You can tell a generalist by the shape of their calendar. As a case study, let’s take a quick look at mine.
Over the past few weeks, my calendar shows a rather adventurous exploration of topics. This is the story of a generalist. Outside of working hours, I’ve had a number of networking events crammed into the margins. Here are a few examples:
A few weeks ago, I attended a lecture on artificial intelligence in medicine. My colleagues and I have recently been working on articulating the impact of AI on the future of business, and were excited for the chance to reflect on advances in AI and machine learning in the healthcare industry.
A week later, you could find me drinking coffee with change managers and discussing ways to use change management as a tool to better serve strategic planning by business leaders. Consultants in our People Practice have recently been synthesizing varying perspectives on change management to identify the key phases and activities that all good change management engagements must include (look out for a thought leadership piece on our blog soon!). This was a great chance for us to carry this conversation into a community of change management practitioners.
A few days after that, I spent my evening at a talk by Kevin Ciccotti on the topic of how good leadership inspires good work. After Kevin finished speaking, I sat at a table with professional mentors, small business leaders, product owners, and project managers and discussed how we could put Kevin’s words into practice in our various industries and positions. Conversations like this spill into all the work that I do as a TGG consultant.
Two days later, I swung by an early morning roundtable discussion on project management in manufacturing environments. Everyone in the room had experience leading projects, and we went around the room for an hour asking questions and sharing advice about how to make projects better. At TGG we recently created an internal bank of resources to help our consultants who are managing projects; roundtable discussions like these are a good way for us to test drive our resources with a group of experienced practitioners.
Artificial intelligence. Change management. Strategic planning. Reflecting on Leadership. Project management. Why all these different things in one month? Because that’s just what we do at TGG. We specialize in quickly immersing ourselves into new contexts, bringing in a new perspective that adds value to the system.
Our time inside and outside of the work day is an adventure. We get to learn about a hundred different topics and thrill at the chance to make connections between them. This enables us to bring a broad, integrated perspective to our work.
At TGG our success comes from schedules like mine. It matters who you talk to. As generalists we talk to everyone. Spending our time like this helps to form us–speaking with such a wide array of professionals and therefore, helps shape who we are.
Interested in learning more about the life of a generalist? Check out this book on the subject. Want to hear more about how our generalist approach benefits our clients? Check out a couple case studies of how we successfully bring a broad perspective to our clients’ challenges.
OUR NON-NEGOTIABLES: EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
At The Gunter Group, the leadership traits and characteristics that define us are our Non-Negotiables: Collaborative, Integrity, Intellectual Curiosity, Thrives in Ambiguity, Emotional Intelligence, and Grounded Confidence. These traits and characteristics guide us every day in our interactions with clients, each other, and our community.
At the Gunter Group, we consider EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, or “EQ,” essential for understanding and solving complex problems. In short, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage emotions in yourself and others. For us, it’s about more than accurately reading and adapting to social cues, although this is an important part of EQ. It’s pulling from the depths of our intelligence, experience, and heart to show up fully for ourselves, each other, and our clients. It’s an approach that not only feels great but gets the best possible results.
While emotional intelligence is often referred to as a “soft” skill, we think of it as quite a hard one – both in terms of tangible value and difficulty to master. I recall taking an EQ assessment early in my career for a job in the hospitality industry. What I thought of as sophisticated and mature responses at the time I now think of as cringeworthy. “Where was my self-awareness?!?” I think now, after gaining much experience and insight in the years since. It certainly didn’t come easily or overnight. I’ve learned that other skills can be taught, and as consultants we’re accustomed to a steep learning curve, but EQ requires serious commitment to truly master and cannot be built overnight, hence why it is one of the most important traits we look for when growing our team.
As stewards of our client relationships, our consultants must demonstrate the highest degree of emotional intelligence. With this in place, we can trust them to assess and respond to situations appropriately, enlist support as needed, persevere through challenges, and moderate their own impulses, especially during times of stress. Exceptional EQ also means being aware of potential burnout, building individual resilience, and integrating work into a fulfilling and healthy life. When our consultants thrive in and out of the office, they deliver outstanding value for the long haul.
Furthermore, emotional intelligence is essential for our other five non-negotiables, enabling and amplifying our most important traits. For example:
— Self-awareness, a component of EQ, keeps the ego in check (grounded confidence).
— We can sense when someone feels unheard or steamrolled and adjust accordingly to cultivate trust within a group (collaboration).
— Connecting to our own emotions keeps us rooted in a strong moral compass (integrity).
— Giving, receiving, and integrating feedback makes continuous learning and improvement possible (intellectual curiosity).
— High EQ people are better able to maintain optimism and intrinsic motivation in the face of uncertainty and rapid change (thrives in ambiguity).
Research shows that emotional intelligence in the workplace helps establish the psychological safety proven to increase group intelligence which then drives innovation. As one of our non-negotiables, EQ enables us to challenge the status quo and deliver success without pushing too hard or coming in like a bull in a china shop.
Finally, when we enter a new engagement, understanding perceptions is crucial. I’ve been on the other side, when your company brings in an “outsider.” It can feel like a stranger who knows nothing about you or your work telling you how to do your job. We understand a degree of skepticism or even resistance to partnering outside your organization. Our clients have tremendous ownership and expertise – they are right to be protective of their work! It’s from a place of empathy and self-awareness that we navigate the at times tricky role of “third party” to eventually become true partners and trusted advisors. With emotional intelligence as a cornerstone, we know from experience that our non-negotiables will always lead to the best possible outcome for everyone.