Looking Up at The Illusion of Power

Bottom line: Your coaching clients tend to over-estimate the power of their superiors. Now the details. And why it matters. Think about the comments your coaching clients make about their bosses or their CEOs. My guess is that the ratio of complaints to positives is high. In other words, your clients are more likely to talk about their bosses’ failures than what their bosses have done well. You are likely to hear comments that begin: “If I were in that job, I would . . .” But if they ever do get in that job, they are likely to bump into constraints on power that are not always evident to others. We see this most dramatically with the President of the United States (POTUS). Candidates for that office are full of statements that begin, “And when I am President, I promise that I’ll . . .” George Bush (the first)…

The Secret to EQ Workshop Success

Workshops can be a boon or a fatal error. In this post, we’ll look at how to ensure that your workshops succeed, whether you are the presenter or the person in your organization who is charged with providing effective development.  First, some history: Daniel Goleman’s first book on EQ, published in 1995, created a lot of excitement. Before long, every consultant with a pulse had developed an EQ workshop. Companies bought them by the truck load.  Just one teeny tiny little problem. Almost no one’s EQ improved in response to these workshops. Companies were investing billions, with nothing to show for it.  Why? The workshop model can work well for intellectual mastery, but not behavioral mastery, especially mastery of soft skills like EQ. So those early workshops probably did an excellent job of introducing the concept of EQ, and maybe even convincing people that it would be great to have…