Frequently Asked Questions

During a recession or an otherwise shaky economic climate, when the mantra of “do more with less” becomes more prevalent, it’s increasingly important to develop more emotionally intelligent employees and create a more emotionally intelligent corporate culture. Why? Because studies show that emotionally intelligent employees have higher levels of productivity. (Conversely, and not surprisingly, a soul-deadening corporate environment with poor emotional intelligence – poor managers, lack of constructive communication, etc. – does not allow employees to show up and do their best work.)

It’s also especially important for organizations to support their high-performing employees during an economic downturn – and emotional intelligence skill-building is an effective way to help executives better communicate with and retain their best employees and ensure they’ll continue to do their best work during and after an organizational challenge or transition.

Overall, organizations that adopt an emotionally intelligent workplace are inoculating themselves to withstand an economic downturn and strategically positioning themselves to thrive when there’s an eventual upturn. When the market gets bad, an organization with an emotionally intelligent culture can better manage transitions – including layoffs – and even increase productivity during rocky times. When the market improves, the emotionally intelligent organization can successfully retain its best employees because it has earned their loyalty.

When Genos works with an organization to improve its emotional intelligence, the organization begins to transform in powerful ways. For example, employee satisfaction increases, sales performance improves, customer service is enhanced, and employee retention, engagement, and productivity increase – all of which contributes to a significant return on investment.

There are myriad ways to measure ROI, and the approach we take depends on what strategic business objective our client is trying to achieve. For example, Genos works with clients who want to improve their sales performance or employee satisfaction and engagement, and those areas are relatively easy to measure. Other areas, like leadership and management skills or employee retention, may be less straightforward to measure, but there is a tremendous ROI to be realized by improving an organization’s ability to attract and retain top talent, because the cost of replacing an employee is approximately two and a half times their annual salary.

On average, Genos generally creates a 20 percent increase in tangible, positive emotionally intelligent behaviors on the job. This in turn impacts the bottom line, because it correlates to an increase in areas such as employee engagement and satisfaction, sales effectiveness, and customer service. Moreover, because emotional intelligence is an important determinant of a high performer, improving emotional intelligence in the workplace can help an organization achieve a valuable ROI by enabling its employees to improve their productivity and add significantly more value to their organizations. The bottom line is this: Corporate America now realizes there are real costs to neglecting workplace emotional intelligence and employees’ emotional well-being – costs due to absenteeism, turnover, employee error, healthcare, etc. – so there has been a loud wake-up call to manage employees differently. Organizations are acutely aware of the need to improve interpersonal relations at work, and are now realizing the benefits of using emotional intelligence to do so.

In summary, someone with exceptional people skills is:

• Highly self-aware
• Adept at expressing how they feel
• Able to effectively read other people
• Skilled at managing their own emotions
• Open to receiving feedback and capable of acting on it constructively
• Effective at lifting team morale, supporting others through adversity, and finding the positive in challenging situations
• Enjoyable to be around

Genos helps develop exceptional people skills by ensuring that we fully understand our customers’ business need and strategy, and then designing a program that will help them achieve their objectives.

Genos works with individuals, teams, and organizations to improve their people skills and emotional intelligence – using a combination of assessment, one-on-one coaching, small group work, and other strategies as required. Genos currently provides a suite of emotional intelligence–based products and methodologies, such as assessment and debrief reports, coaching methodologies, workshop agenda and workbooks, and EI-based human capital development strategies.

Emotional intelligence is an emerging construct, and as academic research into its structure continues to grow, Genos will continue to add to its product portfolio.

Genos claims: “One of the great benefits of emotional intelligence is that everyone can actively enhance it within themselves with remarkable results.” Is this really possible? Aren’t some people so annoying that they are simply beyond help?

Genos is teaching emotional skills – skills that can be learned – so the good news is there are very few people who are completely beyond help. Of course, there must be some intrinsic motivation to change – some pain that an individual, team, or organization is experiencing that is causing them to reflect on how individual or group behavior may be impeding the ability to be successful. In other words, if someone has a lot of success by being a sharp-elbowed jerk in business, there’s no intrinsic motivation to change and they probably won’t. However, if someone has made a lifelong habit of not managing interpersonal relationships particularly well, and is now facing significant turnover in their team, the possibility of losing out on a promotion because feedback suggests they are a poor leader, and their business productivity is suffering, then there is some intrinsic motivation to change and improve emotional behaviors – and that’s when Genos can help.

Organizations that derive the best results from working Genos are those with business-savvy CEOs with a genuine desire to develop exceptional people skills in their workforce. Emotionally intelligent people tend to be running progressive, highly successful companies – like Google and Microsoft, for example – and tend to place a high value on having other emotionally intelligent people in leadership positions throughout their organizations. In addition, organizations will derive the greatest benefit when there is widespread stakeholder buy-in and commitment to improving emotional intelligence and achieving strategic business outcomes as a result.

Conversely, organizations run by authoritarian CEOs and/or filled with toxic people with low emotional intelligence are less likely to derive success from working with Genos, especially if they fail to take the necessary steps to lay the foundation for success with our products.

Some of the factors that will help determine whether an organization will succeed at improving emotional intelligence and achieving a demonstrable ROI include:

• Establishing a clear link between the Genos EI improvement program and the organization’s business strategy and needs
• Strong buy-in and commitment from executives
• Participants taking clear ownership of the program and organization leaders playing a hands-on role
• Minimal competing learning initiatives
• Solid internal HR support, specific roles and responsibilities, clear goals, and well-managed expectations

Genos EI Assessment Scale is an inventory that indexes the way people typically think, feel, and act with emotions at work, according to our empirically based seven-factor model of emotional intelligence. The scale provides individuals with a psychometrically sound assessment of their general workplace emotional intelligence according to seven sub-scale scores. The scale consists of a balanced number of positively and negatively phrased items that help determine inconsistent response patterns and illogical responding.

The Genos EI Assessment Scale demonstrates high internal consistency for each of its seven factors; shows manifold positive inter-correlations between each factor that is consistent with the theoretical model of EI; demonstrates incremental validity over and above other psychological constructs, such as IQ and personality; and correlates significantly and meaningfully with indices of job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

The Genos EI Assessment Scale is the most user-friendly and interpretable measure of EI available. Compared to other measures of EI, notably the Bar-On EQ-i and the Emotional Competency Inventory (ECI), the Genos EI Assessment Scale has fewer dimensions with more items assessing each dimension. This results in the most in-depth assessment of an individual’s EI at work.

The seven skills are Emotional Self-Awareness, Emotional Expression, Emotional Awareness of Others, Emotional Reasoning, Emotional Self-Management, Emotional Management of Others, and Emotional Self-Control. The Genos EI Accreditation Program provides substantial information regarding the assessment and development of each of these seven skills.