Background:

MBDA is a multi-national aerospace and defence group with over 11,000 employees working together across Europe. This multi-cultural working means relationship building is hugely important to the success of their projects and business. So, the HR team wanted to ensure that their people managers, who are often managing multi-cultural and multi-location employees, were equipped with the right skills to manage these challenges.

MBDA asked us to create a practical and relevant 2-day Emotional Intelligence programme that would highlight individual’s strengths and provide them with tools to help them develop and enhance their skills and abilities in this area. This now runs both face-to-face and virtually. We consulted with Linda Vijender, HR Advisor for MBDA, to ensure that the content we created would meet the objectives of the business and the attendees. It was very important that the course was practical, that attendees could see the everyday relevance of Emotional Intelligence (EI). It was also crucial that attendees left with the knowledge of how to apply their EI, to develop it and get the best from it with pragmatic tools and techniques.

What we did:

Designed and delivered a 2-day Emotional Intelligence for Managers course including the MSCEIT (Emotional Intelligence test) for each attendee.

Attendees were asked to complete the MSCEIT in advance of the course. This online test measures their individual skill in the 4 areas of the EI ability model and produces a 40-page personalised report of their results. The reports were then analysed by Fiona Doran-Smith, our advanced qualified MSCEIT practitioner. The 2-day course covered how to use Emotional Intelligence to aid their job performance, people management, wellbeing, relationship building skills and develop a positive working atmosphere. Referring to their own personalised MSCEIT report attendees explored each area of the ability model, identifying their own strengths and areas for development and compiling an action plan. By doing this, with our EI expert on hand to provide insight and guidance, they were able to gain valuable understanding into their own level of EI and how they can use, maintain, and improve it.

The course was highly practical and pragmatic, allowing the attendees to clearly see how EI can be used at work as well as understanding the theory and practising the skills during the session. The course has recently been adapted and is now attended by all levels within the business not just managers.

Outcome and feedback:

The sessions continue to run both face to face and virtually and have been expanded to include non-people managers. Feedback has been very positive and now we have also supplied other EI sessions to different areas of the business including a senior leadership team and the procurement team.

Linda Vijender says: “We really value Fiona’s professionalism in terms of her knowledge of EI and in how she work with us as a stakeholder. She listens attentively, identifies the key points and is very easy to work with. Fiona is flexible and open to our ideas and feedback to tailor solutions to our requirements. Feedback from the delegates is always complimentary about Fiona’s knowledge on EI and they value her practical approach which helps them identify areas to improve and how to. The delegates I have spoken to all rated the course contentand Fiona highly.”