EI and ROI

In this article, we will address the business case for EI with two specific case studies from the Genos archives, and then we will provide you with additional resources that document the economic value of EI development as seen by other companies around the world.

Our first example is from a leadership development program with 35 senior executives at a large retail company. The process included a pre-and post- program EI assessment, one full-day and two half-day workshops, and 9 individual one-on-one coaching sessions, for a total of 34 hours of time invested per individual over the 3 month program. The chart below illustrates the before and after scores on the EI assessments, and please remember, these are the averaged scores for the entire group, all participants.

Clearly there was a measurable increase in emotional intelligence across the board, but what does that really mean for you and your company? How does that translate into a recognizable ROI?

The Genos EI assessment is a complete 360, so each of the executive participants had 10 raters, for a total of 350 additional staff members providing feedback throughout the program.

After the EI development program was completed, that same rater population also completed a customized leadership evaluation designed to assess their managers' improvements in those leadership qualities that were the original corporate objectives for the program. Here's what the raters had to say:

These results trigger some very important questions. In your company, what would be the economic value for:

Here's another example from the Genos archives. This particular project was with 10 senior financial executives, and the core objectives were cultural change, team and leadership development. As in the previous example, there were pre-and post-assessments, a couple of group sessions and in this case, 7 one-on-one coaching sessions that included:

Here are the post-project EI assessment results as reported by the rater population for this group:

As you can see, the raters report significant improvements in emotionally intelligent behaviors across the board. Again, what does that translate to in terms of the company's goals and objectives for the project?

Here are the results of the customized leadership survey after the project was completed. This is direct feedback from the rater population.

As in the previous example, these results trigger some very important questions. In your company, what would be the economic value for:

The same questions I asked before apply here. What would those kinds of improvements mean to your bottom line? What would the impact be on your company's absenteeism rate, or on your retention rate? What effect might that have on workplace satisfaction and contentment for all your staff? What do you suppose would happen to stress levels?

There is an interesting postscript to this particular case. This client company has 40,000 employees and is heavily unionized. About halfway through the project, the leadership team handed down a decision that caused a company-wide strike.

At the time this decision was reached, about half the leadership team had just completed the decision-making section of the Genos EI development program. In those divisions where the managers had done this work, there were 50% fewer staff who went out on strike, as compared to those divisions where the leaders had not taken the program.

This is a classic example of how emotionally intelligent behaviors, and in this case specifically, decision-making and communication, can have a profound impact on the outcomes of our decisions in the workplace.

If you are looking for ROI information related to Emotional Intelligence, there are two other documents I would recommend. The first was compiled and written by Cary Cherniss of Rutgers University and the EI Consortium. The title is "The Business Case for EI" and it's a list of 19 examples of EI projects and outcomes. You can either download the PDF from our site, CarmineLeo.com, or you can download the original from the EI Consortium web site:

The second is a 40 page research paper written by Lyle Spencer for the recent book edited by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, "The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace". Spencer's research paper is Chapter 4 in the book, but it is also available as a PDF from here.

would like to make one last point here. Throughout his research, Spencer defines superior performance as an improvement of one standard deviation above the mean. In our corporate EI development and executive coaching projects, using the Genos EI model, we consistently see performance improvements as high as 3 standard deviations above the mean.

What if your executive team were working at a performance level that was 3 standard deviations above the mean? What impact would that have on your company's bottom line?

Graphic images in this article provided by ©2002 ©2005 Genos Pty Ltd. Used with permission.