Dr. Relly Nadler: Today we are sharing with you a special encore of our interview with David Cory from July of 2012. He is the President and Founder of Emotional Intelligence Training Company. We’ll be talking about some of the training that he has done in a variety of places, all around the world.
His company is based in Canada and he has delivered emotional intelligence leadership courses in Dubai, United Arab Emirate, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, London, United Kingdom, Port of Spain, Trinidad, Kingdom of Bruni, and Bahrain, Singapore, Shanghai, China, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Logos, Nigeria, and all over North America. The list goes on and on.
He really has a unique view on taking emotional intelligence and really working with populations who may not be as familiar with it. We’ll talk with him about what seems to work and some things that he has really noticed.
He is a leadership performance consultant specializing in individual and organizational performance improvement. He has a Masters of Arts degree in adult education and is a certified trainer in the emotional intelligence, EQi 2.0 with MHS and is an international expert in integrating EI and leadership development.
He is often a requested keynote speaker at conferences, the World HR Conference in Singapore, Bruni, Bahrain, and Kuala Lumpur, and many of the other professional associations, SHRM, the HR Group, and ICF (International Coaching Federation), on the topic of emotional intelligence.
We are going to take a glimpse of the global EI through David’s eyes. David, welcome to the call!
David Cory: Thank you very much. It’s great to be here, thanks for having me on.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Just a little bit more about you. David’s expertise lies in many areas: assessment of learning needs, and able to design and deliver customized, performance improvement interventions, including the development of personal and interpersonal; leadership skills, presentation skills, team effectiveness, and also psychometric assessments for recruiting, screening, employee development. He has done facilitating team building and strategic planning sessions, conference and meeting keynotes and executive coaching.
David and I met years ago at one of the emotional intelligence conferences that Mental Health Systems put on. We were both presenters and this was maybe 3-4 years ago in Chicago. David’s company actually sponsored one of the first EQ conferences in 2006, which brought together EQ experts including Dr. Reuven Bar-On, who we have also had on our show, who was really the creator of the EQi 2.0 and then earlier this year we also had Dr. David Stein, the President of MHS.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: David, the one thing we always ask all of our participants is who most influenced your thinking and who you have become in your career today?
David Cory: Well, Cathy, I can think of two individuals. One was the best boss that I ever had. One of the exercises that we do in our training sessions is that we ask people to think of the best boss they ever had, and what that person was like. The best boss I ever had was a guy who was extremely fair. You know when you’ve got a boss, a leader who is just fair with every decision he or she makes, and it is just that you have that sense of fairness that you are going to be treated with equality and with a sense of equity.
The other thing that he did that was really great was is he was really cool under pressure. Things would be falling down around us, absolute chaos and he was so cool and that just really inspired a sense of confidence and that we could deal with anything when we work together. That was the kind of leader that he was. That was really inspiring for me. I use that reference a lot in my training sessions. He was just one of those guys that you wanted to be more like.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: You are so lucky.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Is there another person that was a great influence?
David Cory: There was another one. This was a guy who was a leader of workplace training and really taught me how to conduct workplace training. One of the most significant things he imparted to me was to see things from the participant’s side. As an instructor, as a facilitator, we often are looking at how we are going to structure our training for maximum effect, for maximum learning, and we don’t always think about the participant experience, and he really taught me that.
It was hey, when a manager comes to a training session, what is that person expecting to see and how. He taught me about the importance of having materials at really high standards. The venue has to be a really top-notch venue and just to do things right and do things at the highest level.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: It sounds like doing things right and also doing things well. It’s so important these days because what we would think would be right doesn’t necessarily come from what we might call command and control, or command climate, as we like to say sometimes in the military. But it comes from doing things well because they are good for everyone.
David Cory: Yes.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Let’s ask a couple of questions just about first, how did you get interested in emotional intelligence? You have been doing this for quite a while. Maybe just give us a little bit of your background and how you got into EI.
David Cory: I don’t know if you remember Zinger Miller, the training company. They had this fantastic leadership training that was designed by Ph.D’s in organizational behavior, and it was wonderful training. I was trained as a Zinger Miller facilitator. I was going into companies and I was delivering training that had been created by other people, and it was excellent training and we had some great video clips that we would show with professional actors who were acting out various business scenarios.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Right, I remember this. I used to be a Zinger Miller trainer when I was with Accenture. This is fascinating.
David Cory: Absolutely, great stuff. But what people would tell me that was really going on in the company; they would tell me at coffee breaks and at lunchtime. They would talk about the difficulties in dealing with certain people. They would talk about the difficulties in dealing with certain bosses and manager who were more that command climate that you were talking about, Cathy, those command, and control autocratic leaders who would try to enforce their will.
The problem with command and control, as you both know, is that it doesn’t feel good. These people would talk about how it felt to be in this command and control environment where they really just wanted to have a voice. They wanted to have a say and to be included. They wanted to participate in the creation of the work product.
They weren’t allowed to do that. We didn’t have any Zinger Miller training for that. We had some that might have been close, that might have helped with that, like perhaps conflict resolution, but still, it didn’t address the power differential. There were a lot of things that that didn’t come up.
When I went to a conference and I went to a breakout session on emotional intelligence in 1997, that’s when it hit me that that is what I really wanted to focus on. The other thing that came out around the same time was an article by Warren Bennis called The Billion Dollar Mistake. What Warren Bennis was talking about in that Billion Dollar Mistake article was the idea that we assume that manager has basic personal and interpersonal skills before they come into those leadership training sessions. As both of you know, that’s not always the case. We have such a wide variety of personal and interpersonal skills in our North American adult population, that we can’t assume that people have a solid foundation of basic personal and interpersonal skills.
That’s what emotional intelligence addresses really well. We have got this scientific way of addressing that and it is really important to focus on having a solid foundation first before you build on other skills.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: I couldn’t agree with you more, and I think one of the things that you just highlighted for many of our listeners is they have lived in environments that have not been what we would call optimizing their skills and their talents because someone has been too directive and doesn’t understand that if you don’t treat people like whole, happy, resources as my friend and President of the ICF Southern Arizona Chapter says, you are not going to ever get the results that you want from these folks and you will always be delegating and you are causing kind of a loop there, of that kind of behavior because you are never going to let people grow.
Listen to the entire interview, above.
Relly
