Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

20 The Cavalry Isn’t Coming

Caroline Stokes

Caroline Stokes is the CEO of FORWARD, author of Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company (Entrepreneur Press, 2019), and podcast host of The Emotionally Intelligent Recruiter. She is an award-winning leadership coach, partnering with global teams and leaders throughout their career and leadership lifecycle.

Here’s how to become an internal evangelist for creating an emotionally intelligent workplace.

I first met Scott, a program director in a satellite office of one of the world’s most valuable US public companies, when I was invited to discuss emotional intelligence with him and his team. As I often do at the outset of large-scale coaching engagements, I took the team through the results of their workplace EQ (emotional quotient) diagnostic. It is a tool I created to enable organizations to assess their overall emotional intelligence level and see how they need to evolve to acquire and retain “unicorns” – those key hires who will help a company stay resilient and drive growth.

We wanted to find out: was Scott’s company already a “unicorn magnet,” demonstrating advanced emotional intelligence in the workplace? Was it on the verge of becoming one? Or was the company just getting its bearings and only now learning what it means to be an emotionally intelligent organization? The results would initiate a year of powerful, wide-ranging work with Scott and his team.

Using the EQ diagnostic, ...