COMING SOON
Turn “they have a people problem” into something you can actually work on.
Almost every people difficulty gets diagnosed as attitude, and almost none of them are. This profile separates what someone notices from what they do about it and from how it lands on others — so the problem stops being a judgement about the person and becomes a specific competency, which is the only version of it anybody can develop.
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Emotional and Social Intelligence is in development. Register your interest and we’ll tell you the day it opens — no other mail.
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Treated here as a set of learnable competencies rather than a single trait — because a trait tells you who somebody is, and a competency tells you what to work on. There are 21 across 4 quadrants, 10 personal and 11 social. The split matters: the two halves fail in different ways and are developed by different means, so knowing which half a difficulty sits in already narrows the remedy.
Personal competence. Knowing what is happening in you as it happens — naming a feeling while you are still in it, tracing it to what set it off, and holding a realistic account of your own limits.
Personal competence. What you do with what you notice — holding a reaction long enough to choose it, staying effective when conditions change, and sustaining effort without external pressure.
Social competence. Reading people and situations accurately — what someone is feeling before they say it, and the informal influence and unspoken rules of the wider organisation.
Social competence. What you do with people and groups — persuading, handling disagreement, developing others, and building relationships that outlast the immediate need.
Personal competence — three competencies.
Emotional Self Awareness
You register what you are feeling while it is still happening, and can usually trace it back to what set it off.
Emotional Self Assessment
You hold a realistic account of what you are good at and where you run out of road, and can take hard feedback without dismissing it.
Self Confidence
You back your own judgement without needing the room to agree first, and can stay in an unpopular position while it is examined.
Personal competence — seven competencies.
Self Control
Strong feeling does not automatically become action. You can hold a reaction long enough to choose what to do with it.
Trustworthiness
What you say and what you do stay in the same place, whether or not anyone is checking.
Conscientiousness
You take responsibility for your part and finish it properly, including the details others treat as beneath attention.
Adaptability
A change of plan does not cost you much. You drop an approach once the situation stops rewarding it.
Learned Optimism
You read setbacks as specific and temporary rather than as evidence about you, which is what lets you try again.
Achievement Drive
You measure yourself against a standard rather than against the people around you.
Initiative
You move before being asked. When something needs doing and nobody owns it, you tend to pick it up.
Social competence — three competencies.
Empathy
You pick up what someone is feeling before they have said it, and can hold their view of a situation alongside your own.
Situational Awareness
You read the room and the wider system it sits inside — who carries weight, what is agreed but unspoken — and use it to time things well.
Service Orientation
You work out what someone actually needs, which is not always what they asked for, and follow through past the request.
Social competence — eight competencies.
Developing Others
You notice what someone could become and say so, backing feedback specific enough to act on with a chance to try.
Inspirational Leadership
You put a direction into words that make people want to move toward it, rather than merely accept it.
Influencing Others
You build agreement by working out what matters to the person in front of you, and bring people with you rather than over them.
Communication
You listen properly before responding, and what you say lands close to what you meant, adjusted to who needs to understand it.
Being a Change Catalyst
You name the thing that needs to change while others are still working around it, and take on the discomfort of leading it.
Conflict Management
You move toward disagreement instead of around it, and can hold two opposed positions open long enough for the real problem to surface.
Building Networks
You keep relationships alive at times when you need nothing from them, which is what makes them there when you do.
Teamwork and Collaboration
You work for the outcome the group is after, not the version of it with your name on it, and make the people around you more effective.
Someone excellent gets promoted and something goes wrong. The feedback they receive is that they need to work on their communication, or their stakeholder management, or their leadership presence. None of those is a thing a person can practise on Tuesday. So nothing changes, the conversation repeats at the next review, and eventually it hardens into a reputation.
The gap is nearly always narrower and more specific than the label suggests. Someone who reads a room accurately but cannot hold a disagreement open has a different problem from someone who handles conflict well but never sees it coming — and both get told they need to work on their communication. One needs Conflict Management. The other needs Situational Awareness. The remedies have nothing in common.
That is what naming twenty-one competencies separately buys you: the report will not tell you someone is weak with people. It will tell you which of twenty-one things they are weak at, and every one of them is learnable — which is the whole reason to measure a competency rather than a trait.
A strong overall band almost always hides unevenness, so the useful work is nearly always in the lowest quadrant, and usually in one competency inside it rather than across the board.
Technically strong people moving into roles where the work is now other people. This is the most common and most expensive transition an organisation gets wrong, and it is rarely the promotion that was the mistake — it is that nobody could say precisely what needed to be different.
Teams that keep having the same friction. Separating Other Awareness from Social Skills tells you whether the signals are not being received, or are being received and handled badly. Those two have nothing in common except the symptom, and half of all coaching spent on the second problem is actually aimed at the first.
Anyone building a development plan that has to survive contact with a busy quarter. Start at the bottom of the quadrant order: Self-Awareness is what the other three are built on, because someone who cannot name a feeling while it is happening has nothing for self-management to act on and is building social skill on an unstable base. Plans sequenced that way tend to hold; plans that start with the most visible symptom tend not to.
It is not a selection instrument, and it is not a personality test. It describes competencies, which means every one of them can be developed — that is the reason to measure them.
Rigour
This page describes what the instrument will report. It is not built, no results exist, and nothing here is a claim about how any individual will score. A competency profile describes learnable behaviour at a point in time — not ability, and not suitability for a role.
Emotional and Social Intelligence