Travis Bradberry, Ph.D.: I would definitely say that our mission is to make assessments a learning tool. There's kind of this stale thinking that makes tests just "here's your score, there you go," which is terrific for research but we're missing out on today is the ability to actually have those scores mean something and have some kind of action and real learning that participants can get from that and that's the mission of our business whether it's assessments that we write or other people's tools that we develop into a real learning solution. We make that assessment into something that is more than just a score.

Kevin: Travis, the focus of much of your work is on Emotional Intelligence and there's a lot of people out there that would probably say, you know, Daniel Goleman's got that thing cornered. How did you decide that you had something to contribute in this area, and what's your angle with emotional intelligence?

Travis: Yeah, I think it really relates to what we're talking about in terms of the purpose of TalentSmart because we like Dan Goleman's model, I mean all our products and assessment is created in his model with his permission. And because we worked in the field for so long we know that what's lacking in emotional intelligence is a way for people to actually use it. The comment we always get is, "Oh yeah, I've read the book or I've read all of Goleman's books but we've never done anything in my company."

So it started with our assessment that measures Goleman's model… anyone can go get it and use it and previously you had to go attend a five thousand dollar certification to use an assessment or you had to pick one that didn't measure his model and there you go. Another example is our books that we put out. The Emotional Intellligence Quick Book actually includes an assessment with the book and so now you're not just giving your leaders a four hundred page heady book on emotional intelligence, I've had trouble getting clients through that, you're actually giving them something that's quick and accessible.

Kevin: You published the EI Quick Book with Fireside; when was it released?

Travis: It was released on June 7.

Kevin: What's the reaction been thus far?

Travis: The reaction has been good. I think the core of the book is the work that we've done with our Emotional Intelligence Appraisal Assessment which is a twenty-eight question measure of Daniel Goleman's model of emotional intelligence, and over the years working with that test we collected data on over a half a million people.

Kevin: Wow, that's a lot of data!

Travis: The core of the book talks about that research, what people are doing specifically to build emotional intelligence, what works and what doesn't and of course the reader is actually going through an exercise of learning his or her own profile so we include the test with the book. I mean the reaction has been good, the book is actually selling really well and I think, I just heard from the rights department of Simon & Schuster yesterday that they sold five markets already, foreign language editions, so all that stuff is happening pretty quickly. I mean I think that it just speaks to people, you know they've been wanting this easy to use tool so they can put emotional intelligence into practice and so that's been the response, it's been really good.

Kevin: You know there was one chart that I saw in your work that I thought was interesting, which shows EQ levels by job title and CEO is on the far right side and is lower, shows lower scores than supervisor or manager type which surprised me. Any thoughts on that?

Travis: Yeah, and I'll tell you a story about that. When I first crunched those numbers and got them and put them into a graph it was the night before I was going to do a talk on EQ and you know when I speak about emotional intelligence it's centered on this idea that the top performers are the ones that are the highest in emotional intelligence.

Kevin: Right.

Travis: By and large it's the biggest predictor of success for people in leadership positions, and I'm looking at this graph for the first time and I'm just completely scratching my head, I just don't get it why middle managers have the highest EQ and then from there it's just this ski slope down to the CEO's having the lowest EQ in the workforce because they're supposed to be the highest performers, they're the most successful people, they've achieved the level of CEO.

And the point that it really made sense for me was when I went back to the data within each category, so among CEO's, those with the highest EQ are the best performing CEOs.

It goes down to what we label the senior executive and then you go one more into an executive and then one more to a director. It's the EQ that's the biggest predictor in each category or role. And what's happening is companies aren't promoting people for those qualities, you know you go from a director to a senior exec or middle manager into a director title because you make some kind of good financial decision but it's not the same thing that's going to get you to be the best you can be.

Kevin: Yeah, I had read somewhere something similar about that, they're saying you'd actually be surprised at sort of the almost psychoses that you would find in the CEO suite and that all the emotional you know tantrums or outbursts or way they treat people, you know it wouldn't be tolerated at any other level in an organization but for whatever reasons you know the organizations have put them in there for some other qualities other than their ability to really lead people and to groom other people and things like that. I mean that's disappointing to me on a lot of levels but it makes sense.

Travis: Yeah, I'm a real consumer of the psychology of individuals who are very successful. I tend to just, in my spare time I really like to read those books, you know the biographies on people and business and things like that and I completely see that, I see all kinds of quirks and sometimes even mental disabilities that are holding people back. And it's hard to argue, when someone's brilliant and their soft skills are, you know what they choose to do or say is holding them back it's hard to argue with that because their brilliance is making them successful. But at the same time, you know especially as workplace learning professionals, we really have an understanding of what it is that can make people the best they can be or how they can overcome their shortcomings, etcetera, and that's the whole thing. And most of the people we deal with, even if you're a vice president in a Fortune 500 company, you're a lot more of a regular person than Jack Welch is or Steve Jobs.

Kevin: Right.

Travis: So most of us can't rely on brilliance. We're competing with a lot of other people who can do what we do and we have to be the best we can.

Kevin: Yeah, that makes sense. I want to talk more about it, as you said earlier that you've, I mean it's really sort of an incredible value that when you buy the "Emotional Intelligence Quick Book" you get a free test so you can go through an EQ test for yourself. First of all, are people taking you up on that, I mean are you seeing people come on the website and getting into that?

Travis: Oh, yes, absolutely. I mean I think it's about, I don't know the exact number but it's a huge percentage of people who buy the book are actually taking the EQ test. And when I first proposed that I scared a lot of people in my own company because the fear, I mean we sell that test for $30 and the book is $19.95. Of course at Amazon it's $13.50 and at Barnes & Noble if you're a member it's $12.50, so the fear was that people would just buy the book and not buy the test anymore.

Kevin: Right.

Travis: And the reality is the book market is a whole another group of people that we don't even sell to right now, it exposes people to the test and I think, if we were going to release the book I don't see how we could say that testing for emotional intelligence is so important and you have to know where you're at today to make any change and then not give that reader a test with the book.

Kevin: Tell me a little bit about what you and your colleagues at TalentSmart are doing with e-learning after the assessment process.

Travis: Yeah, what we do is, we basically have a series of interactive exercises that are designed to show you how to put each of the four skills into practice. The real e-learning component there is the action plan and so it actually has recommended strategies you can follow to build that skill.

What we tend to hear when we're doing coaching and we're doing training when we explain to someone what the skill is, they always say, "well what does that look like?" What we do is we actually bring in snippets of Hollywood movies and television to actually show what we're talking about in action.

We show someone who's memorable, some character such as Lucille Ball or Nicole Kidman or even David Hasselhoff, the brilliant actor that he is, but he's memorable and people get to see that and they say that's right, there's a guy who is impulsively making too quick of a decision. Or someone who's really listening to that other person's feedback before they act. And then people tend to as they watch the clips think about themselves and the final stage there is there's a whole goal tracking system in there where you actually choose which actions you're going to take, it sends you automatic reminders, it will share your goals with other people that you choose and all that.

Kevin: I've heard anecdotally that those automatic reminders can dramatically improve training results. Do you have any data or know of any studies or anything on that yourself?

Travis: Well we did a big project that's actually ongoing with Fortune Brands. They had a 360 in place and they really sort of want to take it to the next level, the part of the leadership development initiative. So what we did for them was we created the e-learning component to this 360, we put it up on-line, we added the video clips and the learning activities to teach the leaders their competency model and then we had the goal tracking and the follow up.

We measured how impacted people were who used this stuff and those who went through the formal training and used the on-line learning a hundred percent were impacted and those who just went through the classroom program were impacted, I think it was something like 38% had a positive impact. And the exciting thing was the number was actually higher for those who just used the on-line learning. Because there were some people who wouldn't do the classroom training or wouldn't do the follow up coaching but they had the time or the motivation to just use the on-line learning. And there was a similar impact to actually having them in the classroom.

Kevin: That's great so that whole debate over what's better, is there any difference, I mean you're getting at least the same results if not better through e-learning than through the workshops.

Travis: Yeah, and we're finding the you know I think sort of the truth. When I read all the articles and different things out there, I think the best thing you can do is provide blended learning. Get someone in the classroom, find a way to get them to follow up after the fact, and with the amount of time that people are on the internet and on email today it's a learning process and it's real interesting to find that the people who really participated in the program, that showed up in the classroom, that got an executive coach and participated in on-line learning, I mean literally a hundred percent of them were positively impacted and it was three times the number who were positively impacted that just attended the classroom training.

Kevin: That's significant.

Travis: I feel like it gives a merit to the e-learning, it shows that it's worthwhile to do that in addition to your classroom training.

Kevin: Travis, anything else you want to share with the e-LearningGuru members?

Travis: Well a big thing for me personally with the Guru audience is I feel like I don't get enough discussion with people on what they think about actually having e-learning with the book. I know that there's been other books such as "Now Discovery Your Strengths" that have a test with the book but ours actually has e-learning activities so for me it's kind of, it's thought provoking that you're buying words on a page but you're also getting e-learning with that and I'm interested in you know people are working with e-learning hearing what they think about that and how it's different than what's out there, if it's compelling, if it's not, you know where the field should hit.

Kevin: Yeah, it's an interesting topic…I don't know if it should be a new business model or an interesting consumer behavior thing but in some ways you know your example of the book that comes with on-line learning could almost be a Trojan horse for the e- components. As you said it's a $30 assessment that you can now get for $12.50 and there's a free book along with it.

Maybe you've struck on the model of the future… the real B to C play is to use more established traditional outlets such as bookstores and maybe the books are going to get a whole lot thinner but in the back is that on-line web address and pass code to let you go on and continue the experience and the learning.

Travis: Yes, if I really wanted to push e-learning on people I would have made the book only available as an Adobe reader file and we wouldn't have sold a fraction of the books that we have.

Kevin: Yeah, that's right.

Travis: People aren't ready for it. I think your suggestion of a Trojan horse is, well you know it would be nice if our book was that but I think whatever it is it's going to be a book like this or it's going to be something that isn't just e-learning because people aren't ready for it yet. And a real strange thing has happened for us, I was just looking at this the other day, where our book's been out for ten weeks and as I said we sell far more books because our test comes by itself with a booklet, and we sell far more Emotional Intelligence Appraisal booklets than we do the on-line version, but in the last ten weeks it's almost flip-flopped.

Kevin: Wow!

Travis: And we can tell when people are e-learning training because they buy 27 booklets or 32 booklets or 22, you know it's the size of a classroom, and those are almost exclusively booklet sales, but in the last ten weeks they've almost exclusively been on-line. So I think people are buying the book and they're saying oh yeah I've got 27 links to pass out in my next training. And we've been kind of laughing, we've actually been laughing and talking about it and it almost seems that it's that Trojan horse phenomena at least with the people that we've been exposed to. So it's fascinating stuff and I'm really curious what people are thinking and what the market is doing with this stuff but I think it's unexplained at this point.

Kevin: Thanks, Travis.

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