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Fueling Effectiveness and Wellbeing of Female Finance Executives

This study demonstrated a correlation between increases in emotional intelligence and increases in effectiveness, wellbeing and life balance for female CFOs.

Overview

Situation: Top finance executives face more complexity than ever before, and female executives face additional challenges to their competency and leadership.

Solution: SunUp developed a customized emotional intelligence training program for a small cohort of female CFOs.

Results: Participants showed significant growth in core emotional intelligence competencies and the 4 success factors measured by the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment.

“I am immensely grateful for the program and my improvement is clear. You can see it on my face, in my disposition, in everything really.”

– Ednalva Vasconcelos, Finance Director

Situation

This generation of CFOs face responsibilities that previous generations of finance leaders could not have imagined. In addition to resource management and governance, the modern day CFO has added corporate strategy development, board engagement, digital initiatives, business support and M&A management to its scope of responsibilities. Add on to this the economic instability, shift to remote work and wellbeing challenges resulting from the pandemic, and executives face more complexity than ever before. This presents immense challenges for finance executives’ effectiveness at work and personal wellbeing.

Solution

SunUp, a Six Seconds Preferred Partner in Brazil, developed a customized emotional intelligence training program for a small group of female finance executives associated with W-CFO Brazil. The participants all worked in finance, but in different sectors. Using the Six Seconds Emotional Intelligence Assessment, workshops and individual mentoring sessions, the study sought to increase the executives’ emotional intelligence and measure how that impacted their effectiveness, wellbeing, relationships and quality of life. At the end, participants took a post-assessment to measure the program’s impact.

Results

The study found that increasing self-awareness and developing emotional intelligence skills has a strong impact on the professional success and quality of life for female finance executives, in spite of external conditions remaining unchanged.

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OVERALL IMPROVEMENT

The percentage of participants with high emotional quotient scores and success factors increased from 43% at baseline to 92% after completion of the program.

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INCREASED EQ

The group’s average emotional intelligence scores increased from 98.4 to 106.2, with growth in all 8 emotional intelligence competencies.

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BETTER BALANCE

Participants showed significant growth in all 4 success factors, including an 11% increase in Quality of Life a 14% increase in Achievement.

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Products & Services Delivered

EQ Skills

SEI – Six Seconds’ Emotional Intelligence Assessment is a validated psychometric tool for measuring emotional intelligence, used with over 250k people worldwide.