Independent Magazine - Issue 6, 2023

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE:THE (MISSING) LINK BETWEEN EVALUATORS AND MANAGEMENT

“You can be strong technically, but if your emotional intelligence is not adequate you will neither be a good evaluator nor a good manager”. Indran A. Naidoo, Director of the Independent Office of Evaluation of IFAD (IOE), drove home this message during an interactive session with students of the European Institute of Innovation for Sustainability (EIIS). Dr Naidoo explained that while having strong technical skills is fundamental, because they help cement the legitimacy of an evaluator – case in point, 50% of IOE professional staff have a PhD – these intellectual assets are only one element of what makes for a good evaluator.

Held on 27 April 2023, the questions and answers session with the IOE Director was an integral component of the ‘Measuring and Evaluating Food Sustainability’ module of a new a post-graduate certificate programme on ‘Food and Sustainability’. Co-designed by IFAD and EIIS, the certificate programme is structured to help shape the future leaders of food by providing them with the necessary tools to analyse the food system, understand its complexity and develop solutions to concretely fix it at the company, consumer, and institutional levels. To this extent, the programme covers all the main aspects related to food, from sustainable agriculture to nutritional challenges, food policy, food education and many more. In addition to Dr Naidoo, programme instructors include, among others, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and David Katz, Founding Director at Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center.

Investing in emotional intelligence is necessary in order to pursue ‘co-creation’ among evaluators and management. Co-creating implies forward looking dialogues built on processes of genuine reflection, with the common aim of serving the poorest of the poor. Dr Naidoo is striving to introduce the concept of co-creation at IFAD, and is doing so by demystifying the evaluation process and by customizing entire reports on the basis of user needs.

Judgement is a word that triggers negative connotations. To overcome these, IOE is following a three-step process. The first is to shift the conversation from ‘you’ to ‘the organization’. It is the programme that is being evaluated, not the individual. The second step is to allow the evaluand to talk more. The third part is to enable space for self-evaluation, which implies asking the evaluand to fill in questionnaires, and engage in a process of genuine reflection.

“Management needs to look at evaluation not as being punitive, but as providing information that they cannot get. This requires a mindset shift, and the willingness to put aside egos. If management were to spend less time worrying about judgement, we could focus on how we can improve the future”, clarified the IOE Director.

In this context, Dr Naidoo underscored that while evaluation, by its nature, is about what happened in the past, IOE looks at the past in order to provide information for a better future. This is done through a set of action-oriented and practical recommendations, which form an integral part of the Office’s reports to IFAD’s Executive Board.

Ultimately, success needs to be defined from the perspective of rural people. For this reason, IOE always gives voice to the local rural beneficiaries. Results are not necessarily always quantitative. In some cases, while outputs may not be measurable, for example in terms of increased food production, evaluators may observe qualitative indicators related to happiness, to a sense of belonging, or to people feeling that they have a greater sense of agency and voice. IOE merges quantitative and qualitative information.