Lesson Objectives:
    To illustrate the importance of three applications of emotional intelligence in the workplace.
Goals:
    Students will work effectively as a team to complete and present an assignment.
    Students will discover nuances of negative criticism and demonstrate the ability to
    formulate and offer constructive criticism.
    Students will dramatize the corflict in discrimination in the workplace.
    Students will discover ways ofnetworking effectively to accomplish a task.

Materials:
· Nametags with "employee numbers" to divide into groups
· Notecards with job titles and descriptipns ( Team Leaders, Print Ad Specialists,  Special Promotions, Sales Managers,  Packaging Designers)
 paper and markers
 3 newspaper or internet articles detailing cases of discrimination in the workplace (see
    attached examples)
· 14 worksheets for the networking activity
· 196 small star stickers

Activities:
INTRODUCTION: Discuss the benefits of emotional aptitudes in the workplace and Goleman's three emotional intelligence components for affecting change in the workplace (pp. 149-150):

    "CRITICISM IS JOB ONE": The leader assumes the role of a corporate CEO as nametags with 'employee numbers" are distributed at random. Instruct the students that the company is relying on their expertise to develop an effective advertising campaign for a fictional product. Divide the students into groups based on their employee numbers. Within each group, the students will pick a notecard at random bearing their job title and a description of their responsibilities. Each group will contain at least one:

Team Leader - Overseer of the efforts of other group members; formalizer of presentation.
Print Advertising Specialist - Designer of graphic elements for print advertising of product.
Special Promotions - Designer of campaigns to increase sales including giveaways and
     coupons.
Sales Manager - Designer of nationwide sales strategy and distribution plan for the
    product.
Packaging Design - Designer of the actual physical packaging in which the product will
    be sold.

    Allow the groups 5 minutes to prepare their presentations using paper and markers provided. Afier all groups have presented, give one group no feedback, one group negative feedback that offers no solution. and give one group negative nonspecific feedback. Tell them they have 2 minutes to revise and re-present. At the end of the 2 minutes, ask the students if they were able to make any revisions - why or why not? Bring everyone into a circle. Ask for alternatives to each of the 3 criticisms given to the groups. Discuss the nature of effective critiques.

"ZERO TOLERANCE FOR INTOLERANCE": The leader distributes an Internet or newspaper article dealing with some form of discrimination in the workplace (racial, sexual, age, sexual orientation. etc.). The students peruse the article or highlighted portions and determine the characters and the conflict. Each group has 3 minutes to design a frozen scene (or tableaux) which depicts the most heightened moment of conflict in their story. They are encouraged to use improv to arrive at the conflict, and illustrate the emotions involved physically. The leader spotlights each tableaux for the other groups to exanmine and try to determine what the conflict is. Discuss the emotional intelligence skills that Goleman contends are an advantage in discriminatory situations.

"ORGANIZATIONAL SAVVY AND THE GROUP IQ": The leader assumes the role of the corporate CEO from the first activity and distributes worksheets and 14 star stickers to each student, while informing the students that the company is seeking proposals for major product initiatives. The successlul proposal will have each of the 14 characteristics listed on the worksheet. Each student is an expert in one of the 14 areas, and their area of expertise is highlighted on the worksheet they receive. They collect a star in that space on the worksheet. The object of the activity is for each participant to collect a star from the appropriate expert to complete a proposal. The areas of expertise on the worksheet are:

technical expertise     creative appeal      economic feasibility        error-free presentation Communications strategy     short-range plan for implementation     feasible distribution planning effective marketing strategy        ability to generate revenue         innovation
long-range plan for irnplementation         philanthropic component         benefits for stockholders appropriate division of labor

When all proposals have been completed, discuss the ways students discovered of achieving what they were aficr for thcfr proposal. How was it challenging to provide their own expertise stickers while obtaining those they needed from others? What worked and what did not work?

ASSESSMENT: Discuss how it felt to be labeled with a job title or area of expertise not of the students' choosing. In the first and third activities, did anyone want to switch to an area they felt more comfortable with? In the discrimination tableaux, what issues were raised? Did the environment of the workplace change the way in which the conflict was manifested? Was it difficult or easy to complete the proposal on their own? how could the process have worked differently? Ask if any student has a particular area on the worksheet that they feel they would be good at. Are their others with that same area of expertise? how could the activity have been structured differently to allow teams to work together?
 

               The Successful Proposal Will Demonstrate the Following 14 Characteristics:

technical expertise

creative appeal

economic feasibility

error-free presentation

communications strategy

short-range plan for implementation

feasible distribution planning

effective marketing strategy

ability to generate revenue

innovation

long-range plan for implementation

philanthropic component

benefits for stockholders

appropriate division of labor
                                                                    Developed by Carol Lanoux

Source News and Reports
By Dan Gallagher
Daily Transcript staff Writer

Oct 21, 1996
City Attorney John Witt will have to pay former Deputy City Attorney Nancy Higgins $3O,OOO in punitive damages for acting with oppression or malice towards Higgins, a jury decided Monday.

It was the final decision in a case against Witt, City Attorney-elect Casey Gwinn and Criminal Division head Susan Heath, which has been in trial for more than five weeks.

Witt alone was deemed liable for punitive damages, since he was the only one of the three defendants who was found guilty of oppression, fraud or malice towards the plaintiff. The jury returned the verdict after hearing Witt testify about his personal worth and annual income.

Witt had upheld Higgins' termination from the city attorney's office, which had been made by Gwinn and supported by Heath. Plaintiffs attorneys said Witt, who has led the office for 27 years, should have had more knowledge about what was going on in his office.

"He simply rubber-stamped everything that Heath and Gwinn told him to do," said Melody Harris, who is Higgins' attorney.

Outside the courtroom, several jurors agreed, adding that Witt should have taken more time to review the Higgins case befbre letting her go.

The jury delivered its main decision in the case Friday afternoon. The verdict, which many have described as unusual, said Gwinn, heath and Witt were not guilty of gender discrimination or sexual harassment towards Higgins. However, the jury did find that the three defendants had retaliated against Higgins when she reported the treatment, violated her free speech rights by punishing her when she spoke out and violated public policy by terminating her. The jury also ruled that the defendants did not intentionally inflict emotional distress upon Higgins, but negligently inflicted emotional distress on her.

Higgins was awarded $200,000 in actual damages, to be paid by the city. Harris, Higgins' attorney, asked the jury for $l00,000  in punitive damages against Witt, an award which would punish Witt and deter him from future conduct. Witt will leave the city attorney's Office in December after 27 years as the city's prosecutor.

Gwinn and his attorneys said they plan to appeal the decision immediately, blaming Judge Thomas Dufly for allegedly mishandling the case by not giving the jury the proper instructions on the law in this case.

"The judge gave erroneous and misleading instructions to the jury," Gwinn told reporters in his office after the jury was dismissed. "We don't believe this case will survive the appeal."

Gwinn added that he does not intend to pay anything out of the taxpayers purse to Higgins. The jury did not find for the plaintiff on the three main issues in this case, namely gender discrimination, sexual harassment and defamation. Those findings, Gwinn said, indicates that the jury simply felt sorry for Higgins and wanted to give her some money from somewhere.

However, Ricardo Spencer, one of the two men on the jury, said most of the jury felt the case was not sexual in nature anyway Spencer said it was more of a case where an office did not handle or appreciate a strong woman Spencer added that none of the women on the jury felt the case was about sex.

Higgins was fired from the city attorney's office in February1995, cited for failing to live up to her performance plan. Higgins had complained that she was being unfairly singled out and scrutinized, and filed a complaint with the city's Equal Employment Opportunity office a month before she was terminated. She said Gwinn was creating a hostile working environment for women, and this became the main charge in her lawsuit.

The jury said terminating Higgins after she complained to the EEO office amounted to retaliation by the defendants. Gwinn said he never knew about the EEO complaint until after Higgins' termination, and someone who has filed an EEO complaint can still be terminated if there is a valid reason.

"To have been accused of such discrimination is painful because it challenges the very core of who I am and what I've fought for throughout my career. My record as an aggressive advocate for battered women and their children demonstrate just the opposite - and the jury agreed," Gwinn said in a prepared statement.
 

State Supreme Court Broadens Right To File Suit For Age Bias
By Chris Diedoardo
Daily Transcnpt Staff Writer
Aug 27, 1997

In a 6-1 decision issued Wednesday, the Califoriiia Supreme Court significantly expanded the right of plaintiffs to file suit on the basis of age-discrimination.

"The policy against age and sex discrimination is similar in important ways to the policies against race and sex discrimination," wrote Associate Justice Joyce L. Kennard in Stevenson vs. Sperior Court of Los Angeles."Like race and sex discrimination, age discrimination violates the basic principle that each person should be judged on the basis of individual merit, rather than by reference to group stereotypes."

On a less idealistic plane "because average life expectancy has risen to more than 80 years, most California residents either are now or will become over-40 (year-old) employees, thus creating an extraordinarily broad class of potential victims," Kennard said in the opinion, which revives a former employees' common-law age discrimination case.

The matter centered on the question of whether an employee's failure to file a claim with the Department of Fair Employment and Mousing (DFEH) barred her from suing her employer on a common-law basis.

That's exactly the situation Joan Stevenson found herself in 1992 After working for the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles for more than 30 years, Stevenson, then 61, was terminated after she attempted to return from a medical leave of absence

In December 1993, she sued the hospital under a variety of causes of action, including age discrimination. While the hospital's demur was overruled as to the contract claims, the trial court threw out Stevenson's age-discrimination allegations because she failed to file a claim with DFEH.

"She didn't have representation at that time," said Oakland attorney Antonio Lawson, who represented her at the Supreme Court "So she filed a complaint alleging common-law claims and couldn't go back and file with DFBH because the statute of limitations had lapsed."

An apparently conflicted Court of Appeals upheld the trial court, although it urged the Supreme Court to "explore flirther this troubling area of law at its next opportunity."

The ruling is the latest of a series ofjudicial modifications to the doctrine of "at-will" employment, under which businesses can fire employees for any reason that does not violate public policy.

 In its 1994 ruling in Jennings v. Marrale, the Supreme Court declined to allow employees of companies with less than five employees to sue for age discrimination on a common-law basis, since they weren't covered under the state's Fair Fmployment and Housing Act.

The apparent conflict between Jennings and Wednesday's ruling is what troubles Robert M. Dato, an attorney with the Long Beach office of OFlaherty & Belgum who represented the hospital, the most.

"While the absolute letter of Jennings doesn't prohibit the result they reached today, the spirit of it did," Dato said. "I think we had all assumed all along that in these types of cases where the sole prohibition is in statutory schem, you go down the administrative road and you touch second base.

"Now, you don't have to."

Rut Lawson sees it as a way to expand access to justice for plaintiffs, many of whom may not have an attorney at the start of the matter.

"It gives you the added assurance that if you have defects in your statutory claims or questions about the identity of your major actors or timeliness, you can resolve them with a mirror image common law claim~" he said.

But he feels the major impact of the decision, which overturns the lower court's demur and remands the case to the trial court, is a symbolic one.

"At a time when other courts are grappling with the question of whether age discrimination should be given the same importance as race and gender di'scrimination, the statement today by the Supreme Court is extremely important" LawSon said.

Abby Silverman, an employment-law specialist with Baker & McKenzie, saw another aspect of the decision.

"Sometimes the DFEH claim is the first time the employer even hears about the case, especially if it's a larger company," Silverman said. "(the decision) eliminates a step where some might make an error that would bar some people from pursuing a claim.

"But I see the downside of this is that it eliminates a step that could lead to a settlement short of full-blown litigation."