“[Emotional intelligence is] the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions.”
Emotional intelligence (EI) alone will not make you successful. Most leaders I know have high IQ as well. I know some very successful leaders who have very little emotional intelligence. I agree with Angela Duckworth though, these people are likely successful despite their lack of emotional intelligence and would be even more effective if they took a little time and energy to develop stronger social skills and emotional competence.
Researchers Salovey and Mayer brought EI into the literature in 1990. Instead of the four domains popularized today, they used something more like a flow chart. Emotionally intelligent people have four fundamental capabilities. They can perceive their own and other people’s emotions, and can understand the information these emotions present, both their intuition and empathy for others. Emotionally intelligent people use this high-fidelity emotional information to make better decisions, communicate more effectively, and create more meaningful relationships. They can regulate their emotions to respond intentionally instead of reacting unpredictably, and they can even regulate other people’s emotions from inspiring a team to consoling a friend’s grief.
I have written much about perceiving and understanding, but an anecdote is helpful here. As you become more emotionally aware, you will realize that there is an invisible emotional world around you. Emotions are a language, and people who know each other well can communicate volumes with a look or a tone. The words “I’m fine” can mean 10 completely different things when combined with the tone, body language, and context – including “I am 100% not fine.” Leaders who don’t think emotional perception and understanding are important are akin to an English-speaking manager going to Japan to head up a department with no Japanese language skills or cultural knowledge – foolish. Learn more about discerning your own emotions and cultivating empathy in these articles.
Emotional regulation allows leaders to tap into social skills
Say you are on a whitewater rafting trip with your team. You likely perceive massive rapids and dangerous hydraulics. You even understand what’s going on around you, but without your skilled guides to navigate the river, you get tossed from hydraulic to strainer, at the mercy of the river. This is the leader who is aware enough to tell their team that they sometimes get angry and yell at people, but they don’t mean to. That will only get the boss so far before people avoid them regardless of their self-disclosure. Learning to regulate your emotions means choosing which feelings to acknowledge and responding intentionally instead of reacting unpredictably. This intentionality makes you a reliable leader whom people can count on.
Socially skilled leaders regulate other people’s emotions
Leaders have an outsize impact on the emotions and mood of their teams. Research calls this emotional contagion, and it checks out. When your boss gets agitated, you likely remember the whole department becoming anxious. When your boss is calm, confident, and excited, your team likely gets a lot more done. The river analogy works here too. Once you develop your empathy (see tips to do so here), you can perceive and understand other people’s emotions. A socially skilled leader can then regulate the team’s mood. Part of this is developing emotional norms, or team emotional intelligence. Part of it is intentional regulation on the leader’s part, that is noticing collective moods and acting intentionally.
For example, a leader with high EI might:
- Notice general anxiety and refocus the team on collective efficacy.
- Sense excitement and name it to reinforce momentum.
- Recognize sadness from layoffs and authentically acknowledge team members’ feelings.
A leader lacking in social skills would:
- Sense anxiety, get frustrated and push the team harder.
- Take a sense of excitement for granted and eventually burn out the team.
- Try to act happy to get people to stop moping about layoffs.
How to skillfully use emotions as a leader
Make better decisions
Emotional intelligence opens a whole new data stream for us. It’s like learning another language and getting twice the information to help make decisions and communicate more effectively. Self-awareness provides high-fidelity data to help guide our decisions and actions. I call this founded intuition. If an experienced mountain guide says we should turn around on a snowy slope with nothing but a bad feeling to inform us, I say OK. The more we perceive and understand our emotions the more information we unlock. We learn to disregard emotional noise and tap into powerful intuitions which are richer and more robust than our cognitive capabilities alone. Empathy also unlocks collective wisdom for team decision-making. Many avalanche fatality reports detail experienced skiers making poor decisions because no one spoke up. Empathetic leaders notice other people’s reservations and surface them for the group.
Communicate more effectively
Communication means creating a shared understanding of reality. If a leader lacks emotional intelligence and social skills, they cannot intentionally create shared understanding. Emotions create too much noise which leads to confusion. People say they are fine when they are hurting, and a leader who missed the “I’m not actually fine” tone” makes their employees feel alienated and even less fine. People say I’d be happy with any task but light up when they see a particular role. Leaders who are not privy to emotional cues put people on tasks they don’t want and assign others to someone else’s dream role, which leads to quiet quitting.
Higher fidelity communication feeds directly into many other social skills accessible to emotionally intelligent leaders. Here are a few examples of emotional competencies in action:
Motivation: Leaders read between the lines and use their tone, body language, and words to intentionally remove friction and reinforce positive emotions. Socially skilled leaders can get teams to go from willing to driven toward a common goal.
Negotiation and conflict resolution: People with social skills can figure out what the other party actually wants in a negotiation and find win-win solutions that EI challenged leaders would miss. Check out our micro-course on negotiation to learn how!
Coaching: Great coaches sit beside clients and see the world from their eyes. Leaders who get their people’s perspective can effectively get them from where they are to where they want to go. Imagine meeting someone and walking them to
Build stronger relationships
True relationships come from genuine emotional connections. In quality relationships, we care for each other intentionally. We check in with each other and lend a helping hand when we can. Frankly, this makes life more meaningful. It also makes business sense. As leaders take on more responsibility, more relationships with different departments and outside stakeholders allow them to solve problems more quickly and effectively. It even helps in getting jobs when leaders can call up connections in a pinch.
Well-tuned emotional understanding underpins trust: Having high interoception and emotional literacy is like an early warning system for trusting people. When you meet a new person, or even when you are negotiating a commitment, you can tap into every other interaction you have ever had. Your prefrontal cortex can’t do this, but your hippocampus is designed to scan for similarities with past experiences and flag threats. Your body picks up on subtle tones, phrases, and body language and tells you to watch out, but only if you tune into it!
Compassion builds relationship: We have explored many ways to foster connection, but emotional and compassionate empathy might be the most important ingredients. We understand others more readily when we can feel their emotions. It would be strange for a close friend to say, “I can see how you feel but I don’t feel for you.” More importantly, socially skilled people intentionally care. This can feel silly at first, but put people’s birthdays in your calendar and send them a note or a text every year. Notice what a co-worker likes for their morning drink and pick them up a frappe once in a while. These little actions enrich your life and come in handy when you need to “know someone for that.”
“As leaders gain seniority, technical competence is assumed, and emotional competence becomes the key to organizational success.”
Social skills lead to a higher quality life - why wait?
Imagine having low emotional intelligence. The rest of the world speaks a different language than you. People give you cues not to trust them, but you ignore your intuition because you can’t even perceive it. You end up with limited perspective, because of your low empathy, and your peers get promoted because they find innovative solutions for sticky problems. You’re a technical rockstar, but your career stagnates because nobody wants to work on your team – they don’t feel like you care. You don’t even have quality relationships to get mentoring and figure out how to improve.
Early in a leader’s career, these things may not matter. As leaders gain seniority, technical competence is assumed, and emotional competence becomes the key to organizational success. Building social-emotional skills is ridiculously easy when weighed against the benefits they yield. Develop a tuned perception. Build literacy, just like you would in any other language. Learn to regulate emotions so that you choose how to respond instead of clinging to your raft and hoping for the best down a class five rapid. Learn when and where to use the data you gain from perception and understanding. They will help you make better decisions, communicate more effectively, and build high-quality relationships. Sure you can be successful without working on EQ. Maybe you’ll even bumble your way into a few good relationships. Is it really worth hoping it works out when improving your emotional intelligence is so accessible though?
Want to dig into these concepts to find actionable insights for your team? Let’s talk!
Books, Articles, and Podcasts
Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership HBR article on social intelligence.
No Stupid Questions: Is EI Really a Superpower? Short and super useful discussion on EQ with Angela Duckworth.
Atlas of the Heart Book to help understand and label emotions. A few pages on each of the 87 common emotions we experience!
Primal Leadership Book about emotional contagion and using emotions as a leader.
The Emotionally Intelligent Manager Book by the original scientists in EI describing how to use emotions to make better decisions and forge better relationships.
EQ 2.0 Book with tips on improving in all four domains of EI.
Permission to Feel Book that details the RULER method for understanding and regulating emotions.
How Emotions are Made Book about the social influences on our emotional experience.
Permission to Feel Podcast with key points from Permission to Feel book.
Why You Should Not Trust Your Feelings Article arguing against completely trusting your feelings – a counterpoint.
Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On? Article arguing for a more comprehensive understanding of EI than “being nice.”
Emotional Intelligence is a Trainable Superpower Podcast episode discussing ways to develop EI.
1990 EI Article from Salovey and Mayer The first academic article on EI, and a different way to understand the concept from the way Goleman popularized it.
Emotion Wheel Wheel of emotions is useful to label with granularity.
Mood Vs Emotion Quad chart using energy and quality to help identify particular moods.
The Science of Emotions UWA Great primer on emotions, what they are, and where they come from.
Positive Psychology 5 Ways to Regulate Emotions Blog full of info and tips on emotional regulation.
Equanimity and Emotional Regulation More information on the concept of equanimity.
The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence A counter-argument to all of this.
