Emotional intelligence in leadership is the ability to recognise and manage your own emotions while understanding and responding to the emotions of the people you lead. It’s made up of five core skills: 1) self-awareness, 2) self-regulation, 3) motivation, 4) empathy, and 5) social skills. Emotional intelligence can show up in everyday moments for leaders. Here are some examples:
- knowing when to push and when to hold back
- noticing when someone on your team has gone quiet
- staying steady when a project goes wrong
Leaders with high emotional intelligence don’t just manage tasks. These leaders also manage the emotional climate of a team, which is often what determines whether people actually want to follow them.
Table of Contents
The Five Components of EQ: Emotional Intelligence In Leadership
Here’s what each one looks like when you are the person leading the room.
#1 Self-awareness
You know what you are feeling in the moment, before it starts leaking out sideways into the room.
In practice: You recognise you’re about to snap in a meeting before it happens, not afterwards, when you’re apologising for it.
#2 Self-regulation
You know how to manage what you are feeling.
In practice: You stop yourself sending an angry email late at night. You pause before you respond to difficult messages, instead of reacting to your first wave of emotion. You are not suppressing your feelings; you are actually choosing your response instead of being run by your first impulse.
#3 Motivation
You are driven by something that is more than the next win. It can be your growth, purpose or standards that you hold for yourself regardless of who is watching.
In practice: You stay consistent with your team even when a project isn’t going particularly well, rather than only showing up and being engaged with your team when things are easy.
#4 Empathy
Reading and noticing what is happening for someone else, without them saying anything to you about it.
In practice: You might notice that a team member who is usually vocal has started to go quiet in meetings. You make a point of checking in with them rather than assuming they’re fine. Empathy in leadership isn’t about being soft with your team. It’s about understanding them and how they are feeling. This is true emotional intelligence in leadership.
#5 Social skills
You are great at building relationships and moving a room in a certain direction, especially when the team is under pressure.
In practice: You know when to mention hard topics to team members and when to hold it for a one-to-one meeting instead. It’s about reading the temperature of a team meeting before deciding how direct you can be.
High EQ vs Low EQ Leadership
| High EQ | Low EQ |
|---|---|
| ● Asks what got in the way before assigning blame when bad news lands | ● Reacts to bad news with blame — "who let this happen?" |
| ● Raises feedback early and calmly, while it's still small | ● Waits until frustration builds, then delivers feedback sharply |
| ● Names their own mistakes plainly and moves to what happens next | ● Explains their mistakes away or blames circumstances |
| ● Checks in privately when a team member goes quiet | ● Doesn't notice — or notices and says nothing |
| ● People bring problems early, because they trust how it'll land | ● People manage the leader's moods instead |
Source: The Leslie Link
Why EQ Outpredicts IQ For Leadership Success
Technical skill and intelligence are usually what helps people get promoted into leadership in the first place. But once someone is in the role, these two factors rarely determine how well they will actually lead.
Daniel Goleman’s original research found emotional intelligence was roughly twice as important as IQ and technical skill combined in predicting outstanding performance, across jobs at every level.
Interestingly, this gap doesn’t stay flat as people rise through the ranks; it actually gets bigger.
For instance, among senior leaders, nearly nine in ten of the differences between star performers and average ones came down to emotional intelligence.
At that level, almost everyone in the room is already smart and capable. But what separates the leaders people want to follow is those leaders who can stay steady under pressure, read a room, and manage the emotional undercurrent.
Emotional Intelligence In Leadership – How Do You Know?
It can show up in obvious and practical ways. For example, a brilliant technical leader who can’t manage their own reactions will create a team that is also anxious and guarded.
A leader with strong self-awareness and empathy, even without being the smartest person in the room, builds a team that raises problems early, speaks honestly, and stays engaged under pressure.
Over time, the differences between these two teams become clear:
- people doing their best work or just enough to do the job
- employees who trust their leader and colleagues
- stronger employee retention — people are far less likely to look elsewhere when they feel understood by their manager
IQ will always help to get you the job, but it’s usually your EQ that determines how far you will rise. It can also be a deciding factor in how many people will choose to come with you and pick you as their leader.
How To Start Developing It (practical starting points)
Emotional intelligence isn’t something that is completely fixed in your life. Unlike IQ, you can actually build it with practice over time. It doesn’t involve a major overhaul of your personality; you just need to consistently repeat a few small habits.
1) Name the emotion before you react to it
Unnamed emotions are usually what drive reactive decisions.
For example, somebody might have sent you a difficult email or you were involved in a very tense meeting. When something like this happens, take a pause and think about the emotion you are feeling, before you respond to the trigger.
Are you defensive, embarrassed, frustrated, or overwhelmed? Naming it (even silently to yourself, you don’t have to say it out loud) can create a half-second gap between your feeling and your next action.
That gap is where self-regulation actually happens.
2) Build in a pause before you respond
This pause doesn’t need to be dramatic. It just has to stop that first draft of your aggressive email from being sent. If you have hammered out an angry email, wait an hour or even overnight if you can, before you send it.
If it is during a live conversation, just taking one breath before you speak is often enough to shift a reaction into a response. Because the goal isn’t to suppress what you feel. You are actually choosing what you do with it.
3) Ask one reflection question at the end of the week
It can be hard to recover your focus after a hard week at work. A reflection question can help you. It can be something really simple, but it also needs to be consistent.
Here are examples of two great questions you could ask yourself:
“Where did I react instead of respond this week?”
“What was going on for me in that moment?”
This doesn’t have to be a big habit or process. It’s just one question you ask yourself regularly. It will help you build your self-awareness which is the foundation of EQ.
4) Get curious about other people’s reactions, not just your own
If you notice that somebody in your team is not themselves (distracted, short-tempered or quiet), resist the urge to make an assumption about why they are like that.
Empathy means checking directly with the person to see what is going on and if they are okay.
EQ is a skill that becomes better through repetition, the same way any skill does. If you would like a structured way to build this rather than trying to remember it all on your own, that’s exactly what the Check In With Sally is designed for.
It is a short, regular space to notice what’s actually going on for you, before it turns into a reaction you regret.
FAQs
Here are some answers to a few common frequently asked questions about this subject.
1) Is emotional intelligence the same as being nice?
No, emotional intelligence is broken down into five core skills: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills.
2) Can EQ be learned?
Yes! It doesn’t matter how old you are or what you do as a job; you can learn EQ at any time. It can enrich your leadership style and life.
3) What’s the difference between EQ and IQ?
EQ is the emotional understanding and awareness you have of yourself and others, whereas IQ is your level of intellect.
Sally Leslie is the founder of The Leslie Link. She speaks, runs workshops, and coaches leaders and senior professionals, helping them build the emotional intelligence, meditation practice, and resilience. She’s the author of Think Clearly. Lead Calmly. A Guide for Leaders Under Pressure. Based between Newcastle, UK and Mallorca, Spain. Sign up to her Calm Leadership newsletter.
