Why Emotional Intelligence Is the Most Underrated Leadership Skill

Introduction

In 1998, psychologist Daniel Goleman published a landmark analysis in the Harvard Business Review. He had studied nearly 200 large global companies and identified the capabilities that distinguished the best leaders from average ones. His finding was striking: for leadership roles, emotional intelligence proved to be twice as important as technical skills and IQ combined.

More than two decades later, the data only strengthens this conclusion. A study by TalentSmart found that 90% of top performers in organisations score high in emotional intelligence. And yet EQ remains the most under-discussed, under-developed, and under-valued skill in most leadership development programmes.

This is the paradox of leadership development: we train leaders relentlessly in strategy, finance, and operations — the competencies that make them good at managing things — while largely ignoring the competency that determines whether people will actually follow them.

 

The Leadership Problem

High-IQ, low-EQ leaders are recognisable by the trail they leave. They are often brilliant analysts who cannot understand why their team seems resistant to ‘obviously correct’ decisions. They give technically accurate feedback that lands like criticism and creates resentment. They miss the emotional undercurrents in rooms and are blindsided when talented people resign. They mistake confidence for connection and authority for trust.

The problem is not malice. It is a blind spot. And unlike technical skills, emotional intelligence requires a different kind of development — one that is introspective rather than instructional, relational rather than analytical, and deeply uncomfortable for leaders who have spent careers being rewarded for cognitive sharpness rather than emotional awareness.

 

Key Leadership Insights

Insight 1 — Self-Awareness: The Foundation of Everything

Goleman identified four dimensions of EQ: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Self-awareness — the ability to recognise your own emotions, triggers, and patterns in real time — is the foundation without which the other three collapse.

Self-aware leaders know when they are frustrated before they act out of frustration. They recognise their bias towards certain types of people or ideas. They notice when their ego is influencing a decision that should be purely strategic.

Example: A CEO client discovered through 360-degree feedback that her team perceived her as dismissive in meetings. Her self-perception was that she was ‘decisive.’ When she started noticing the physical cues in others when she cut discussions short — lowered eyes, reduced participation — she finally understood the gap between her internal experience and her external impact.

Takeaway: Request a 360-degree feedback exercise from your team or trusted peers. Ask specifically: ‘What is one behaviour of mine that negatively affects you — and might I not be aware of it?’

Insight 2 — Self-Management: Responding, Not Reacting

Viktor Frankl wrote: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.’ Self-management is the leadership capacity to find and use that space — especially under pressure, provocation, or uncertainty.

Low EQ leaders react. They send the angry email before sleeping on it. They snap at a team member who delivers bad news. They double down defensively when challenged. High EQ leaders respond. They pause before reacting, regulate their emotional state, and choose their behaviour deliberately.

Takeaway: Identify your top three emotional triggers at work. Write them down. Then write the behaviour you want to exhibit when triggered — not your default behaviour, but your chosen one. Keep this somewhere visible as a daily reminder.

Insight 3 — Social Awareness: Reading the Room at a Deeper Level

Social awareness is the ability to sense what others are feeling, even when they are not saying it explicitly. This is the skill that tells a leader the team’s nodding agreement in a meeting is not genuine buy-in. It is the ability to notice that a team member who is ‘fine’ is actually struggling. It is what distinguishes a leader who manages by assumption from one who leads by understanding.

Example: During a major company restructuring, a Division Head noticed that while her team publicly expressed support, the energy in the room had shifted — quieter hallways, fewer jokes, less eye contact. Instead of concluding that her communication had been effective, she scheduled individual check-ins and discovered deep anxieties about job security that had been masked by professional politeness.

Takeaway: In your next team meeting, watch for non-verbal signals rather than listening only to words. After the meeting, note what you observed. Then test your interpretation by checking in directly with one or two people.

Insight 4 — Relationship Management: Building Trust as a System

The highest dimension of EQ — relationship management — is where self-awareness, self-management, and social awareness converge into a sustained capacity to build, maintain, and repair relationships that enable extraordinary collaboration.

Leaders with high relationship management EQ are skilled at inspiring others, managing conflict productively, being a catalyst for change, and building bonds that survive adversity. These are not ‘soft skills.’ They are the primary mechanism through which leadership influence operates.

Takeaway: Map your five most important relationships at work. For each one, ask: ‘Is this relationship operating at its potential — and if not, what is one thing I could do differently?’ Then act on one of those answers this week.

 

Practical Strategies

A 10-minute daily EQ development practice:

1. Morning: Name your dominant emotion before starting work. (Not ‘fine’ — specifically: focused, anxious, irritable, motivated?)
2. During the day: After any significant interaction, ask yourself — ‘What was I feeling? How did I manage it? What was the impact on the other person?’
3. Evening: Review one interaction where you wish you had responded differently. What triggered you? What would a high-EQ response have looked like?

 

Real-World Example

When Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks as CEO in 2008, the company was in crisis — hundreds of store closures, declining revenue, and a demoralised workforce. His first act was not a financial model. It was a meeting of all 10,000 US store managers in New Orleans, where he stood on stage and, visibly emotional, took full personal responsibility for what had gone wrong. He did not blame the market or the team. He modelled the vulnerability that EQ-driven leadership requires. That moment became the emotional turning point of Starbucks’ recovery.

 

Reflection Questions

• When was the last time you received feedback about your emotional impact as a leader — and how did you respond to it?
• Which of Goleman’s four EQ dimensions is your greatest strength, and which is your greatest development edge?
• Who on your team do you find most difficult to connect with — and what might that tell you about your own EQ blind spots?

 

Key Takeaways

• EQ accounts for twice the performance impact of IQ for leadership roles — and remains widely underdeveloped.
• Self-awareness is the foundation: you cannot manage what you cannot see in yourself.
• Self-management is about responding deliberately, not reacting automatically.
• Social awareness means reading the room beneath the surface of what people say.
• Relationship management is where EQ becomes sustained leadership influence.
• EQ can be developed — but it requires reflection, feedback, and disciplined daily practice.

 

Conclusion

Technical brilliance will open the door to leadership. Emotional intelligence will determine what you build once you walk through it. The leaders who leave lasting legacies — who inspire loyalty, navigate crises with grace, and build organisations that outlast their tenure — are almost universally those who have done the hard work of knowing themselves deeply and leading others with genuine understanding.

EQ is not a personality trait you either have or do not have. It is a set of skills that can be learned, practised, and compounded over a career. Start today with the simplest question a leader can ask: ‘How am I actually showing up?’