Why you need to work on your emotional intelligence

Amy Jacobson wants you to pause. Not permanently, but long enough to understand the emotional forces driving your behaviour as a leader. Once you do, she says, you can make better decisions, handle difficult conversations and cultivate a workplace where people want to show up.

Jacobson, an expert in emotional intelligence, makes a case in her new book, The Emotional Intelligence Advantage, that mastering this is a powerful tool. But while many leaders recognise the term, few know how to wield it effectively.

She says: “There’s no such thing as an emotionally intelligent person. It’s a skill.” And it’s a skill that can make the difference between a thriving culture and one quietly falling apart.

To use EI effectively, leaders must first understand what is. “What we know or what we can do is our IQ,” says Jacobson. “This is our knowledge, education, talent and what we can deliver. The how and why we do it is our EI. How we interact with others, how we make people feel, how we manage emotions, the effectiveness of our communication and the purpose behind what we do.”

Many assume emotional intelligence is innate. While partly true, it draws on instincts honed over thousands of years and mastering it requires conscious effort.

Consider a workplace meeting. You prepare with an agenda, invite the right participants and anticipate diverse perspectives. However, here’s where things can get tricky.

“You’re encouraging people to have a voice and be themselves. But now you’ve got a room full of people who all think they’re right and who have been wired from birth to believe being right is what matters,” Jacobson explains. “That’s where conflict starts.”

In the modern workplace, we are surrounded by people who have different values, beliefs and opinions. That can cause clashes.

“It's a fight or flight mechanism – or emotional hijack – that goes off in our mind that looks to protect us,” she says. “I’m looking at you saying that my way makes sense. You’re looking at me thinking your way makes sense. This is where you start to have these confrontations in workplaces.”

The goal is not to suppress this reaction, but to manage it. To do this, Jacobson offers a five-step framework that starts with self-awareness.

The first pillar is about knowing who you are. “You've got to own the wiring in your mind,” Jacobson says. “You've got to own the values and beliefs that are driving your decisions, but you've also got to own the reality of life: the only thing you have control of in this life is yourself and how you choose to respond. As for everything else that's happening around you, you have no control over it, but you've got to own and accept the reality of it.”

Jacobson suggests asking yourself:

• What in your life are you struggling to accept?
• How well do you own it?
• What drives your decisions?
• Can you work with reality rather than wishing it away?
• What can you take ownership of today to move forward?

The second pillar is “face it”. “This means facing your emotions and understanding where they come from,” she says. “Then you step out of your head and go into others’ worlds. ‘Feel it’ is about empathy. ‘Ask it’ is communication and ‘drive it’ is motivation. Are you following through? Are you achieving what you’ve said you would?”

The real test of EI comes during stress and crisis. “Leadership is easy on a calm day,” says Jacobson. “It’s in a crisis that your emotional intelligence is truly tested.”

She gives the example of a retailer opening a new store. If your emotional brain dominates, the fight or flight response may lead to poor decisions. Similarly, team energy can push you toward bold moves or, if unchecked, risky ones. Grounded dissent can help bring balance.

In another example, a company has appointed a new CEO and senior leadership team but it is still grappling with a merger that happened five years ago. Poor communication and unresolved tension lingered. Jacobson helped the new leadership recognise the emotional baggage employees carried. An open apology and acknowledgement of past wrongs transformed the atmosphere in just 45 minutes.

“They were struggling because it's human nature when somebody does wrong by us, we want an apology,” says Jacobson. “We identified that these people were still in victim mentality because they had been done wrong. The incoming CEO and executive group took the time to stand up in front of all of them and acknowledge it. The difference in those people when they walked out of the room was unbelievable.”

Difficult conversations are inevitable, but Jacobson’s model empowers leaders to lean into them. In the merger scenario, the incoming CEO needed to own past mistakes, face emotions, feel them, ask questions and drive change. Yet, not everyone processes such messages similarly. Some get stuck in the “own it” and “face it” phases, unwilling to move forward.

Jacobson recommends a technique called “ask, ask, tell”, which offers a balance between being liked and respected. “During those two asks, we're hoping that their emotional intelligence will come into play. We're hoping that they'll stand up and they'll own it and take it forward. But if they don't, that's when the tough conversation needs to happen.”

Jacobson’s closing advice? “Hit pause... before you speak, before you react, before you hire, before you fire. Take three breaths. Let your logical brain catch up to your emotional one. We’re so obsessed with who we want to become next, that we forget to be the person we already are.”

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