3 Lessons Amazon’s Chief EQ Evangelist Learned Scaling EQ To 1.5 Million People

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Rich Hua, the former Chief EQ Evangelist at Amazon and Founder of EPIQ Leadership Group, has sparked EQ growth for more than 1.5 million people worldwide, reaching over 500,000 employees at Amazon alone. But, as is the case for millions of people around the world, emotional intelligence wasn’t something that came to him naturally.

Born in Taiwan, Hua immigrated to the U.S. at age four. Initially, he struggled to build relationships. “I had three things going against me,” Hua said. “I didn't speak English. I had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And I was socially awkward.”

What came to him naturally was his intellect. “I told myself my goal was to become a genius robot,” he said. And for a long time, this worked. Hua got straight A’s, a perfect SAT score, and he studied electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley. “But then I got married,” Hua said, laughing. “And I found that my wife didn’t care about the genius part, and she really didn’t like the robot part. Instead, she cared about things like empathy, vulnerability, and emotional connection.”

His wife had exposed a gap that he now couldn’t stop thinking about—emotional intelligence (EQ). High IQ had taken him far, but he realized that EQ offered an opportunity to go much further. He began studying EQ, reading experts like Daniel Goleman, Travis Bradberry, Marc Brackett, Amy Edmondson, and others.

While working in a technical sales role at Amazon, Hua noticed that this same gap between IQ and EQ was a challenge for many people. The Tech world attracted brilliant, high-IQ people, but many of these talented people found themselves limited by their social and emotional skills.

So, Hua began to do EQ keynotes to share everything he had learned. From there, everything began to take off. Hua’s keynotes caught on fast, and he filled rooms with thousands of people. In 2021, he created his own job as Worldwide Head of EPIC (empathy, purpose, inspiration, connection) and Chief EQ Evangelist, where his impact eventually crossed one million people.

Here are the three lessons Hua learned that made it possible.

Lesson 1: To Scale EQ, You Need to Bake it into the Culture

When Hua started scaling EQ at Amazon, he faced a question that surfaces time and again in our interviews with L&D and people leaders: How do we embed this into culture without it feeling forced?

“People ask, ‘How do we train EQ?’” Hua said. “That’s not the hard part. The hard part is making the culture emotionally intelligent.”

When Hua arrived at Amazon, he became a student of the culture long before he ever designed or delivered any content. What he saw was fast-moving and intellectually rigorous, an environment that prized data and innovation. “Amazon has an edgy and exacting culture,” Hua said. “You can’t walk in talking about feelings without connecting them to business or customer outcomes.”

Hua said that the idea behind harmonizing EQ training with the existing culture is to avoid what he calls “transplant failure.” Like a body rejects an organ, a company may reject training if it doesn’t fit its culture.

To harmonize EQ training with a company’s culture, Hua likes to draw on his martial arts background, particularly hapkido. “In hapkido, you don’t fight force with force,” he explained. “You redirect energy. To move a culture, you have to blend with it, then redirect that energy.” To fit Amazon’s culture, for example, Hua framed EQ as deeply linked to core values like customer obsession, innovation, earning trust and delivering results.

Lesson 2: Scaling EQ with Ambient Learning, Not Just Training Events

Even when EQ fits the culture, there’s another obstacle: time. “Everyone feels behind these days,” Hua said. And that reality shaped how EQ scaled at Amazon. In addition to his EQ keynotes and workshops, Hua built systems that delivered content directly to people. He built three interconnected systems:

• An EQ Community of Practice - “Human interaction is the only way people really experience the social and emotional benefits of EQ,” he said. And his method to drive human interaction was to create an EQ Slack community. It grew to more than 15,000 members, where members constantly ping each other with new articles, ideas, reflections, and questions.

• An EQ Newsletter - He also launched a newsletter. It started as an email that he sent out to just over 100 colleagues, simply sharing the latest articles he was reading related to emotional intelligence and success. His content curation struck a chord, and his newsletter grew to more than 50,000 subscribers. As the newsletter grew, he evolved it from weekly to a daily stream of EQ “nudges.”

• An Expert Podcast - Hua invites experts onto his podcast to have longer-form conversations on key EQ topics like EQ and AI, psychological safety, emotion regulation, and how EQ can help drive sales.

Together, these created “ambient learning” where EQ becomes a part of people’s daily information flow rather than an isolated training event.

Lesson 3: As AI Grows, So Will The Need for EQ

As artificial intelligence accelerates, Hua believes emotional intelligence is becoming more important, not less. Research from McKinsey supports that view, showing that emotional and social skills are among the hardest capabilities to automate. Adaptability, empathy, judgment, and authentic connection remain distinctly human advantages, and ones that will only grow as we continue to automate different parts of people’s jobs.

“Everything that can be automated will be automated,” Hua said. “The question is: what value do humans still bring?” For leaders, that question is no longer theoretical. AI is reshaping workflows, decision-making, and team structures. Leaders must help people navigate uncertainty, loss, and reinvention—often simultaneously. To do so, they’ll need core emotional intelligence skills like self-awareness, empathy, emotion regulation, and conflict management.

“AI can simulate empathy,” Hua shared as an example of the power of enduring human experiences. “But it doesn’t risk or sacrifice anything for you. Authentic care comes from vulnerability and lived experience.”

Unlike an AI coach or manager, Hua pointed out, your boss can express authentic vulnerability. “Your boss can say things like, ‘I remember when I really had a failure. I remember when I was in a really dark moment. I remember when I was fired.’ AI doesn't have those experiences. And so that's what you're going to want from a leader.”

In other words, as AI gets smarter, the most irreplaceable skills, and the ones we should spend our time practicing, will be those like EQ, which are deeply, authentically human.

‘IQ Without EQ Is a Waste of IQ’

After impacting more than 1.5 million people, Hua believes more strongly than ever that IQ is not enough. Success today requires an integration of EQ plus IQ—what he calls EPIQ skills. His favorite quote of late is from Satya Nadella: “If you just have IQ without EQ, it’s a waste of IQ.”

Emotional intelligence doesn’t scale through mandates or one-time training. It scales when it fits the culture, moves through actionable and digestible learning paths, and helps people leverage their IQ to succeed in their work.