5 Lessons From 40 EQ Experts

Did someone forward you this newsletter? You can subscribe here. 
Want to become a certified EQ coach and facilitator? Learn more here. 

According to reports like the McKinsey analysis on jobs and the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs, organizations are all scrambling to answer the same question: “What skills do we need to double or triple down on as we enter the AI Era?”

Across these reports, the skill that continues to top this list of “enduring skills for the AI Era” is emotional intelligence (EQ). That’s held true across over 40 interviews with talent development leaders. It’s also echoed by business leaders like HubSpot’s founder, Dharmesh Shah, who recently presented a keynote slide that simply said “EQ > AI.” He pointed out that “AI does not have emotions. It hasn’t had any lived experience, but you do.” And Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, said in an interview that “IQ without EQ is just a waste of IQ.”

Over the last four months, I interviewed over 40 talent development leaders, all of whom are responsible for building and scaling emotional intelligence training. While the subtleties of their training programs often varied, some clear patterns came up. Patterns that distinguished the very best EQ programs from the rest.

Below are five lessons that surfaced the most often. They’re not theoretical best practices. They’re drawn directly from how leading organizations are making emotional intelligence training stick.

Takeaway #1: Make Your EQ Training Story-Based to Win Buy-In

At least half of the published articles that result from these interviews open with stories about people using EQ skills at work. One describes a hotel employee using EQ skills to save a guest’s life. One follows a law enforcement officer who went from dismissing human skills as “soft” to getting his PhD in EQ. Another follows the journey of the current CHRO of Delta from her beginnings as a flight attendant.

There’s a reason these types of stories make for great hooks. They’re emotionally resonant. They make EQ feel relevant, not abstract. This same tactic applies to the training room. Stories help busy leaders move from dismissing your training as “soft” to seeing and feeling a living example of these skills can help them perform better.

One great example of story-driven training comes from Renny Bloch, Director of Leadership Development at Regeneron. He uses an exercise called “Best Leaders” where he asks people to think back to the best leader they’ve had. He then asks them to write down a few adjectives to describe what made that person a good leader. Next, he writes out four categories on a whiteboard: IQ, Technical Skills, EQ, and Other. The group works through their adjectives, categorizing them into one of the four buckets. They quickly see that nearly all of their adjectives fall into that EQ bucket.

Rather than try to win people over purely with research and data (though definitely do that too!), incorporate stories that paint a clear picture of how EQ can impact performance. Bonus points if you can get a more senior leader to join your workshop to share a personal story.

Takeaway #2: Make Your EQ Training Measurable, and Measure the Big Things

The best case examples of EQ training all link EQ to hard results. Hospitality companies link EQ training to improved guest satisfaction, healthcare companies to improved patient satisfaction, and manufacturing companies to reduced incidents.

At MD Anderson Cancer Center, Director of Leadership Development, Cathy Schaefer, has shown measurable gains for the leaders who complete the institution’s training programs. For instance, leaders who graduated from the program saw greater scores in leadership effectiveness, team engagement, and even patient satisfaction.

While it took a lot of time and effort for Schaeffer’s team to measure this impact, it continues to pay dividends. Buy-in from busy physicians, nurse leaders, and senior leaders makes it easy to champion investment in expanded training throughout the organization.

Takeaway #3: Make Your EQ Training In-Person (Or at Least “Live”)

Research shows that emotions are contagious. Meaning, when someone enters the room, their emotions transfer to you like a virus. Often, you don’t realize it’s happening. You just feel the emotion.

In EQ training, this degree of interconnectivity can work to your advantage. By having leaders practice together, you can bring these interpersonal, emotion-based skills to life. It’s the difference between simply reflecting on a time you felt stressed, and simulating on-the-job stress with a peer. In the latter example, the emotion is actually present. It’s the old “practice like you play” mantra applied to emotional intelligence.

Ash Panjwani, Head of Global Talent Development at Procore, is very thoughtful about how she facilitates connection between participants in her EQ training programs. For example, she explained to me that at the VP level, “these leaders need to be in the thick of the friction, working themselves through difficult situations that are occurring across the company.” And at the first-line leader level, she said, “This group needs to build a network, connective tissue. This is what drives retention.”

The idea with live EQ training is to pull rather than push. When training skills that hinge on interaction and emotions, bring your people together. It will make your learning more interesting, memorable, and practical.

Takeaway #4: Make Your EQ Training Audience-Specific

If you follow the previous three lessons, you will very likely nail this fourth lesson without trying. In lesson one, a great story will need to be audience-specific to resonate. To measure impact in lesson two, you need to take into account the target outcomes of your participants (i.e., patient satisfaction). And notice, in the example in lesson three, how Panjwani tailors the style of interaction to the needs of each level of leadership.

To tailor to your audience, you don’t need to redesign your entire program. Rather, you can spend extra time on the specific EQ behaviors that will help your audience most. One great example comes from Grand Central Bakery, where about half of the workforce operates in bakeries. Tight-knit teams need EQ skills to build their relationships, engage in healthy conflicts, and collaborate smoothly as one unit. The other half of the staff work in cafes. In this environment, leaders need to manage their emotions in high-stress situations and navigate upset customers.

The 80-20 rule—which says that 20% of the work delivers 80% of the results—is apt here. Consider what 20% of your programming might you adjust for this audience to improve your program by 80%?

Takeaway #5: Make Your EQ Training Longitudinal

The best talent development leaders lace EQ through multiple checkpoints. This helps to embed emotional intelligence into your company’s culture. A few examples:

At the mining company Orica, emotional intelligence appears on all leaders’ annual 360 assessments. Leaders practice key behaviors in their areas for improvement and retest yearly as a part of their performance review.

At MD Anderson Cancer Center, emotional intelligence training and other leadership development training counts toward promotion as “one year of leading people.”

At Amazon, Chief EQ Evangelist Rich Hua created a mass Slack community devoted entirely to emotional intelligence. People would share what they were reading, challenges they faced at work, and relevant podcasts, videos, and studies.

Even though each of these examples seems quite different from one another, they share in common that they’re ongoing and integrated into each company’s way of working.

Applying These 5 Lessons in Your Own Training

Although a select few companies incorporated all five of these takeaways into their emotional intelligence training programs, many of the best applied only two or three. But they applied them with thoughtful precision.

That’s my recommendation for any company looking to roll out EQ training for the first time. Choose to apply just one or two of these strategies, and focus on really getting them right. Then, start to stack on the other strategies on this list.