All Decisions Are Emotional

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In 2018, an article called “Pulling the Goalie” went viral. The article looked at decision-making in hockey, and it completely debunked a core piece of hockey strategy.

When losing late in the game, there’s a tradition to pull your goalie with 2-minutes left. It’s a calculated risk. Putting your goalie on offense improves scoring potential, but you leave your own goal wide open.

The paper showed that the 2-minute convention wasn’t quite as “calculated” or “logical” as teams claimed it was. The tradition was mostly emotion-based. Logically, the authors showed that a team down by one goal should actually pull their goalie with six minutes left, and a team down by two goals should pull their goalie with 12 minutes left. Coaches knew and ignored these statistics for fear of losing badly. They feared how owners, fans, and players might respond if they lost 6-0 instead of 2-0.

Every Decision Has An Emotional Component

“Pulling the Goalie” shows one specific example, but emotions drive decisions all the time, often unbeknownst to the decision maker. Consider the famous study showing that judges’ favorable parole rulings dropped sharply toward food breaks, the fact that we donate more when there’s one clear person in need, and the fact that we are more likely to vote to keep a local representative if our local sports team wins. Or, just look at my tanking investment in Oatly that I refuse to let go of because I love the copywriting on the carton.

The idea here isn’t to say that emotions cause poor decision-making. That’s patently false. Anxiety, for example, helps people avoid harmful outcomes all the time. You prepare your house for your baby, you practice before a public speech, and you wear sunscreen all because you feel anxiety about potential negative outcomes.

The idea instead is to say that you need to take your emotions into account when you make a decision. Ignore them, and they’ll often make the decision for you. Instead, you should tune into your emotions and choose how you want to react.

Emotional Intelligence and Decision-Making

Knowing that all decisions are emotional, it’s not exactly “a jump, a hop, and a skip away” to say that emotional intelligence (EQ) skills should improve your decision-making. EQ is your ability to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions and the emotions of others in order to be effective. This, of course, applies cleanly to decision-making.

You can break EQ down into four core skills:

Self-Awareness: Your ability to recognize and understand your emotions.

Self-Management: Your ability to manage your emotions toward effective outcomes.

Social Awareness: Your ability to recognize and understand the emotions of others.

Relationship Management: Your ability to use each of the three other core skills to build, manage, and maintain relationships.

Then, you can map each of these four core skills cleanly to decision-making:

Self-Awareness: You need to recognize and understand the emotions behind your decision.

Self-Management: You need to manage that emotion so it doesn’t “take over” automatically and dictate your decision. Often, a decision-making process is an EQ strategy, because the process helps you consider your emotions as you make your decision.

Social Awareness: You need to weigh how your decision might make other people feel.

Relationship Management: You need to weigh how your decision might affect your relationships. Many people with strong relationships, may also make better decisions because they can talk their decisions through with trusted friends.

New Research: EQ Skills Associated with Decision-Making Quality

My team at LEADx decided to run the data on 1393 people to see if their EQ scores were associated with better decision-making. Specifically, we looked at two measures: 

1. If you score more highly in emotional intelligence, are you more likely to use a decision-making process? (Likert scale 1-5)

2. If you score more highly in emotional intelligence, are you more likely to have accurately predicted the outcomes of your decisions? (Likert scale 1-5)

I found a pretty consistent pattern: the higher someone’s EQ, the more “disciplined” their decision-making tends to look on paper. In our sample of 1393 people whoo took the LEADx EQ assessment, overall EQ was moderately correlated with using a decision-making process (Spearman ρ = 0.33) and even more strongly correlated with reporting that decisions turn out about as well as expected (ρ = 0.39). Put less statistically: people who said they “Almost always” use a process averaged an EQ of 40.2/50, compared to 33.8/50 for those who said “Rarely”—a 6.4‑point gap. And when it came to decisions turning out as expected, the gap was almost identical (41.6 vs. 35.6, about 6 points). 

When we broke EQ into its four core skills, the story got even sharper: Social Awareness was most tied to using a process (ρ = 0.32), and Self‑Management was the standout for decision results (ρ = 0.37). 

This data doesn’t prove EQ causes better decisions (it’s self-reported), but the signal is hard to miss: the leaders who can manage emotions tend to make decisions that feel less like gut-driven reactions and more like repeatable, predictable choices.

EQ, Decision-Making, and the AI Era

As more and more of our work gets automated, no one knows exactly which skills will be the most important. But, across three of the biggest prediction reports—The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs, The McKinsey Jobs Report, and LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report—emotional intelligence and/or decision-making make the top five of every single list. 

This makes sense, because how else can you ensure that your employees use AI ethically and responsibly? And how else can you ensure that while AI automates rote tasks, your people hone their abilities to do the things that are distinctly human? Through EQ skills, your people can learn to make more sound decisions, connect with others, develop their team members, and think creatively and critically. As jobs change, these are the attributes that will set talent apart, and companies apart.