Are Emotionally Intelligent People More Creative?

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EI Quote of the Week

When an MVP candidate misjudges a ball and falls on his duff, he does it in the sight of millions. You should be willing to do it before your teacher and a few friends or fellow students. If you're always thinking about appearances, you can never attain the state of concentration that's necessary for effective learning and top performance.

—George Leonard, Aikido Instructor

New Research: Are Emotionally Intelligent People More Creative?

As knowledge work gets commodified by AI, enduring human skills continue to rise in value. This shows up on yearly skill reports from McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and LinkedIn, and one skill that consistently tops these lists in recent years is “creativity.”  

That’s because AI has a “middling” effect on creativity. Research shows that when people use AI to produce an output, their outputs become increasingly similar. To get a sense for what this looks like, just scroll through all the mind-numbing AI-written LinkedIn posts. Creativity is valued at organizations because it helps them find outlier ideas, ideas that can change a project, a team, or an organization’s trajectory. To do this, you need creative humans. 

So, how do you train your people to be more creative? One unexpected yet effective avenue is to train their emotional intelligence (EI). 

The Research: EI and Creativity

Since the connection between EI and creativity is not obvious, it would make sense if you’re a bit skeptical. I know I was, at least before we ran the data (and that’s what makes this kind of research so fun). So, let’s start by looking at some clear evidence. At LEADx, we ran a study on 1,305 people, measuring their self-assessed emotional intelligence and self-assessed creativity. We saw a positive association between creativity and emotional intelligence across each of the four core EI skills—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. This positive association held up across two core types of creative thinking—divergent thinking and associative thinking.

To evaluate emotional intelligence, we used our open-source emotional intelligence self-assessment, which is psychologically validated and reliable.

To evaluate creativity, we used two questions: 

• “When solving problems, I generate multiple solutions before choosing one.”

• “I frequently find myself connecting ideas or concepts that other people see as unrelated.”

These two items reflect core cognitive behaviors associated with creativity in psychological and organizational research: 

• The first question measures divergent thinking, or the ability to generate multiple possible solutions before selecting one, which has long been recognized as a central component of creative problem-solving in the work of J. P. Guilford and contemporary creativity researchers. 

• The second question captures associative thinking, or the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas, a hallmark of creative insight described in research on remote association, innovation, and lateral thinking. 

Together, they represent the generative and integrative processes that underlie creative thinking.

Why EI Drives Creativity: The Four Core EI Skills and Their Connection to Creativity 

The idea that you could train emotional intelligence to boost your employees’ creativity sounds like a stretch, but when you start to dig into the connection skill by skill, it makes more sense. 

Self-Awareness and Creativity: Negative emotions like stress, anxiety, and frustration act like a wet blanket on creativity. Self-awareness is your ability to recognize and understand your emotions. This enables you to pick up on derailer emotions early before they send you spiraling. Through noticing alone, research shows you can drastically reduce the negative impact of your emotions. 

Self-Management and Creativity: Self-management is your ability to regulate your emotions and use them to your advantage. Importantly, self-management can help you achieve a flow state, which researchers have connected to massive increases in your creativity (especially your ability to process information and recognize patterns), a five-fold increase in productivity, and an influx of feel-good hormones like norepinephrine, dopamine, and endorphins. 

Social Awareness and Creativity: Social awareness is your ability to pick up on and understand the emotions of others. Through the creative lens, social awareness is about having the empathy to imagine how your idea will come across to others. People high in social awareness can communicate their ideas in a way that other people will feel and understand. Also, psychological safety has been connected to creative collaboration. To create a psychologically safe environment, you need to know how other people feel and how you make other people feel (social awareness). 

Relationship Management and Creativity: Through relationship management skills, you can build a network of interesting and influential people to give you ideas, workshop your ideas and your plans, and to help your ideas spread. Agile collaboration, expressing vulnerability, and engaging in constructive conflict are all critical behaviors to both relationship management and creativity. 

EI Is Foundational to a Number of Enduring Human Skills

Because we experience emotions constantly, they influence nearly everything we do. By training for emotional intelligence, you can build a sturdy foundation from which you can grow other core human skills. Our past research has already shown positive associations between EI & Agility, and between EI and Decision-Making. As knowledge gets cheaper, the value placed on these enduring, irreplaceable human skills will continue to rise. Table showing how, across the board, emotional intelligence skills are associated with both the use of a decision-making process and accurate prediction of decision-making outcomes.

Reports from McKinsey, The World Economic Forum, and LinkedIn all indicate that as AI commoditizes rote work, enduring human skills will be more valuable than ever—skills like agility, resilience, cross-functional collaboration, and decision-making.

The good news is that all of these skills are a matter of emotional intelligence, which is a highly trainable skillset.

Become a LEADx Certified EI trainer and coach, and you will:

• Be equipped with our EI training system of curriculum, assessments, and SME support.

• Help train up your organization on the #1 skill for this BANI time — brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.

• Carry your certification for life, into other orgs and your independent coaching & consulting work. No renewal fees.

Learn more here.