Leading isn’t about the title before your name, or the letters after it—it’s how you make people feel.

Emotional intelligence (EQ) isn’t a “soft skill”; it’s the hardest skill in leadership, and it’s next to impossible to teach. If you want to unlock your team’s potential, you must be able to inspire, empathize, and elevate your talent. In other words, you need to be a leader, rather than a boss.

Let’s start with the “why” behind the importance of EQ for leaders: for the most part, people don’t want to be ticket takers.  They want to be creators, to participate in the creative process.  Study after study has shown that when people are involved with determining what they do and how they do it, they become more deeply invested in the outcomes.  If you take the time to understand your team and communicate with them why you are collectively pursuing a particular North Star, they are much more likely to outperform your expectations than if you simply tell them what to do and how to do it. Happier people, better outcomes.

So…how do you develop and mature your emotional intelligence?

First, start with self-awareness.  Understand your own triggers, blind spots, and strengths; in other words, “Physician, heal thyself.”  This is an area I have struggled with personally, putting my own needs dead last while focusing on producing great outcomes.  But just like they say in the airplane safety lecture, secure your own oxygen mask before helping those around you.  Check with your HR team and see if they subscribe to services like the Clifton Strengths Assessment.  These profiling tools will help you honestly evaluate yourself and understand how you function best.

Next, practice active listening. Don’t just hear your team—seek to understand their fears, motivations, and ideas.  This is why I say that 1:1s with team members of any level are non-negotiable.  It’s one thing to have an open-door policy. It’s another to create the level of comfort and trust where junior engineers are willing to take the initiative and talk to you. I always ended my 1:1s by asking, “What’s something that nobody wants to tell me?”  It almost always yielded eye-opening revelations.  Remember why you hired your team members; it’s because they have skills and expertise that make the collective team stronger, so make sure you are tapping into that intelligence!

Then, focus on empathy.  Recognize emotions in others and respond in ways that build connection and trust. This is probably the toughest part for some leaders to adopt; if you aren’t already an empathetic person, trying to fake it is likely going to be worse.  I’ve seen many bosses who were almost proud of having no feelings.  While that may have protected them on their journey, it didn’t make their teams feel heard or valued.  It certainly wasn’t inspirational or motivating.

Finally, cultivate emotional agility.  Leadership means adapting your approach to fit the moment, not clinging to a single playbook.  If you are a “my way or the highway” kind of manager, this is your wakeup call.  You should view yourself as the *least* important person in the room, and lead from a position of humility.  Your team is made up of individual persons who have their own sets of challenges, not all ofwhich may be readily apparent to you. Your role as a leader is to adapt your team to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Great leaders don’t just lead—they inspire, empathize, and elevate those around them. They create safe spaces for their teams to try dangerous things, where creativity and risk-taking is encouraged. Unleash your teams by developing and practicing your own emotionalintelligence.

‍