288: Emotional Intelligence As Leadership’s Operating System, with Maggie Sass, Ph.D.

Most leadership breakdowns are not failures of intelligence or strategy. They are emotional failures.

In this episode of the Leadership AI Podcast, Maggie Sass, Ph.D., Executive Vice President of Product, Research, and Professional Services at TalentSmart EQ, explores how emotional intelligence functions as the operating system beneath strategy, coaching, and decision-making.

Together, we unpack what it really means to treat leadership as daily emotional behavior, especially in high-pressure environments like healthcare.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• why leadership is fundamentally emotional, not just technical
• how limbic “hijacks” happen under pressure and how to recover
• the four core EQ skills and how they build on each other
• delivering feedback that creates learning, not defensiveness
• building habits through tiny experiments and simple cues
• scaling EQ through assessments, onboarding, and certifications
• navigating generational differences around emotions at work
• a simple five-minute morning and evening practice to strengthen EQ

If you care about leadership performance that holds under pressure, this episode is for you.

Be sure to follow Maggie Sass, Ph.D. on LinkedIn for practical insights on emotional intelligence and organizational performance.

Transcript

Framing Leadership As Daily Behavior

Dr. Pelè 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to the Leadership AI Podcast. I'm Dr. Pillai, and on this podcast, we explore how leadership becomes daily behavior, not just good intentions. And today we're talking about the emotional architecture underneath that, underneath the performance of leadership. And it's truly my pleasure to welcome Maggie Sass, PhD, Executive Vice President of Product, Research and Professional Services at TalentSmart EQ. Wait for this. Maggie is an organizational psychologist, an executive coach, and one of the clearest voices today on the human side of leadership. She's also a thought leader on LinkedIn, where she regularly challenges how we think about emotional intelligence at work.

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 0:53

Maggie, how are you doing today? I'm so good. I'm thrilled to be here.

Dr. Pelè 0:58

I know that was a long preamble, but I just had to get all your stuff out. You know, I just appreciate you. Where are you actually located right now? Where are you?

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 1:07

Yeah, I'm in San Diego, California, where I was actually born and raised. Wow. So that's uh I'm about one of eight. Most people are transplants in San Diego. Wow.

Dr. Pelè 1:16

So you actually you're where you you've always been, in a sense.

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 1:20

Yeah. I yeah, I studied in Northern California, so I left for a couple of years. I lived in London for a little bit. I lived in Sacramento, but it's hard to bench places to San Diego. So I'm back.

Maggie’s Path And Early Insights

Dr. Pelè 1:32

Awesome. Well, Maggie, I told you before we started that I'm just thrilled and really grateful that you're here because you're a top voice uh in this sort of you know confluence between emotional intelligence and how leadership shows up every day. One of the things you say is that most leadership problems aren't skill problems, they're emotional problems hiding inside people and systems. What do you mean by that? And when did that insight become sort of undeniable for you?

Skills Vs Emotions In Real Performance

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 2:01

Yeah. It's a good question. Um, so you know, I started my professional career at the Center for Creative Leadership. Uh, it is uh an organization that focuses solely on leaders, um, headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina, but they have a campus in San Diego. So that's where I did my um my internship as a master's student before I started tackling my dissertation. And um uh when I first started training leadership development programs, uh, and the way CCL works, you know, the programs are by leadership level. Uh what I was finding was, you know, the content was organized by competency, skill competency. Uh so you know, we're gonna teach you how to coach, we were gonna teach you about decision making, we're gonna teach you about time or stress management, all great things. I think of those as sort of like horizontal learning buckets, right? So there's there's lots of skills and um leadership, you know, can be learned absolutely. But I think what was so interesting to me over the years, and I started to see really clearly, especially as I started to train much more senior programs, uh, was it really had nothing to do with vertical sort of building skill blocks and much more to do with can you understand the emotions that sit underneath all of those skills? If you can't regulate, it doesn't matter if you have taken strategic innovation with Clay Christensen himself from Harvard. If you can't regulate, if you get into a fight with your partner on the way into the office and you're about to head into a strategy meeting, it won't matter because you won't be able to access the training that you have. Um, and so I I really sort of hooked into this idea of okay, so then if that's true, what does that mean about leadership? What is leadership really and how do we do it well?

Dr. Pelè 3:59

You know what's interesting? It sounds almost like you're saying, sure, there's a theory of leadership over here, but what happens in the moment, every day, when that thing snaps and you gotta be able to read the situation on the spot? In high pressure environments, you know, I currently work in the healthcare verse vertical. Um our our product is very much focused in healthcare. I wonder what, you know, as you know, that's high pressure in the moment, everything's happening, people die, you know. Yep if you don't get things done right. Um what emotional patterns do you think show up in those high stress moments that people need to watch out for beyond theory?

High-Stress Healthcare And Limbic Hijacks

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 4:40

Yeah. Uh actually it's so interesting. It sitting inside hospitals uh is a great place to observe emotional intelligence, high and low, in the wild. Um, and it's so interesting because people have developed different strategies for themselves. I think what happens, and and this is very um sort of an elementary understanding of the brain. So, you know, if if you've got a degree in neuroscience, don't come after me because I'm I'm simplifying this on purpose. But you know, your um your brain has a lot of different areas that process emotions, but one big one is the limbic uh system. And um you can get hijacked, right? So if you imagine that you are walking down a busy hospital hallway, and coming up the hallway is, you know, someone on a stretcher and you know they're bleeding out, right? And so you've got paramedics and you've got maybe the family that's running towards you. And then imagine that you're getting a call from your child's school at the same time, and then you can hear coding going off on the loudspeaker, and then someone drops a coffee on the floor in front of you, right? So, like the brain is taking in all of that information through the brainstem, all of that sensory information comes in. It all passes through the limbic system, which gets coded emotionally even before it makes it to your prefrontal cortex, where you've got now the ability to have both logic and emotionality. And you can you can have access to both of those to make good decisions. But a lot of times you are reacting before it gets there, right? Because all of this stuff is coming in. I was thinking about this last night. Um, I was sitting next to my toddler, who I lovingly describe as a pterodactyl, just unhinged these days. Um, and I was I was typing something on my computer, and we had the Olympics on the TV. So there's like sensory stuff happening, and I'm typing something, and my toddler just starts pounding on my laptop. And, you know, I think of myself as someone who works really hard to practice high EQ and sort of is is calm, and I was not calm. My response was not calm in that moment because you know, I was having a knee-jerk sort of uh hijacked reaction to what was happening. Um, and that happens super easily for people all the time. It's it's really interesting. My um I I've been in hospitals uh more consistently in the last couple of years because of what's going on with family members, and you can watch people who are who have learned to manage themselves really well. So imagine that scene that I just described, right? You can see um, you know, nurse admins and physicians um close their eyes and sort of take a deep breath. Like sometimes they like put their hands like this, but you can see them just like giving themselves a hot minute to be able to create some space so that they they have more choice in what comes next. That's uh I think a lot of times what I say is your brain is sort of wired to keep you safe, and a lot of what happens inside organizations feels like legitimate threat to your brain. So I don't really care what your first reaction is, because that's your brain's reaction. I care what your second reaction is, because if you can create some space before between the like initial brain reaction, but not really have an external reaction to it, then you've got some ability to plot a different course.

Dr. Pelè 8:46

You know, whenever I talk about this topic, I like to remind people that Descartes once said, uh, I think, therefore I am, but he was wrong. Because everything science shows us that we feel first, the emotions get the data first before anything else. So he should have said, I feel, therefore I am, quite frankly. Um so I'm totally aligned with you. In fact, um I would, you know, I would love to know more about uh your organization and the kinds of things uh that you guys use to help people in these difficult moments where they've got to literally make split-second decisions that could that could save lives.

Creating Space For A Second Reaction

TalentSmart EQ’s Origins And Approach

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 9:28

Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, TalentSmart EQ, we've been around for two decades. Um, you know, I think originally the the company was founded at this sort of magical time. Uh Dan Goldman had written Emotional Intelligence in the mid-90s, and that book sort of took the business world by storm because I think up until that point, the the main message was you've got to have high IQ to be successful, right? And I think the Goldman's message sort of flipped the script a little bit and said, you could actually have maybe mid-range IQ and be incredibly successful because EQ is this thing that really impacts success in different categories. And unlike IQ, you can build it, you can practice. It's a real muscle. And I think um I think what TalentSmart does really well uh is I think that we we've taken a complicated topic. You know, emotional intelligence uh is is complex, right? Because you're pulling from neuroscience, you're pulling from uh emotions research, you're pulling from uh organized and applied uh psychology, and you've got to find ways to make it practical and accessible. It's really interesting. So, you know, this is the this is the book that we're really known for, Emotional Intelligence 2.0. This book was written in 2009, and it still to this day is on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list, and people are still finding it. It, you know, they're they're still discovering it for the first time. And I think the reason it's got such uh sort of evergreen um appeal is because it is incredibly uh practical, but it also does not make you feel badly about yourself. So it's we know when I was at CCL, I was I was coaching very senior leaders who were incredibly successful, maybe in sales or in in other capacities, but you know, they were leaving trails of bodies behind them. They were not doing themselves any favors with building relationships with people. And a lot of times I would just hand them this book and just say, like, let's just start here. Just take uh, you know, take the weekend to read this book. You could read it in a couple of hours. Um, and the next session that I would have with them, they would come back and say, It's this is wild. My partner, you know, my wife or my husband has been telling me these things for 20 years, and we just had maybe the best conversation of our marriage because of this book. And I think part of it is because the strategies are like snacks, right? So it's like, greet somebody by name, Pele. Interesting. Your name is Pele. Where does that name come from? Like it gives you these small ins with people that allow you to better understand yourself, better understand other people. When we know people more, we're less likely to be misunderstood. That, you know, impacts the way you think about hard conversations and conflict and feedback, all of these things. And so I think um it allows people to sort of lower their defenses and say, like, I'll try. You know, you you study learning, like learning is hard. A lot of times we do not want to learn things because we sort of look like idiots in the beginning, the competence and the con confidence goes down. I think this feels like a right-sized step towards learning in a way that someone will say, Okay, I could do that.

Dr. Pelè 13:13

Yeah, no, I I hear you. In fact, um, I love the way you you sort of uh put a almost a historical stepping stone uh from Daniel Golesman Goldman's um recognition that IQ is not enough, uh EQ is necessary. I bet you there's a new angle that's happening right now in the world of AI that says It's wild. AI gives us anything you want to know. Intelligence, not an issue because you can just type it in and figure out whatever you need to know. That makes EQ even more important, isn't it?

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 13:45

I think so. I mean, it's you know, we we say things like people get hired for IQ, but they get fired for EQ. Yeah, yeah. Or um, this is sort of a take on um, I think there was a famous football coach who said, like, um like talent sets the floor, but character sets the ceiling, you know, so it's sort of like IQ sets the floor, EQ sets the ceiling. I I think you're right. I think that in a lot of ways, AI has made IQ sort of table stakes, like information is no longer king. Like we are all we've democratized information. So now it's do you know who you are? Do you do you have an accurate understanding of how you show up in the world and what's working about that, maybe what's not working about that, how you adjust it to different types of audiences? Do you know how to manage yourself when the stretchers are coming at you? Right. I I think the biggest thing that I have been thinking about the last couple of years is emotional intelligence is incredibly easy to do when everything is going well. Right? When you wake up on the right side of the bed and your children are behaving and everyone's putting their dishes in the sink and they got their shoes on, and we're getting in the car, and there's no traffic, and revenue's great, and you're getting a raise, all of that high EQ for days, not that hard. That's the problem, though, right? Is that you you need EQ the second that your brain makes it hard to actually accomplish it in the moment. And so we've got to find ways to think about how do you build up sort of a bank account of EQ points long before you need them, right? If you think about that like sort of in parallel with resilience, how do you have enough resources and tools so that in the moment you know what to do to at least minimize the harm that you're doing to yourself or to others? And then inevitably, we're all gonna make mistakes. We're all gonna um step uh uh, you know, step in it. And so then how do we repair in better ways than than we use right now?

EQ Beating IQ In The Age Of AI

Dr. Pelè 16:01

Yeah. You know, um, at practicing excellence, which is uh where I work, yeah, um, one of the big themes is this idea of uh human uh performance, human development, the human angle of being a great physician, for example. So, you know, my wife is uh she's a doctor, and I I just love her as a doctor because what she does is more human than technical. She'll play with her patients, she'll you know, dance with them, have fun with them, and they love her, and then the technical skills and the doctoring it all works out, and that's the human angle. So you know, I wonder if you could break down emotional intelligence, which is you know a human angle, yeah, into its core constituent parts. You know, like for example, in my world, you know, there's there are three big things. You learn something, you do it or you don't do it, and you turn it into habits or you don't turn it into habits. Those three things uh exist. What are the things that exist to make emotional intelligence what it needs to be?

The Four Core EQ Competencies

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 16:59

Yeah. So I would say the um the cliff notes is emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, recognize, and manage your emotions and other people's for better outcomes. So it breaks down into four pieces. Two of them are personal competences, so things that you own, and two of them are social competences. So the first is self-awareness. Like I was saying before, do I, do I know how I accurately show up? And how do I, how do I do a better job of getting enough information so that I have an accurate picture? And then self-management. So it's what do I see in myself, self-awareness, and then what do I do about that information is self-management. So can you use that information to help you out of hard situations or at least minimize the harm in hard situations? And then the social competences are social awareness. So am I, Maggie, good at recognizing what's going on for Pele? How am I watching your verbals, nonverbals? How am I tracking to better understand how to meet your needs in this conversation or relationship more broadly? And then so that's me using my awareness, right, externally. And then what do I do with that awareness? And that's the last skill, which is relationship management. And really the first three skills build because if you're if you're taking all of that information in and using it appropriately, then it allows you to build healthy, strong relationships, both at and outside of work.

Dr. Pelè 18:38

You know, when whenever I read your LinkedIn posts, they're very much this is the real world. Do it like this in the real world. You're not doing the theory thing. Um so now that you've explained what emotional intelligence essentially is, someone might be listening, going, okay, now I know what it is, right?

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 18:55

Yeah.

Dr. Pelè 18:56

Can we bring it down to their level and say, here's what could go wrong? Like emotionally speaking, what causes leaders to default to old habits or just lose it in the moment, as you've described? What are the things they should be watching out for so they can do these things right? These four components.

Triggers, Feedback, And Bad Habits

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 19:14

Yeah. Um, okay, so I was at the um the car dealership yesterday. I took my car in for servicing. So I was set up in sort of the waiting area, just doing work while I was waiting for the car to be ready. And uh, maybe 20 feet from me, uh, a manager was screaming at a direct report. Uh, so I wrote a LinkedIn post about this because I was within earshot. So this person was like, you know, what's your problem? Are you even awake yet? Are you in interstellar space? And it was so interesting because I, you know, I obviously could hear it. I wasn't on a meeting, so I sort of looked around and there were so many people. There were customers, there were uh employees. Um, the person getting screamed at sort of quietly, you know, it almost inaudibly, you know, said sorry. But I thought to myself, okay, um, I think a lot of times what we tend to do is we we sort of villainize the the bad person and we we elevate the victim in some situations, right? Because it would be easy in that situation to say, like, that manager is being a jerk and the direct report is being attacked. And I don't disagree, right? But you know, let's let's try to like live in both people's shoes. What if what this person had done was the hundredth time they had made that mistake? Or what if that cost the business $50,000, right? Like, I think for every person listening, there is there is a number of times that someone did it or uh an amount of money where you could say, like, okay, I could understand why someone would be screaming like that. The problem is it doesn't, it doesn't really matter what the person did, what the direct report did. The second that you behave like that, you're the bigger asshole. And no, I don't really care. I don't care how much money they lost you, I don't care how many times they did it. You you are not thinking about your job in the way that it actually matters to you. Like, what is the point of feedback? The point of feedback is to get someone to understand what to keep doing, what's working and why, and what to stop doing. The second that you say that sentence to somebody, right? Like screaming questions that aren't really questions, they're attacks, you're not considering what that person would really need to change, right? You're in the business of learning and like what it takes to get to have it. That person does not want to turn anything. That you care about into a habit now. That person just wants the day to be over.

Dr. Pelè 22:06

You know, you know, it's interesting because I've seen, personally seen, uh, and experienced people in very professional environments behave very badly, uh screaming, all those things. And you know that they know better, but they're just not doing better at the moment. Um, you know, I wonder, for example, I wonder, for example, how you guys take your solution and you take your solution to the world so that it can scale. Because I know that you, you know, of course, your assessments are a big part of what you do. You help people see what they can't see until it's assessed. How do you scale that? How do you get a larger organization to benefit benefit from uh TalentSmart's work?

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 22:50

Yeah. Besides the book.

Dr. Pelè 22:52

Besides the book, of course. Yeah.

Scaling EQ Through Assessments And Training

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 22:55

That'll scale. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Um, I I mean, I think one of the things that we do is we have trainer certifications. So we love to partner with organizations that are thinking about it in a not in a transactional sort of like, let's check the EQ box way, but more, you know, we're thinking about how EQ connects to all of our other learning engagements and how we get activation of those learning engagements when the EQ is a um a known skill set. Um I think the other thing too is it's about really understanding what is it that you're trying to accomplish as a business and connect EQ to all the pieces underneath that. Because I think, like I was saying at the beginning of our call, right? Like you can think of EQ as a horizontal learning bucket, just like you know, learning about conflict strategies or learning about time management, but you can also think about emotional intelligence as an operating system of the way that you think about how you run your entire organization. And so if you educate people uh in the skills, then they are given this opportunity to really think about how they would take that and apply it to all parts of their work. So, you know, we do work with uh people on executive teams. We we take the EQ course into onboarding in big organizations, but I think the my favorite work that we do with clients uh uh comes in the form of organizations that have really thought about it from a strategic uh advantage perspective.

Tiny Experiments And Habit Formation

Dr. Pelè 24:39

Wow. You know, um I I wonder I wonder how uh I wonder how people react to learning about EQ and then getting in the moment and a habit takes over and then they're like, oh gosh, I didn't quite get that. You know, how do you connect EQ to habits? You know, by the way, that's my favorite word if I haven't told you that before. The word habits building and sustaining good habits, my favorite. How do you connect this operating system? I love the word operating system, the the phrase. How do you operate, how do you connect that to habits?

Generational Gaps And Emotional Norms

Leadership Is Emotional, Point Blank

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 25:17

Yeah. Um, it's a good question. Um, okay, we've all read, you know, James Clear's book. We we've all read all the habit books. Yes. Habits are so hard because your brain loves to be lazy. And your brain just wants to keep the patterns it's got right now, right? So to build or to break habits takes activation energy, and the brain is going to do anything it can to sort of circumvent that goal. And so I think I think one of the things that I have done in the last couple of years, there's this great book um uh called Tiny Experiments. It's written by a woman, a neuroscientist, um LeCov, uh, I think is her last name. But um her sort of strategy around goal setting is like modern goal setting is maybe a little too big. The world, you know, with AI and and other technologies is just moving so aggressively fast that it's hard to even keep pace with. If you I set a goal on January 1, does that goal even make sense one quarter in or two quarters in, much less the end of the year? And so her strategy is like come up with a bunch of tiny experiments and just keep running tiny experiments over and over and over again. That's the way that I talk to our learners and and clients about emotional intelligence. I think one of the biggest things we're up against, to be honest, is the way that generations think about emotions differently. So you've got a lot of um senior leaders who were who are coming from generations where the mindset was we check emotions at the door. And uh in large part, many of those people were raised in homes where they were told, like, don't, you know, don't be a sissy, uh, you know, don't cry. And they weren't given the tools at home because their parents weren't given the tools either, right? They weren't given the tools at school. They showed up to work and they were told, like, we do work here, you know, you leave your emotions at the door. So they weren't given the tools there. And so it's basically like we're all walking around with no manual for the biggest thing that drives behavior. And if you don't have access to it, if you're not paying attention to it, if you if you don't understand it, then it is driving your behavior and you are not conscious of it. And that's the scariest place to be. I think the the current generations are much more interested in emotional intelligence. They're much more bought in that emotions are important and helpful, but that means that we've got a mix of opinions about emotions inside the workforce right now. And so it's hard to understand each other and it's hard to get it right. Um, I I think the the most important thing that I talk about is that leadership is emotional, point blank. Like we think about leadership, like leadership is the work, and then emotions are this sort of unfortunate side effect that we have to deal with. You got to flip that. It your life gets so much better if you are in clear agreement with yourself that leadership is emotional, because I think then some people would maybe choose not to be leaders. If they knew what was required, it doesn't just come with the salary, it doesn't just come with the prestige, it comes with the expectation that you are doing work to better understand yourself and you care for your team in holistic ways, where you are understanding their output and sort of what they're capable of, but you also understand that they're a whole human doing that work, and that's a complicated job.

Dr. Pelè 29:28

Yeah. Yeah. I I remember working in an organization once where the CEO uh she came down and was very, very animated and angry, and she said, We don't have time for all these emotions everywhere. You guys gotta get your work done. And I'm sitting there going, Thank you for showing your emotions. You know, I mean, we can't eliminate emotions, they're always with us. Um Maggie, I wonder as we close, if leaders listening today could begin practicing one emotional habit, just one, um, tomorrow, for example, yeah, that would meaningfully improve their performance under pressure or generally, what would you recommend?

One Daily Practice To Build EQ

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 30:08

Yeah. Uh the best thing that you can do for yourself is to take five minutes at the beginning of your day and five minutes at the end of your day. So at the beginning of the day, it's, you know, what am I thinking about right now? What am I feeling right now? What am I excited about? What is what am I maybe scared of? Like start to start to pay attention. You know, if you don't know what your emotions are, you're teaching yourself right now, that's okay. You're 55 doing that, that's okay. Just start today. Just start right now. Um, because then you can track patterns over time, right? So capture that in the morning, and then at the end of your day, just a couple minutes and and think about all the AI tools to help you now. Like you don't even have to be writing in a journal. Like you can be dictating on your drive home, you can talk to Chat GBT, whatever you want to do. Um, but think about like what what was the biggest uh emotion of my day and how did it impact the way I interacted with people and my decision making, right? Like just start to track and pay attention to the way emotions are showing up so that you can put yourself more in the driver's seat.

Closing Thanks And Follow Maggie

Dr. Pelè 31:21

Wow. Well, Maggie, you know, I could listen to you all day because I love this topic. It's so powerful. Um, but I just want to say to anyone listening, I think what Maggie's saying is start with awareness, start with being intentional about watching and listening to yourself and categorizing what's really happening. Um, Maggie, I think that could be a lifesaver because people uh we so many of us are just doing things without really knowing what's behind what we're doing. So thank you so much for being here, for sharing your expertise. And I'm gonna keep following you on LinkedIn. Whoever you are listening to this, thank you. Make sure you follow Maggie Sass PhD on LinkedIn. She's got a lot to say about practical things with respect to leadership and emotional intelligence. Thank you, Maggie.

Maggie Sass, Ph.D. 32:09

Yeah, thank you so much.

Dr. Pelè 32:11

All right.