Emotional Intelligence: The Multiplier You’ve Been Overlooking—And How to Finally Unlock It

Think your IQ is what limits your influence? The real bottleneck might be your reactions. We pull back the curtain on emotional intelligence and show how it quietly governs decision quality, trust, performance, and the culture your team lives in every day. Instead of treating EQ as a soft add-on, we frame it as the leadership multiplier that turns strategy into steady execution.

We break down the four core domains—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management—and connect them to moments you face at work: the meeting where tension spikes, the email that triggers you, the one-on-ones where people read your mood more than your words. You’ll hear candid reflections on blind spots, how values drive triggers, and why stress widens the gap between who we think we are and how others experience us. We explore the hard ROI: regulated leaders access clearer judgment, build predictable trust, reduce drama, and unlock smarter problem solving across the team.

Along the way, we share practical moves you can use right away. Map your top triggers to the values beneath them. Pause before key decisions to name what you feel and choose instead of react. De-escalate heat with simple scripts that separate facts from stories. Treat culture as a daily product of repeated reactions—because mindset drives behavior, behavior shapes culture, and culture becomes legacy. If you want your team to think better and move faster, start by leading your inner world on purpose.

Listen now, then tell us: what emotion is steering your leadership today? If you found value here, subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a quick review to help more leaders lead on purpose.

Ambitious leaders know that real leadership goes far beyond titles—it’s about developing the clarity and mindset to guide others with confidence. In this podcast, you’ll explore what today’s leaders truly need, from navigating everyday problem solving to handling tough moments of workplace conflict with steadiness and respect. Episodes dive into setting healthy workplace boundaries, strengthening workplace collaboration, and building the emotional intelligence and emotional agility that make leadership sustainable. Whether you’re managing a growing team or refining your voice as a decision-maker, you’ll find insights that help you cultivate a resilient growth mindset and elevate your impact.

Transcript

Rethinking Emotional Intelligence

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast, the show that helps leaders gain clarity, build emotional agility, and create meaningful impact without sacrificing themselves. I'm your host, Cindy Wetland. And in this episode, we're going to talk about challenging maybe the way you think about leadership. And it's about emotional intelligence. It's not a soft skill, it's not secondary, it's not optional, and it's not something you focus on after mastering strategy. Emotional intelligence is a core leadership discipline. And here's the truth: a lot of people don't lose influence because they lack intelligence. They lose influence because they lack awareness, awareness of emotions, triggers, tone, or impact on others. Most leaders really invest heavily in results. I know I did goals, metrics, performance, but very few invest intentionally in the patterns that drive those results. So if mindset drives behavior and behavior shapes culture, then your emotional intelligence sits at the top and is the root of your leadership effectiveness. So today we're talking about the ROI, why it directly impacts decision making and trust and performance, and ultimately the legacy you leave as a leader. Because leadership on purpose begins with leading yourself first. Let's dive in. Emotional intelligence isn't a soft skill, it's a leadership multiplier. I believe that very strongly. And I've mentioned many times that if I could go back and do one thing, just one thing differently in my career, it would be around the area of emotional intelligence. At that time, there was information about it, but it's not as much as exists today. And there was not a lot of, I think, insight about the lack of emotional intelligence on leadership, but also business success. And I would say that in many ways, I was a successful leader, but was I effective at emotional regulation and managing my stress and my emotional reactions? 100% no, I was not. So if we think about what emotional intelligence is, typically it is referred to as four key domains. That is the emotional awareness that we know that we're having an emotion. And you know what? A lot of people don't when they're having them even experiencing it, feeling that emotion in your body. The second is emotional self-management. What do you do with it? The workplace is full of, oh, I don't know. Do any of you have drama? Drama, as stated by Cy Wakeman, who's an author who uh re she writes about um drama in the workplace. She calls it emotional waste. And I think that's a pretty good definition, right? People are wasting emotional reactions, uh, reacting to things in a very unproductive, destructive way. I love that definition. So emotional self-awareness, emotional regulation, what do you do with it? And then there's all about your connection with others, empathy, that's social awareness. Are you able to connect with people? And then, of course, the quality of all your relationships, relationship management. And that is a profound and important domain for anyone who's in a leadership role or an aspiring leader for the most part. So I think it's important to know that it isn't about being nice, it isn't about being overly emotional, it isn't about managing yourself, even to manage and lead others. But if you can't manage your internal world, then how are you going to manage outcomes? I think what's really important to notice and note that I have talked about a lot in these podcasts is that there's a gap in self-awareness. There's a lot of research that suggests most people believe they're self-aware and they aren't. And I think this comes to emotional intelligence a lot. A lot of people maybe think about leaders that you've worked with who think they're very calm, but they actually come across as uh cold or aloof, or leaders who think they're passionate and they are really very reactive in how they respond to things, or leaders who think they're direct, but they're actually disrespectful or dismissive. And I think most leaders, and this this came out, so I'm reading a really great book right now by Tasha Yurich, and it's called Insight. And she has been one of the researchers that's talked about this gap in self-awareness. But she talks about um doing research from the books of Travis Bradbury, and that what he has noted about emotional intelligence in his online EQ assessment is that it's gone up over time. And her research actually points to something different, that maybe that absence of self-awareness is what is contributing to what is perceived as higher emotional intelligence. And that emotional intelligence accounts for a lot of our work performance. So if we say we don't have high emotional intelligence or people are overestimating it, it is 100% going to have an impact on our performance, our productivities, and our business results. And I saw that in myself. Not that I didn't typically get good business results, I think I could have done better for myself and for my team. I think it's also important that we are often blind to our triggers. I do a lot of activities in classes where I have people do work on what they value and seeing the connection between values and triggers, because typically, and I'll give you an example, I'm I have a very strong, strong work ethic. That's how I was raised. That's important to me. I'm very triggered by a lack of accountability or people who are entitled. Entitlement was always a biggie for me. I thought we were taught in our family you don't you work hard for things, right? You're not just given things. So for me, the opposite of my value of hard work and determination and persistence, the trigger is around entitlement or what I perceive as a lack of accountability. Do you know what your triggers are? Do other people around you know that? And I think what's important to know is that stress amplifies those blind spots. When we're under stress, we're not as aware, we're not as internally regulated to notice and pay attention others' reactions to us. So I think that autopilot mode that we go into a lot when we're not really observing ourselves, we're not really reflecting on ourselves, we're not really aware of the effect that we have is um means we're not managing our emotions on purpose. And that can have a lot of unintended consequences and impact from a work perspective. So when you think about it, what what emotions do you tend to default to when you're under stress? And when you think about that, how does that show up for your team? And also, what is the cost of that pattern? For me, the cost of the pattern, mine was a lot of anxiety and overwhelm. And the more anxious I was, the more overwhelmed I was, the more I isolated myself. I wasn't good at bringing that up and being collaborative in those moments of stress. So, what happened to my team? They knew that I was stressed, they absorbed that emotional energy, they didn't know what was happening because I didn't talk about it. And then their performance would have suffered by definition because I didn't talk about it, right? So there was a lot of speculation about, you know, what am I stressed about? What's happening organizationally? Is our department in trouble? Are we in trouble? You know, are we not achieving our goals? All those messages that I wasn't really clearly um, well, I wasn't really, I think, reflecting on them and and I certainly wasn't sharing them, but did that help them perform? Absolutely not. So when we think about the ROI of emotional intelligence, there is one, and that has been proven again and again. But I'll give you four. One is is better decision making, right? Are you regulated in your uh reaction to your stressors, to the emotional experiences that you have at work, whether that's anxiety or stress or anger or disappointment or embarrassment or vulnerability? And if we are less reactive in those moments, we will have better discernment, we'll make better decisions. Because when we are full of those emotional reactions, we're not accessing that that far part, that part or part part of our brain that has to do with emotional regulation or what that has to do with thinking, right? The prefrontal cortex. This is where good decision making happens. But when we're emotionally unregulated, we can't even tap into that. And that makes it really hard. So second one is stronger trust. Will we make better decisions? Yes, but will we have stronger trust? You bet. And that kind of consistency. I remember working with a boss who was so unpredictable. His emotional reactions were all over the board, right? And we would know, like, oop, don't go talk to him today, don't ask him questions. So our performance suffered because of the lack of predictability in his reactions, not to just to work, but to life. And basically, people trust us when we are more predictable, when we are more stable. And I'm not saying things are not going to come up. Of course they are. That's the ebb and flow of life. But how are we reacting to those things? And are we reacting with a lot of reactivity or are we choosing the responses that we want to make? I think number three improved obviously team performance because emotionally intelligent leaders reduce drama. And if you are interested in drama again, check out Cy Wakeman because she's got some really strong opinions on drama. And I think a lot about that and talk a lot about drama in the workplace. Are you allowing drama to happen? Are you creating or magnifying drama in the workplace? Unintentionally, most of us don't set out like, gee, I hope I drama a lot today. No, most of us aren't doing that. But are we unintentionally doing that? I think that's important to notice. And leaders that are more regulated will de-escalate situations rather than unintentionally escalating them. Are you able to calm yourself down and calm others down so that they are more regulated and more calm in their thinking and problem solving? Because team performance does not get enhanced through drama. It gets enhanced through good critical thinking and problem solving and decision making. And then I think that whole culture, there's a lot of research today about emotionally intelligent and very high-functioning leaders that think a lot about culture, the culture of their team, the culture of their organization, and they put time and energy into thinking about cultural development, the environment that they're creating. And when you think about that, your mindset drives your behavior, your behavior shapes your culture, and your culture becomes your legacy. Are you thinking about that on purpose with intention? And I think emotional intelligence sits at the top of that culture. Because if we're not even paying attention to how we're processing things, if we're not paying attention to how people are perceiving us, and there's a lot of gaps there, right? There's a lot of gaps because a lot of people don't want to be honest with us. I was thinking about that last week when I was encountering working with a group of leaders, and I thought, um, I had some observations, but and and I wouldn't have shared them in in a forum like that, but I had a lot of observations throughout an experience I was having. And I thought, would I tell these people those things or not? And would they be honest with me in sharing their feedback about me as a facilitator, very honestly, or not? But what if we could get to that point where we're not um we're not not wanting to be vulnerable, we're not wanting to be honest, we don't want to hurt people's feelings, but that affects our business results. And there's a lot of that, right? There's a lot of threat triggers with being honest with someone, not just in our personal, but absolutely in our professional lives as well. So I think we believe as leaders that people will be honest and tell us appropriate feedback, real feedback. But we have to ask ourselves, do they really? Do they really do that or not? As I think about emotional intelligence and I think about the effect that this has on teams, on leaders, on a lot of people I coach, I think this impact of emotional intelligence is huge. Does it affect our stress and well-being? 100%. Does it affect our business results? I would say absolutely. So as you think about your the way you're navigating through your work world, through your workday, just consider your ability to emotionally regulate yourself. That's the real multiplier. The multiplier is are you able to pay attention in the moment to how you're feeling, choosing your responses, not just reacting to them. And the hard part is that our brain creates a super highway of reactivity. So things that have stressed you, like for me too, entitlement, laziness, that was always a trigger. Those are things that have always triggered me. So I've spent decades creating a neuropathway, a super highway in my brain of being bugged by that stuff. What are things that bug you at work? And then when you think about the things that bug you at work, go back to the flip side of that to say, what do I really need or care about that isn't being honored? And why is that bothering me? Only in that pause, that pause, can we choose our response? Not just reacting quickly and potentially in ways that erode trust and erode psychological safety and erode the very culture that we want to create is when we're not mindful of all of that. So my hope for all of you is that you think about and really experience that more intentionally this week as you think about not being softer, not being nicer, not just being emotional. It's not about that. It's being deliberate. It's about being reflective, it's about creating the space in our day, in our world, in our thoughts, so we can choose the reactions that matter to us. And those reactions over time, that's what builds our legacy, right? What are we choosing over and over and over again? And unless we pause, and as unless we consider those things, it's happenstance, it's luck, right? We don't want it to be luck, we want it to be intention. So your emotional patterns today are absolutely shaping the culture of your team and the performance of your team. And just pay attention to that. And then as you do, you can also really lean into how other people on your team are reacting. It starts with us first. We have to lead ourselves well before we can lead others, and then we transition into helping people to really show up as their best selves. What a huge impact on the return on investment to your business, but also to your life. As you consider this episode, think about what emotion is causing you the most influence right now. Because when you consider that consistently, the return on investment shows up interest in clarity and in your team's performance. Because at the end of the day, your emotional patterns today are really shaping the legacy that your team is going to inherit tomorrow. That is leadership on purpose. If you like this episode or found something interesting, please leave a review and rate this podcast. That will help us to get to more leaders that will lead on purpose.