10 Strategies to Develop Your Emotional Intelligence |
Self-awareness and an understanding of what you think and feel builds confident, grounded leadership.
Emotion regulation enables leaders to remain calm under pressure and make more informed decisions.
Empathy builds connection, communication, and collaboration in the workplace.
Through years of coaching leaders across diverse sectors, I’ve learned that true transformation rarely comes from new strategies, but from genuine connection and understanding. Whether inspiring others, managing conflict, or fostering collaboration, emotional intelligence (EI) lies at the heart of effective leadership.
We can think of EI as having two broad domains:
Intrapersonal intelligence: self-awareness, emotional regulation, and intrinsic motivation.
Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to read and influence the emotions of others, through empathy, social awareness, and relationship management.
The two are inseparable and essential. Without self-awareness, it’s hard to exercise empathy; without emotional regulation, relationship management wavers.
Why Emotional Intelligence Matters in Leadership
To be effective, leaders must inspire, build trust, motivate others, and guide teams through uncertainty, all of which depend on EI. Emotions are contagious—particularly the leader’s, who sets the tone and shapes the team/organizational climate.
EI provides leaders with a range of benefits that enhance both personal effectiveness and organizational outcomes. At the individual level, EI promotes greater self-awareness, emotional regulation, and resilience, enabling leaders to make more informed decisions and remain calm under pressure. Interpersonally, it fosters empathy, effective communication, and constructive conflict resolution, helping leaders build trust and maintain strong relationships and networks. Within organizations, emotionally intelligent leadership enhances employee engagement, teamwork, and overall performance by creating psychologically safe and motivating environments. Research consistently links EI to leadership effectiveness, job satisfaction, and organizational performance.
10 Strategies for Developing Emotional Intelligence
Build self-awareness. Leaders build self-awareness when they take time to examine their own strengths, blind spots, feelings, and experiences. Interventions like coaching, 360-degree assessments, journaling, narrative, and values exploration all provide space for reflection. The goal is to develop an accurate, holistic picture of yourself that aligns with how others perceive you.
Name emotions. An integral part of self-awareness is the ability to name what you are feeling, which builds emotional awareness and lessens the intensity of the emotion. Start by identifying the emotion, then provide two additional feelings that more accurately describe it. For leaders who struggle with this, I sometimes ask, “If you had to give that feeling a colour or texture, what would it be?” Metaphor helps bypass intellectual defences, and naming an emotion provides a sense of detachment and objectivity: It can be observed, rather than acted out. This shift from fusion to awareness is the foundation of self-regulation.
Cultivate optimism. EI is about mindset. Leaders who embrace positivity and possibility in addition to critique create climates of optimism. This doesn’t mean naïve or toxic positivity, but what Seligman (1991) described as learned optimism—a realistic belief in agency and growth. Reframing questions from “What’s wrong?” to “What could be different?” often opens unexpected pathways.
Map your triggers. Leaders need to know what activates or triggers them, along with the physical effects, to identify effective strategies to bring themselves back to calm. The goal is to respond, rather than react. What triggers you in a given situation, say, in a team meeting, or when delivering a presentation? What happens in your body when you are triggered? Butterflies, sweaty palms, racing thoughts?
Choose/practice your regulation strategies. When triggered, what works to calm you down? Does it work in every situation? It’s imperative to have a series of calming or reset strategies for your key trigger moments. Techniques such as conscious breathing, pausing before responding, taking a short reflective break, reframing a situation, and zooming out to ask yourself what advice you would give to a friend in a similar situation all help and strengthen the neural pathways for self-regulation (Siegel, 2009). The key is to find what works for you and have your strategies ready in case of need.
Extend empathy. Empathy, particularly through perspective-taking, constitutes a critical component of effective leadership. Research consistently demonstrates that empathy is essential to effective connection, communication, and collaboration in the workplace. Leaders can demonstrate empathy through the questions they ask, the depth of their listening, and the quality of attention they devote to understanding others’ experiences and perspectives.
Cultivate organizational awareness. Emotional intelligence operates beyond the individual: Leaders must navigate systems, politics, and culture with sensitivity. Understanding the emotional currents of an organization—its challenges, priorities, and taboos—can be as important as reading a balance sheet. Build organizational awareness by actively paying attention to the values, dynamics, challenges, tensions, and motivations across the organization. Awareness does not equal approval, and it provides intelligence, enabling more responsive and adaptive leadership decisions.
Build and sustain relationships and networks. Leadership is about getting things done through other people. If we want to lead and have more impact, we need to build, manage, and sustain our relationships and our networks. Transformative leaders invest time in building trust and understanding individuals’ motivations so they can best engage and support them. Similarly, leaders who tend to their networks create greater access to resources and opportunities—human, information, technical, and financial. Think about conducting a networking audit to see who is in your network and who you might want to include to extend your impact.
Support others’ growth. Part of a leader’s responsibility is to create more leaders—helping others maximize their potential. Emotionally intelligent leaders get to know their team members, their strengths, development areas, and interests, and know where they will create the most value and growth. When leaders think about how they can support and elevate others, their influence and talent pool expand.
Combine EI strategies. All the emotional intelligence skills and practices above are interrelated and useful in tandem or combined. Identify what you already do well and where you would like to grow. Experiment to expand your EI toolbox.
Emotionally intelligent leadership is not innate, nor is it effortless. It is a disciplined practice of awareness, self-regulation, and connection. When we integrate EI into daily leadership practice, we create workplaces where people can think clearly, feel safe, and perform at their best.
Seligman, M. (1991). Learned Optimism. NY: Knopf
Siegel, D. J. (2009). Mindful Awareness, Mindsight, and Neural Integration. The Humanistic Psychologist, 37(2), 137–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/08873260902892220