Emotional intelligence/emotional quotient (EQ)

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand and manage your own emotions (1) and to recognise and influence the emotions of others (1).

One competency is social awareness, which is the ability to sense and understand other people's emotions and needs — essentially empathy. A manager with strong social awareness can read the mood of a team, for example noticing that staff are anxious about a restructure. Because they can detect these feelings, they can respond appropriately — reassuring staff and addressing concerns — which helps maintain morale and cooperation.

The first way is through better motivation. Using social awareness, an emotionally intelligent leader can sense what individual team members need and respond accordingly — encouraging one person, giving another more responsibility. Because the motivation is well targeted, employees are more engaged and productive than under a one-size-fits-all approach.

The second way is through stronger relationships and teamwork. Empathy and social skills allow the leader to build trust, communicate clearly and resolve conflict before it escalates. This reduces friction within the team, so members cooperate more effectively and waste less time on disputes.

Together, better-targeted motivation and stronger relationships raise team output and morale, although emotional intelligence works best alongside fair pay and sound management.

Change often provokes resistance because employees feel anxious, uncertain or threatened. Emotional intelligence — the ability to recognise and manage emotions in self and others — directly addresses these feelings, so it can be a powerful tool for managing resistance.

First, through social awareness (empathy), an emotionally intelligent leader can sense the source of resistance — for example fear of job losses or of failing to cope with new technology. By understanding why staff are resisting, the leader can target the real concern rather than dismissing it, which is the first step to overcoming it.

Second, through social skills, the leader can communicate the change clearly and persuasively, involve staff in the process and reassure them. Good communication reduces uncertainty, while involvement gives employees a sense of control, both of which lower resistance and increase willingness to adopt the change.

Third, through self-management, the leader stays calm and positive even when staff push back, modelling the composure they want others to show and avoiding confrontations that would harden resistance.

Therefore emotional intelligence helps at each stage — diagnosing the resistance, addressing it through communication and involvement, and maintaining a constructive tone. Its limitation is that EQ cannot remove resistance if the change genuinely harms staff (e.g. real redundancies); in such cases honesty and fair treatment matter more than emotional skill alone. So EQ is highly useful but not a complete solution to resistance.

There is a strong case for weighting emotional intelligence heavily. As the business grows, the chief executive will lead larger teams and must motivate, influence and unite many people — all of which depend on EQ. A leader high in Goleman's competencies can sense and respond to employees' needs (social awareness), build trust and resolve conflict (social skills), stay composed under pressure (self-management) and understand their own impact on others (self-awareness). This tends to raise motivation, improve teamwork and reduce labour turnover, and is especially valuable for leading the change that growth brings. Because EQ can also be developed, the business can build on a candidate's existing emotional strengths over time. For a people-intensive leadership role, EQ is clearly a major factor.

However, making EQ the most important factor is risky. EQ does not replace technical competence and sound judgement: a chief executive must make strategic and financial decisions, and a charismatic, empathetic leader with a poor strategy could take a growing business in the wrong direction. EQ is also hard to measure reliably, so weighting it most heavily means relying on a vague, subjective assessment, and emotional skills can even be misused to manipulate staff. Other factors — relevant experience, track record, strategic ability and integrity — may predict success more reliably.

Judgement (criterion). Whether EQ should be the most important factor depends on what the role most demands and what is hardest to find in candidates. For a chief executive of a growing business, where leading and motivating people through change is central, EQ should be a leading factor — but not the single most important one, because strategic competence and judgement are equally essential and a leader who lacks them will fail regardless of EQ. On balance, the business should treat EQ as one of the top criteria, weighted alongside proven strategic ability and integrity, rather than the most important factor on its own. Making it the sole priority would risk appointing a likeable leader who cannot make the right decisions.

A successful business leader needs both intellectual ability (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ). IQ is the capacity for reasoning, analysis and problem-solving; EQ, in Goleman's model, is the ability to recognise and manage emotions in oneself and others, through self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skills. Whether EQ is more important depends on what leadership actually requires.

The case that EQ is more important. Leadership is fundamentally about people — setting a vision and getting others to follow it. A leader with high EQ can motivate staff, build trusting relationships, manage conflict and lead change, all of which determine whether a strategy is actually delivered. Goleman's central claim is that, beyond a threshold level of IQ/technical ability, it is EQ that distinguishes outstanding leaders, because most senior people are already intelligent — what sets the best apart is how they handle people. EQ also has a practical advantage: it can be developed through feedback and training, whereas IQ is largely fixed, so a business can deliberately invest in raising it. On this view, two leaders of similar intelligence will be separated by their EQ.

The case that IQ remains as important (or more so in some roles). A leader must still make sound strategic and financial decisions, which depend on intellectual ability and judgement. A highly likeable, empathetic leader with poor analytical skills could win people's loyalty yet steer the business in the wrong direction — EQ gets people to follow, but IQ helps ensure they are following towards success. In technical or analytical businesses, or in decisions involving complex data, IQ may be decisive. So IQ cannot be dismissed; it sets the quality of the decisions that EQ then helps to implement.

Weighing it up (criterion). The relative importance of EQ and IQ depends on the nature of the leadership role and what the business needs from it. Where the role is mainly about leading, motivating and changing a large workforce, EQ tends to be more important. Where it is mainly about making complex analytical or strategic decisions, IQ matters more. For most senior leadership roles, where candidates already clear a high IQ bar, EQ becomes the differentiator.

Judgement. On balance, for a business leader — as opposed to a technical specialist — emotional intelligence is usually the more important of the two, because leadership is about people and EQ is what turns intellectual ability into the capacity to lead them; it is also the more developable asset. However, this is not true in every case: EQ does not replace the IQ needed for sound judgement, and in highly analytical roles IQ can dominate. The most defensible conclusion is that EQ is more important than IQ for leading people, but only above a threshold of intellectual competence — the best leaders combine a sufficient IQ to make the right decisions with the EQ to bring people with them, so neither alone is enough.