Emotional intelligence is so 2020. Leaders need to take these 2 steps in 2025

Regardless of your political affiliation, this year’s presidential election results showcased one powerful commonality: People are starving to be seen, acknowledged, and witnessed.

While the 2024 election—like several before it—proved to be divisive and riddled with conflict, it offers an important lesson for businesses and leaders seeking to overcome inevitable friction within their own teams.

We live in a fragmented and confusing world. According to the 2023 Ernst & Young LLP Empathy in Business Survey, 86% of employees believe empathetic leadership boosts morale, while 87% say empathy is essential to fostering an inclusive environment. In Paul J. Zak’s 2017 article in The Harvard Business Review, he noted that people at high-trust companies reported 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies.

However, Gallup continues to report dismal employee engagement across global organizations at just 23%. A McKinsey Health Institute global survey found that toxic workplace behavior is the biggest driver of negative workplace outcomes, such as burnout and an employee’s intent to leave.

Over my last several articles, I’ve explored the neurobiology of belonging and the combined power of the left and right hemispheres of the brain to convert conflict into connection. Now, we’ll explore how leaders must evolve their management style by considering the underlying needs in all of us and asking: “Am I equipped to make high-quality decisions during high-friction times?”

High emotional intelligence—the ability to manage your own emotions and understand the emotions of those around you—is now table stakes for leaders in battling toxic workplace behavior as we enter 2025. The modern leader will practice emotional maturity. They will:

• Realize their workforce consists of a collection of nervous systems and will strive to understand the basics of neuroscience to effectively guide their teams. 

• Hold boundaries, be accountable, give difficult yet constructive feedback, and take time to self-reflect.  

• Master the leadership algorithm with a methodical cycle of planning, executing, checking, and adjusting to drive trust among teams and boost productivity.  

Good leaders know how to plan and execute—to build a strategy and implement it. Emotionally mature leaders plan and execute, but also know how to check, adjust, and integrate these steps into the leadership algorithm using tactical empathy and resonant language to drive engagement with their teams. These two steps—check and adjust—allow us to slow down to ultimately move faster. Or, in other words, to reduce friction to make higher-quality decisions that drive better results.

I recently connected with a potential guest for my podcast over Zoom. They were several minutes late due to technical difficulties and by the time they logged on, they expressed anger that Zoom made them late. After that moment of distress, they tersely asked, “I’m here now, what can I do for you?”

It would have been easy to breeze over this comment for the sake of the task at hand. But at what cost to the relationship? Instead, I invited both of us to check in and take a deep breath. I apologized for the horrible experience and shared my appreciation that they made the effort to proceed with the call. Then we adjusted.

I acknowledged that their nervous system might still be activated from the stress of trying to join the call. I offered to slow down and just say “hello” before digging into our meeting. My guest was shocked—they’d never seen anyone react to friction this way. As a result, we authentically connected for 20 minutes, leading them to request an in-person podcast recording instead of a virtual one—a more mutually beneficial outcome.

So, how can forging connections like this built on emotional maturity apply within a team leadership dynamic? Let’s say you, the leader, want to develop a go-to-market strategy for an innovative new product.

In the traditional planning phase, you’ll ask questions like, “What are we going to do and how are we going to do it?” Before rushing through the planning stage to execution, check and adjust. Engage in self-reflection and hold conversations with your team members. Ask questions like:

• What legacy knowledge might a team member have about this project that I don’t? 

• What am I not considering? What went wrong in the past that is important to consider moving forward? 

• Whose voices and perspectives need to be included in developing this strategy? 

• Are we forgetting to loop in a member of a cross-functional team? 

• Where is the friction in my team or on this project? Is there an unresolved conflict that needs to be addressed? 

This process of self-reflection and discovery can lead to adjustments to the planning phase, enabling leaders to engage their teams using resonant language to name and acknowledge unmet needs, feelings of exclusion, or negative experiences that could inhibit that plan’s success. Making these kinds of adjustments requires leaders to sit in discomfort, to give and receive constructive feedback—however difficult—and demonstrate emotional maturity that fosters inclusion and forges connections that enable better decisions . . . as a result of less friction.