Leadership Without Emotional Intelligence Is Workplace Negligence.
Struggling to get your team to buy in?
It’s probably not your strategy. It’s your emotional intelligence.
Your people don’t just hear your words, they feel your regulation, your assumptions, and your blind spots. And if you’re leading without understanding how emotions actually work, you’re asking them to follow you while wearing a mask.
The latest science (from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and others) shows that emotions aren’t “universal signals” you can simply read—they’re constructed, shaped by context and prediction. Misinterpret them, and you erode trust.
Learn to navigate them, and you unlock influence.
This Labor Day, I wrote about why leadership without emotional intelligence is workplace negligence and what today’s science tells us about leading in practice.
Read the article here below
To mark this year's Labor Day, I’m offering 3 free MSCEIT² assessments (first come, first served). This is the only ability-based test of emotional intelligence. Real data, no self-report bias.
If you want your team’s buy-in, start by seeing yourself clearly. DM me. Let's talk
#Leadership #EmotionalIntelligence #FutureOfWork #LaborDay
Gen Z AI Millionaires and the Values Crisis We Aren’t Talking About
As highlighted in Pivot5 newsletter today; The The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that entry-level AI professionals are landing total compensation packages as high as $1 million. Companies like Databricks and Scale AI are hiring 23-year-olds into salaries and stock packages that rival (or even surpass) the lifetime earnings expectations of many doctors and lawyers.
Meanwhile, unemployment among new graduates in non-AI fields remains stubbornly higher than the overall rate. We now live in a world where 25 people under 25 can hold packages in a company worth $200,000 to $1 million before their brains have fully finished developing.
This isn’t just a labor market trend. It’s a values disruption.
The Privilege of Practicing Emotional Intelligence: Lessons from the MSCEIT²
Every month, I step into a circle of learning leading a certification in the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT², pronounced Mesquite). On paper, I am the facilitator, trainer, and guide. In practice, these sessions are an exchange: I give as much as I can, yet I always leave having received far more.
It is a privilege. Each cohort brings together people with different histories, cultural frameworks, and ways of making meaning in the world. They remind me that emotional intelligence (EI) is not just a personal skillset, it is a living, breathing dialogue across difference.
Why We Struggle With Emotional Intelligence and How to Reclaim It
Human beings have always been emotional creatures. Our emotions evolved as survival tools; fast, automatic signals designed to help us respond to threats or opportunities. As Dr. Paul Ekman’s pioneering research showed, these signals often operate outside our conscious awareness. They emerge in micro-expressions, subtle shifts in physiology, and rapid reactions to stimuli.