Day 3: Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent New Leader
This is the number one skill new leaders need to build
Coming Up Today
What emotional intelligence is – and why it matters for new leaders
How the Thinking-Feeling personality trait scale can influence EI under pressure
Three small moves that build your EI muscle in real time
If you’ve been promoted into a new leadership role, here’s a number worth knowing: emotional intelligence accounts for roughly 58% of job performance, according to research from TalentSmart. Across more than 30 workplace skills they measured, it was the single biggest predictor of success.
So how do you actually build EI as a new leader?
A good place to start is in the kind of conversations that already feel hard – the feedback ones. The conversations we over-prepare for, and that still somehow find a way to go sideways.
Here’s how that often plays out. You’ve been mentally preparing for a feedback conversation with a team member all week. You’ve rehearsed the opening lines. You’ve thought about the timing, the setting, the words. You may have even Googled “how to give difficult feedback to a direct report.”
The conversation starts. You deliver the line you’d rehearsed.
And it doesn’t go the way you’d planned.
Maybe the person gets quiet and you can feel them shutting down. Maybe they push back harder than you expected. Maybe they look hurt, and you instinctively start softening what you were trying to say.
Whatever happened, the script you prepared isn’t helping you now. And no script can prepare you for what comes next. That part has to be read in the moment.
That’s exactly what emotional intelligence (EI for short) is for. It’s the skill that lets you read what’s actually happening in real time – in yourself and the other person – and adjust as you go.
Today, on Day 3 of this 5-Day New Leader Challenge, we’re walking through what EI is, why it matters for new leaders, and three small moves that build it.
As a reminder, here’s where we are in the challenge so far:
Day 3: Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent New Leader (You Are Here)
Day 4: Why Some New Leaders Feel More Confident than Others
Day 5: Knowing Who You’re Leading
Most leaders focus on what to say in a hard conversation. The opening line. The framing. The right word for a difficult truth.
But navigating the part that comes after the speaking – the reaction, the silence, the unexpected turn – that’s a real art. And it’s something I struggled with initially as a new leader.
I could prepare what to say. I couldn’t always handle what came back. And the skill that lets you do that – read what’s actually happening and respond well in the moment – is emotional intelligence.
What Emotional Intelligence Is
At its core, EI is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, who popularized the concept in his book Emotional Intelligence, there are five key components of EI:
Self-awareness: The ability to recognize one’s own emotions and how they impact others.
Self-regulation: The ability to control or redirect disruptive emotions and impulses.
Motivation: The drive to achieve goals and strive for improvement.
Empathy: The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Social skills: The ability to build and maintain positive relationships, communicate effectively, and manage conflict.
For new leaders in hard conversations, the three most relevant are self-awareness, empathy, and self-regulation – knowing your own state, reading the other person’s, and adjusting in real time.
Your personality can influence all three, particularly the Thinking-Feeling trait scale.
For example, Thinking personality types often bring clarity to feedback conversations, but under stress, they can tip into emphasis on being correct, at the expense of the person across the table. They might misread the other person and keep explaining the logic when what’s really needed is a beat to absorb it.
Feeling personalities, on the other hand, tend to bring strong emotional attunement to hard conversations. But under stress, this can tip into an emphasis on the relationship at the expense of the message. They might read too much into the other person’s state, softening the message so much that the point gets lost.
Knowing your tendency can help you catch the pattern in the moment, and adjust as needed.
3 Moves to Help New Leaders Build Emotional Intelligence
Now let’s get into three moves to help you build emotional intelligence as a new leader.
Each one builds a specific piece of the EI muscle – self-awareness, empathy, and self-regulation in turn.
They’re small. They’re learnable. And the more you practice them, the steadier hard conversations tend to get.
