Posts
Why Most Emotional Intelligence Training Is Complete Bollocks (And the 3 Things That Actually Work)
Related Articles:
The bloke sitting across from me in the boardroom had just spent forty-seven minutes explaining how his latest EQ assessment revealed he was a "blue-green personality with high empathetic resonance scores." I wanted to throw my coffee at him.
This was supposed to be a leadership meeting about declining team performance, but somehow we'd detoured into pseudoscientific personality mumbo-jumbo that wouldn't help us sell a single widget or retain a decent employee. Welcome to the modern Australian workplace, where emotional intelligence has become the business equivalent of horoscopes.
The Problem With Feel-Good EQ Training
After fifteen years consulting to everyone from mining companies in the Pilbara to tech startups in Surry Hills, I've seen more emotional intelligence workshops than I care to count. Most are absolute garbage.
Here's what typically happens: Some facilitator rocks up with a PowerPoint deck full of quadrants and emotional wheels. Everyone does a self-assessment that tells them they're either a "Driver," "Expressive," "Amiable," or "Analytical." Then they practice active listening exercises that feel about as natural as a parliamentary question time.
The fatal flaw? They're treating emotional intelligence like it's a software update you can download and install. It's not.
Real emotional intelligence isn't about knowing that anger sits in the "negative emotion" quadrant of some corporate training manual. It's about staying calm when your biggest client is screaming down the phone at 4:47pm on a Friday because their shipment got delayed. Again.
What Actually Works: The Three Non-Negotiables
After watching leaders succeed and fail across industries, I've identified three emotional intelligence skills that actually matter in the real world. Not the fluffy stuff they teach in workshops, but the gritty, practical abilities that separate decent managers from truly effective leaders.
1. Reading the Room Without the Manual
The best leaders I know can walk into a meeting and immediately sense the temperature. Not because they've memorised some checklist about "non-verbal cues," but because they've developed genuine curiosity about what makes people tick.
Take Sarah, a project manager at a logistics company in Brisbane. She never did a single EQ course, but she had this uncanny ability to know when her team was struggling. Her secret? She actually listened to what people said – and more importantly, what they didn't say.
When someone starts answering "How's it going?" with "Yeah, good, just busy," instead of their usual enthusiastic ramble about their weekend plans, that's data. Sarah picked up on these patterns because she cared enough to notice.
2. Managing Your Own Emotional Baggage
Here's something they don't teach in emotional intelligence training: sometimes you're the problem.
I learned this the hard way during a particularly challenging project in 2019. My team was consistently missing deadlines, and I couldn't understand why. The training manuals would have me believe I needed to show more empathy, ask better questions, create psychological safety.
Turns out I was micromanaging them to death because I was stressed about our upcoming audit. My anxiety was making everyone else anxious. No amount of active listening was going to fix that – I needed to sort out my own emotional mess first.
The unsexy truth about emotional intelligence is that most of it happens inside your own head. Learning to recognise when you're projecting your stress, insecurity, or frustration onto your team is worth more than any personality assessment.
3. Having Difficult Conversations Like a Grown-Up
This is where most leaders completely fall apart. They'll spend weeks avoiding a difficult conversation about performance issues, then wonder why their team culture is toxic.
The emotional intelligence crowd loves to bang on about "creating safe spaces" and "non-violent communication." Fine. But sometimes you need to tell someone their work isn't good enough, and no amount of sandwich feedback is going to make that comfortable.
What makes these conversations easier isn't following some script from a training manual. It's accepting that discomfort is part of leadership, and that avoiding difficult conversations causes more damage than having them badly.
The Real-World Test
Want to know if your emotional intelligence training is worth anything? Try this simple test:
Next time you're frustrated with an employee's performance, resist the urge to send a passive-aggressive email or complain to someone else. Instead, schedule a face-to-face conversation within 24 hours.
If your training has taught you to navigate that conversation with honesty, respect, and clear expectations – congratulations, you've found a decent program. If it's just given you a new vocabulary to describe why everyone else is the problem, you've wasted your money.
Why Most Training Fails (And How to Fix It)
The fundamental problem with most emotional intelligence training is that it treats emotions like problems to be solved rather than information to be used. Anger isn't automatically bad – sometimes it's telling you that someone has crossed a boundary. Sadness isn't something to fix – sometimes it's the appropriate response to disappointing results.
73% of the leaders I work with report that their biggest emotional intelligence breakthroughs came from real workplace situations, not training rooms. You can't learn to handle pressure in a low-pressure environment.
The companies that get this right don't send their leaders to feel-good workshops. They create opportunities for safe practice with real stakes. They use simulation exercises based on actual workplace scenarios. They focus on skills, not labels.
The Bottom Line
Emotional intelligence matters enormously in leadership. But most of what passes for EQ training in Australian workplaces is expensive feel-good theatre that doesn't prepare leaders for the messy reality of managing people.
If you're serious about developing emotional intelligence, start with yourself. Learn to recognise your own emotional patterns before you try to read everyone else's. Practice having honest conversations about difficult topics. Pay attention to what's actually happening in your team, not what the assessment tools say should be happening.
And for the love of all that's holy, stop asking people what colour personality they are. It's not helping anyone get better at their job.
The best emotional intelligence training happens in the real world, with real people, dealing with real problems. Everything else is just expensive group therapy with better catering.
Our Favourite Resources: