How Does Emotional Intelligence Make Better Leaders? A Business Psychology Podcast Episode.
All of us have had experiences of bad leadership. This might involve a bad team leader at work, a poor leader in a group project or poor leadership within an organisation. Equally, the vast majority of us have had amazing leaders who we enjoy working with, we develop a positive relationship with and they bring the best out in us. This leads us to question what actually is the difference between a bad leader and a good leader. Emotional intelligence is one explanation. Therefore, in this business psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn what is emotional intelligence, how does emotional intelligence make better leaders and how this knowledge can be used by aspiring and qualified psychologists alike. If you enjoy learning about applied psychology, the psychology of leadership and more, then this will be a great episode for you.
Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Personality Psychology and Individual Differences. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
What is Emotional Intelligence? Applying It to Leadership
In the next section, I’ll explain why learning about emotional intelligence as well as leadership is important for aspiring and qualified psychologists, but until then we need to understand the topic first of all. Therefore, emotional intelligence is a term popularised by the author and psychologist Daniel Goleman who described emotional intelligence as our capacity to control, express and be aware of emotions. This is important in leadership because emotional intelligence allows leaders to empathetically handle interpersonal relationships and with good judgement.
In other words, emotional intelligence means leaders can actually connect with their employees on an emotional level and this is why emotional intelligence is flat out critical for effective leadership. Since an emotionally intelligent leader can make you feel like you matter, you’re valued and this improves your engagement at work and your productivity.
Another important reason why emotional intelligence matters in the workplace is because emotions are everywhere. There isn’t a single job in the world that doesn’t involve effort and burnout, achievement as well as failure, conflict and relationships, uncertainty and change, and interactions with peers.
This is even more important in mental health and educational settings, because we are constantly interacting with other professionals, clients with mental health difficulties and concerned parents and carers. If an aspiring or qualified psychologist or mental health professional doesn’t have emotional intelligence, then they will inevitably harm these relationships. Then this has a knock-on effect for treatment engagement and the wider client and organisational social network.
In addition, if a leader or a peer, to be honest, lacks emotional intelligence then the psychologists and other mental health professionals aren’t going to feel valued, appreciated or respected. This could decrease their mental health and increase rates of burnout, and decrease effort. Again, this has implications for the wider social network and organisation as a whole.
On a personal note, whilst I will go into more depth later in this episode, one of the reasons why I flat out loved working at the University of Kent in their Outreach and Widening Participation department was because of the leadership. The Outreach staff were technically our leaders and bosses, but they were respectful, kind and we could connect with them on an emotional level. Sometimes, within professional boundaries, it felt more like they were our friends than our bosses and that was helpful. It made us feel appreciated and valued so we wanted to keep working, give Outreach our all and we wanted to do our best for the students who were taking part in our events
If we apply emotional intelligence specifically to leadership, then we understand that whenever an organisation undergoes a period of massive change or disruption, then leaders need employees more than ever to help them make it through the difficult time. For instance, a rival company might be taking the majority of customers away from an organisation, an organisation might be involved in a scandal or an organisation might have to unfortunately deal with the fallout of someone abruptly leaving or passing away. Whenever an organisation enters a difficult time, they depend on employees to help them. The employees might need to share ideas, step up and take on new responsibilities or take on extra work for a limited time.
The reason why this specifically connects to emotional intelligence as well as leadership is because a leader with emotional intelligence helps to engage employees, helps them to feel valued and cared for and the employees are happier in the workplace. This means that employees are happy to step up, share ideas and go the extra mile for the organisation. Whereas disengaged workers who work for a leader without emotional intelligence will not want to help the organisation and the organisation can suffer as a result.
Personally, the pandemic is a great example of this, because when COVID-19 forced schools and everyone else to shut down and stay at home, Outreach had to seriously pivot. If we wanted to help students, inspire them and continue to get our funding, then our Outreach work needed to continue. Now, because the Outreach staff were great leaders with really good emotional intelligence, us Ambassadors were more than willing to help out. We were still willing to sign up for work opportunities, give Outreach our all and help them pivot rapidly. This allowed our Outreach work to continue, thrive and it meant we still helped a lot of great students.
That is the power of leading with emotional intelligence.
How Does Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Apply to Psychologists?
The main reason why I want to talk about this on a psychology podcast that is mainly designed for aspiring and qualified psychologists is because leadership is a part of our working life, as well as our external interests. Whether you’re a psychology student, psychology graduate or a qualified psychologist, you will need leadership at some point.
For instance, as a psychology student, you will have to undergo the awful task of group projects at some point in your degree. Even though I enjoy teamwork and I can work very effectively with a team or on my own, group projects still fill me with dread. Anyway, when you’re in a group project for your psychology degree, the question becomes simple. How do you want people to remember you? If you want people to remember you at all, then a lot of this comes down to leadership. If you accidentally or on purpose take the lead then you need to consider if you want to be remembered as a great group project leader who people are very happy and eager to work with again. Or do you want to be remembered as someone who was awful and the worst possible leader?
Probably not the latter. Learning about emotional intelligence and leadership can help you.
In addition, if you’re a good leader at university for a group project, it is very likely that you’re going to make some connections. These connections might give you extra people to turn to when you get stuck on a particular psychology topic, it might make you some new friends and new opportunities. A group of friends might be talking with a lecturer, a new opportunity is mentioned and someone remembers you and your interests because you were a great person (also known as a great leader) when they worked with you.
You really never know where an act of kindness might lead you.
Building upon this, if you’re an aspiring psychologist, you might be working in an educational setting or a mental health setting to get some experience. You might naturally create a leadership position for yourself within your little team where you become well-liked, people listen to you or you might be included in a project, and again, you might develop a leadership role for yourself. Now, I use this framing because this is what I accidentally do a lot in my work or whenever I’m in a group that I’m passionate about. I use my soft skills and my emotional intelligence to make connections, forge working relationships and before I realise it, I end up having authority within the social group.
Wow. I’ve actually only just realised how true that is. Interesting.
If you have emotional intelligence and if you’re able to forge those effective working relationships with your team, your group and your clients, then other mental health professionals and management might notice you. This might lead to other opportunities that can help you get ahead on your psychology journey.
Penultimately, before I mention how this can help qualified psychologists, I want to add that learning about emotional intelligence and leadership can help you develop the skills needed to get a job. Whether this is a mental health-related job or another job that pays the bills whilst you’re developing the clinical and research experience needed to get onto the Doctorate of Clinical or Educational Psychology. For instance, one of the ways how I’m developing my mental health communication, leadership and advocacy skills (since you need to remember that being a clinical psychologist is way more than a therapist) is being involved in the campaign and policy work of my local political party. Soon, I’ll hopefully be confirmed as the Campaigns Officer and my emotional intelligence is a good explanation as to why I’ve been able to lead a by-election campaign, organise volunteers and other campaigning events. As well as working with people, helping them to feel valued and appreciated amongst other areas of emotional intelligence has helped me develop the relationships that make people want to elect me as Campaigns Officer.
In terms of yourself, if you nurture your emotional intelligence and apply it to leadership, then it will help you make those relationships, those opportunities and hopefully it will help you to advance your psychology career as a result. Even if this is a non-traditional way.
Finally, if you’re a qualified psychologist, you might be in charge of a team. This team might be a multi-disciplinary team, a group of trainee clinical psychologists or assistant psychologists. Again, there are some questions for you to answer. How do you want your team to remember you? As well as how effective do you want your team to be?
If you want your team to praise you, be engaged with the work and work to the best they possibly can, then emotional intelligence is badly needed on your part. As well as emotional intelligence would allow you to bring out the best in your team so they can work better and thrive. Ultimately, this helps you to look even better to senior management.
Maybe you’ll get an extra promotion out of it too.
What is Emotional Intelligence Made Up Of?
Now that we know why emotional intelligence and leadership are helpful to each other and to qualified and aspiring psychologists, we need to understand emotional intelligence in more depth. This will allow us to learn how to nurture and improve our own emotional intelligence so we can become better leaders.
Emotional Intelligence and Self-Management
As a result, emotional intelligence is made up of four components. Firstly, you have self-management. This is your ability to control both negative as well as positive impulses and emotions. Also, you’re adaptive and flexible as the situation changes.
This is useful for aspiring and qualified psychologists because you need to be able to be flexible and adaptive and control your emotions. Since you might have a plan for a therapy session or a group session and then the client comes in and throws you a curveball. They might reveal that they attempted suicide, there was a death in the family or another factor entirely. When this happens, your reactions are critical and self-management skills can make all the difference in this situation.
If you want to learn more about this topic, please check out my book: Healing As A Survivor where I discuss how not to respond to a client’s suicide revelation and what to do instead.
An example of my self-management as a leader is that on campaign events, there can be problems or comments or individuals that bug you. Yet I don’t allow myself to show the frustration or my annoyance because that wouldn’t be helpful in that situation. Instead, I allow myself to feel my positive and negative emotions on the inside and on the outside, I focus on finding a solution and I help people.
Emotional Intelligence and Self-Awareness
Secondly, you have self-awareness. Now, self-awareness is always a concept that makes me smile because when I was at university during my Masters, I lived with an emotional abuser. One of the ways how they repetitively and consistently abused me was saying that I had no self-awareness and I hurt everyone around me, even though that isn’t true in the slightest. Anyway, self-awareness is your ability to know your own strengths, weaknesses, emotions and recognise their impact on your relationships and performance.
For psychologists, self-awareness is really important because you need to understand what you know, what you don’t know and what support you might need to develop your clinical skills. If you don’t have self-awareness then it’s going to take you longer to learn what you need and fill your knowledge gaps so you can hopefully get onto the doctorate.
Personally, I know that I am great at organisation, being productive and getting stuff done to a deadline. Those are some of my top strengths. Yet I also acknowledge that my stuttering is a barrier and it is a weakness because of how others perceive me as a result. If I’m talking to new people, and these conversations are important, and I stutter, then the person I’m talking to will likely think that I’m less intelligent and they will be less likely to listen to my message. This means even though I know exactly what I want to say, my stuttering puts my work at a disadvantage. Therefore, it can be helpful to acknowledge that other people are way, way better at this than me, and I thank those people for it.
They have strengths and weaknesses that I don’t have, and vice versa.
Emotional Intelligence and Relationship Management
Thirdly, you have relationship management. This is your ability to inspire people through persuasive communication, building bonds, motivation as well as disarming conflict amongst individuals.
At first, I think this is a difficult concept to apply for psychologists but if you think about it, aspiring and qualified psychologists are constantly inspiring others through persuasive communication, building bonds and motivating others. We might be trying to subtly motivate a client to change their life for the better, we might be motivating our mental health service to embrace a new approach and you need to develop those professional relationships with other professionals so they can help you when you need it. As much as I love psychology and I think it is the best profession ever, it doesn’t have all the answers.
Personally, this is an area that I need to work on to some extent. Since I am really good at building relationships, talking to people and inspiring them so they become motivated. I am good at that, but I am less effective at disarming conflict amongst individuals. This is something that I need to work on. Thankfully, I have a support network around me that is very good at disarming conflict amongst individuals.
Emotional Intelligence and Social Awareness
Finally, emotional intelligence is made up of social awareness. This means that you have an ability to navigate politically, network proactively and have empathy for others.
Social awareness should be the bread-and-butter of aspiring and qualified psychologists because we always need to be approaching clients with empathy, we need to navigate the therapeutic alliance and we need to network with other professionals and our team proactively. This will help us to get noticed, learn more information and hopefully these new bonds and networks will provide us with new opportunities. Opportunities that will help us advance our psychology journey.
In terms of my leadership experience, I proactively network with new members because I want to know their interests, what their concerns are and what I might need to do to help them feel more comfortable about engaging in campaigning activities. Also, I respond to these concerns with validation, empathy and compassion because six months ago, I was right where they are.
Emotions as Functions in Emotional Intelligence
Additionally, it’s important that leaders understand that all emotion serves a function for an individual and ourselves. Since positive emotions broaden ourselves because they allow us to create psychological capital, build new skills, undo negative emotions, improve our thinking and they support our resilience. Whereas negative emotions narrow our behaviour because they call attention to an issue, they’re an indicator of potential threats and negative emotions can help us to learn about threats.
We can apply this knowledge because there will be times when negative emotions are evoked in someone because something or someone has pressed a “hot button” for them. These are situations or people that might frustrate or irritate you enough to engage in conflict as well as produce destructive responses. The more irritated a person or situation makes you, the more intense the negative emotions that you will experience automatically.
When this happens, it’s important that leaders are able to lead through conflict and this is where emotional intelligence comes in. Instead of allowing the conflict to build and build and negatively impact the engagement of the employees, emotional intelligence allows a leader to effectively deal with the conflict without harming engagement and productivity.
Personally, whether you’ve worked in mental health or educational settings, I think we’ve all seen these different situations play out. I remember in different educational settings that I’ve worked in over the years, there were managers and leaders who could effectively disarm conflict in such an artful way that it was almost inspiring. Then I’ve seen plenty of leaders who were so annoying, inconsiderate and frustrating that you became disengaged because you hated the leaders with an utter passion.
I will always remember those leaders in a negative way because of their lack of emotional intelligence. Don’t be like them.
How Do You Increase Your Emotional Intelligence as a Leader?
If you want to become a better leader and use emotional intelligence to improve engagement and productivity amongst your employees (or peers if you’re an aspiring or qualified psychologist), then there are four ways to be more empathetic and more emotionally intelligent.
Build Emotional Intelligence by Connecting with Others On a Personal Level
Firstly, you need to connect with people on a personal level because when you show people and your employees that you’re willing to help them and you recognise their efforts, then you are leading with emotional intelligence. Also, this helps your employees to understand that you care about them as people, not just workers and a means to an end.
It is the very act of caring that helps to build respect and trust between employees and their leaders. This connects to empathy because research shows that successful leaders are able to show caring, kindness and be more “person-focused” because this helps the leader to work with a variety of people from different teams, cultures, countries and departments.
As an aspiring or qualified psychologist, you can use this trick very easily. Just talk to your peers from different teams, departments and be interested in them. I know in the United Kingdom when we ask someone “how are you”, we don’t really mean it. It is simply something we say. Instead, let’s mean it, let’s actually show an interest in people’s lives and let’s start working with the people at work so we can start developing these trusting and respectful relationships that allow us to proactively network and disarm conflicts.
Personally, one of the ways how I do this in campaigning is if I haven’t seen someone or spoken to them for a while, then I message them. I see how they are, I respond to what they say and I actually show an interest in them, and I talk about my own life too. Just by connecting with people on a personal level, I’m able to develop my relationships and lead with emotional intelligence. Then this helps people to become engaged in our work and they keep showing up to events and branch activities too.
Build Emotional Intelligence by Understanding More About Yourself and Others
Secondly, to be more emotionally intelligent, you need to understand more about yourself and others. This connects to the self-awareness point that we discussed earlier. Since leading with emotional intelligence means that you need to harness the power of your employees’ diverse range of experiences, as well as consider how your employees’ lived experiences can help the team achieve their full potential. As well as if you show a willingness to listen and consider how their lived experience and background informs their perspective without judging them helps the employee to feel listened to and valued.
Of course, there will be times when a given employee doesn’t make it easy to get to know them below the surface, and there are also times when it’s really challenging to see the world as other people do. As well as you also need to be aware of your own emotional triggers. Yet it’s important that you do so in a nonjudgmental way because a leader’s effectiveness can be amplified or reduced by the way they understand themselves, their awareness of how others view them and how they navigate the resulting interaction.
On the whole, by increasing your self-awareness, you’re helping yourself to improve your leadership effectiveness and your emotional intelligence.
On paper, you might think that this skill of being nonjudgmental and allowing others to talk about their lived experience would be really easy. To a lot of people it might be, but for others it won’t be and that’s okay. You can think of this skill as practice for being a therapist, a clinical psychologist or whatever type of mental health professional you want to be.
Believe me, I know some people who have a very shocking way of viewing the world and it will make you have a reaction, but that isn’t always a bad thing. It helps you develop your skills a little more, and it can give you a story to laugh about later on.
Conspiracy theorists are the best ones.
Build Emotional Intelligence by Active Listening
The past two points can be boiled down into active listening skills because emotional intelligence requires you to try and see the world as other people do. This means that you really need to listen to and consider what your employees are telling you. This requires you to keep an open mind and create a sense of psychological safety at work and a space of safety too.
Moreover, a good leader works to understand the employee’s feelings and they reflect them back to the person so you listen and pay close attention to the emotions as well as values behind the facts. Then you communicate your understanding of the employee’s feelings to make sure their values and feelings are really understood.
For aspiring and qualified mental health professionals, you can think about this technique for improving emotional intelligence as something that we do in our profession. We need to ensure that we listen to, support and understand where a client is coming from. Especially when it comes to their maladaptive coping mechanisms. For example, if a client is self-harming, then on the face of it, it’s weird, strange and illogical. We cannot say that to a client because it would drive a wedge between us and it would destroy the therapeutic alliance. Yet if we listen to the client and understand the thoughts and feelings behind the maladaptive behaviour, then we can gently challenge the client using our techniques and tricks. Hopefully helping the client to stop self-harming whilst we maintain the therapeutic alliance at the same time.
In other words, we’re already used to listening to and understanding others, so let’s apply this knowledge to our leadership to become more emotionally intelligent.
Build Emotional Intelligence by Unlocking Motivation
A final way to lead with emotional intelligence is by unlocking your team’s motivation, because we know that company benefits and their wage are not the only factors that matter in employee engagement as well as productivity. Employees need to be motivated too. Therefore, emotional intelligence allows you to connect with your employees so you can understand what motivates them, and when you really listen to their responses then this helps you to tailor your way of working and your messaging so you can tap into these motivations to boost employee engagement. Then this has a knock-on effect in improving staff retention and increasing job satisfaction too.
If we apply this concept to aspiring and qualified psychologists, you can build your emotional intelligence and your leadership effectiveness by listening to the motivations of those around you. For example, if you’re a clinical psychologist and you get a new group of trainees to supervise, understanding their motivations for becoming clinical psychologists can help you build your relationship with them, boost their engagement and you can reframe your leadership so it becomes more inspiring and motivational to these trainees.
On a personal note, as a campaigning volunteer, a wage isn’t a motivator for me. What drives me is my motivation to improve my local area, help people and make a real difference. Since my local political party focuses on these motivators and this messaging, it spoke to me and motivated me to become more engaged and productive within the local party.
Business Psychology Conclusion
It might be rare that we look at business psychology topics on The Psychology World Podcast but I always enjoy it when we do. It’s fun, interesting and I enjoy applying this research and these concepts to our profession and my own life. Therefore, the grand benefit of leading with emotional intelligence is that it helps to create a stronger organisational culture that helps to make all conversations, regardless of how difficult they are, more productive, respectful and honest. As well as everyone within the organisation feels a sense of ownership and belonging.
As a result, at the end of this podcast episode, it’s important that we all reflect on our strengths, weaknesses and how we can become more emotionally intelligent so we can build more respectful, productive and better relationships with ourselves and others. Hopefully leading to bigger and better things for all of us.
I really hope you enjoyed today’s business psychology podcast episode.
If you want to learn more, please check out:
Personality Psychology and Individual Differences. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.
Have a great day.
Business Psychology References and Further Reading
Coronado-Maldonado, I., & Benítez-Márquez, M. D. (2023). Emotional intelligence, leadership, and work teams: A hybrid literature review. Heliyon, 9(10).
Dwivedi, D. (2025). Emotional intelligence and artificial intelligence integration strategies for leadership excellence. Advances in Research, 26(1), 84-94.
Gerhardt, K., Bauwens, R., & van Woerkom, M. (2026). Emotional intelligence and leader outcomes: A comprehensive review and roadmap for future inquiry. Human Resource Development Review, 25(1), 29-79.
Gómez-Leal, R., Holzer, A. A., Bradley, C., Fernández-Berrocal, P., & Patti, J. (2022). The relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership in school leaders: A systematic review. Cambridge Journal of Education, 52(1), 1-21.
Prummer, K., Human-Vogel, S., Graham, M. A., & Pittich, D. (2024, June). The role of mentoring in developing leaders’ emotional intelligence: exploring mentoring types, emotional intelligence, organizational factors, and gender. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 9, p. 1393660). Frontiers Media SA.
Saha, S., Das, R., Lim, W. M., Kumar, S., Malik, A., & Chillakuri, B. (2023). Emotional intelligence and leadership: insights for leading by feeling in the future of work. International Journal of Manpower, 44(4), 671-701.
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