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Why Most Emotional Intelligence Training Gets It Wrong (And How I Learned the Hard Way)
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Here's something that'll make half the HR departments in Australia want to unsubscribe from my newsletter: most emotional intelligence training is absolute rubbish.
I've been running workplace training programs for seventeen years now, and I can count on one hand the number of EQ programs I've seen that actually work. The rest? They're feel-good workshops that make people nod along for four hours before they go back to being exactly the same emotional disasters they were before lunch.
But here's the thing that really gets under my skin. Everyone's jumping on the emotional intelligence bandwagon like it's some revolutionary concept Daniel Goleman invented yesterday. Mate, people have been dealing with emotions at work since the first cave-person had to negotiate who gets the mammoth steaks. We just gave it a fancy name and charged $2,000 per head for it.
The Problem with Pretty Workbooks
Most EQ training falls into the same trap as those corporate team-building exercises where grown adults pretend to be stranded on desert islands. It's theoretical. Sanitised. About as useful as a chocolate teapot when Sharon from accounts is having a meltdown because someone used the last of the good coffee.
I remember facilitating a session in Perth three years ago - beautiful venue, catered morning tea, workbooks that probably cost more than my first car. The participants were engaged, taking notes, asking thoughtful questions about the four domains of emotional intelligence. Then, halfway through the afternoon session, the fire alarm went off.
False alarm, of course. But you should have seen these newly "emotionally intelligent" professionals. Panic. Blame. One bloke actually started yelling at the venue coordinator like it was somehow her fault the system malfunctioned. All that beautiful theory went straight out the window the moment real stress hit.
That's when I realised we were doing this backwards.
Real EQ Happens in the Trenches
Here's my controversial opinion: you can't teach emotional intelligence in a training room. You can only develop it through real, messy, uncomfortable situations where your fight-or-flight response is activated and you have to choose between being a decent human being or reverting to your inner toddler.
The best managers I know - and I mean the ones who can handle difficult conversations, de-escalate conflicts, and inspire their teams even during redundancy rounds - they didn't learn from workbooks. They learned from screwing up. Badly. Then reflecting on why they screwed up. Then trying not to screw up the same way twice.
Take my mate Dave who runs a construction company in Geelong. Never heard of Daniel Goleman in his life. But he can walk onto a site where two tradies are about to come to blows over work scheduling and somehow get them laughing about it within ten minutes. How? Because he's been dealing with stressed, tired, frustrated people for twenty years and he's developed an intuitive sense of what works.
The Self-Awareness Myth
Another thing that drives me mental about traditional EQ training: the obsession with self-awareness. Every program starts with some variation of "you need to understand yourself before you can understand others."
Bollocks.
Some of the most self-aware people I know are also the most insufferable to work with. They'll spend twenty minutes explaining exactly why they're being difficult instead of just... not being difficult. Meanwhile, I've worked with managers who couldn't tell you their Myers-Briggs type if their life depended on it, but they somehow always know exactly what to say when someone's having a rough day.
What Actually Works (Based on Absolutely No Academic Research)
After watching hundreds of managers try to implement emotional intelligence training, here's what I've noticed actually moves the needle:
Practice under pressure. Not role-plays. Not scenarios. Real situations where there are actual consequences. The manager who learns to stay calm during budget cuts will handle performance reviews like a champion.
Micro-feedback loops. Instead of waiting for the annual 360 review, create systems where people get immediate feedback on how their emotional responses affect others. Sometimes it's as simple as asking "how did that conversation feel for you?" right after a difficult meeting.
Cultural permission to be human. This one's huge. In organisations where showing emotion is seen as weakness, people develop fake emotional intelligence. They become really good at appearing calm while they're internally combusting. That's not EQ - that's just professional acting.
I was working with a tech startup in Sydney last month where the CEO had banned "negative emotions" from meetings. No frustration, no disappointment, no concern. Just positive vibes only. The result? The most passive-aggressive workplace culture I've ever encountered. People were technically being "emotionally intelligent" according to their company values, but the undercurrents of resentment were toxic.
The 73% Problem
Here's a statistic I probably just made up but feels true: 73% of managers think they're more emotionally intelligent than they actually are. They've done the training, they know the terminology, they can spot emotional triggers in others. But put them in a room with an angry customer or a underperforming team member, and suddenly it's like watching someone try to perform surgery with oven mitts.
The gap between knowing about emotional intelligence and actually being emotionally intelligent is enormous. It's like the difference between reading about swimming and not drowning in the pool.
Beyond the Buzzwords
Look, I'm not completely anti-EQ training. Some programs get it right. But they're usually the ones that make people uncomfortable. They deal with real workplace situations. They acknowledge that sometimes the emotionally intelligent response is to set firm boundaries, even if it hurts someone's feelings.
The programs that work don't just teach you to recognise emotions - they teach you to use them as data. Frustration might mean a process is broken. Anxiety might mean you need more information. Anger might mean a boundary has been crossed. Emotions aren't problems to be managed; they're signals to be decoded.
A Brisbane Example (Because Why Not)
I was running a session for middle managers at a logistics company in Brisbane - big operation, hundreds of staff, the works. During lunch, one of the participants mentioned she was dreading going back to work because her team leader had been particularly harsh with feedback lately.
Instead of diving into theories about empathy and emotional regulation, I suggested she approach her team leader after the session and simply ask: "I've noticed you seem frustrated with my work lately. Is there something specific I should know about?"
Revolutionary, right? Direct communication instead of emotional detective work.
Turns out the team leader was under massive pressure from senior management about productivity targets and had been taking it out on everyone without realising it. One conversation sorted it out. No frameworks, no assessment tools, no action plans. Just two people being honest about what was really going on.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Most emotional intelligence training fails because it treats emotions like problems to be solved rather than information to be processed. It teaches people to manage their emotional responses instead of understanding what those responses are telling them about their environment, their relationships, and their work.
The managers who are genuinely emotionally intelligent - the ones their teams actually want to work for - they're not following some prescribed methodology. They're paying attention. They're curious about why people react the way they do. They're willing to be vulnerable enough to admit when they don't understand something.
And they're definitely not spending their time filling out emotional intelligence assessments.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe the answer really is more workshops and better workbooks. Maybe we just need to find the right combination of theories and frameworks and assessment tools.
Or maybe we need to stop overthinking it and just start treating each other like actual human beings with complex inner lives that can't be reduced to four neat categories.
Your call.
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