Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence names five distinct internal competencies, self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill, so coaching can target the one specific lever that will move a leader's effectiveness, not five vague virtues at once.
Spokes fan out from a central hub, one for each of the five EQ competencies.
Reach for this when…
- A technically brilliant leader keeps derailing relationships and can't see it.
- Someone can't read the room and doesn't know that about themselves.
- You need language for 'something in how they operate' that isn't just personality.
How to run it
- Introduce the five competencies as distinct, not one blended trait.
- Run a validated assessment to get a real baseline, not a guess.
- Debrief the profile to find genuine strengths and gaps.
- Pick the one competency with the most leverage for their actual role.
- Build specific behavioural practices, not vague intentions, for that one area.
A worked example
Situation. Andrei Popescu ran Via Carpatica, a family wine export business in Cluj, Romania, and his sales team kept losing distributors after the first meeting.
Applied. His assessment showed empathy was fine on paper but self-regulation was low, he interrupted, corrected, and argued before people finished a sentence, so coaching targeted that one competency with a single rule: let the distributor finish, then count to three.
Result. Six months in, two of the relationships he'd nearly lost were signed and renewed. Nothing else about his pitch had changed.
The catch
Assessments give a point-in-time snapshot and can be gamed by anyone answering how they wish they behaved, not how they do. Debriefed badly, the report becomes a label, 'he's just low-EQ,' rather than a target for change. And self-report tools are only as good as the person's insight into their own behaviour, which is exactly what's often missing.
If the debrief ends with a score and no behavioural practice, you've run an assessment, not a coaching intervention.
Origin: Daniel Goleman (popularised); Salovey & Mayer (originated)
This tool also appears in the Strategy Catalog (WESC): Emotional Intelligence