EQ vs IQ: What Actually Makes a Workplace Function?

Last week, I attended an event in my home town hosted by Curious Community, where one of the panel discussions focused on organisational culture. After the session, I briefly spoke with Paul Matthews, CEO of Monmouthshire County Council and his comments inspired me. Modern organisations, he suggested, need significantly more EQ than IQ.

Well, if you've been following these posts for a while, you'll know this opinion is right up my street!

There are two reasons this caught my attention. Firstly, because it came from somebody in a professional public sector environment where, historically, emotional intelligence has not always been the thing most openly celebrated. But also, because I think many of us already know this instinctively, even if we’re still figuring out the right language for it.

Most adults have worked in at least one organisation full of highly intelligent people that still somehow felt completely dysfunctional. The spreadsheet formulas are impressively eight-days long and there are strategy documents for writing a strategy document.

What could go wrong?!

Well, somehow, everybody still looks exhausted. Teams don’t trust each other, departments are territorial and nobody feels psychologically safe enough to say, “I think this is wrong”.

So, if intelligence alone can't create successful and healthy workplaces, what else do we need to stop them from falling apart?

***

In a synchronous example of 'trust the timing of your life' this week, I found myself revisiting this question while studying stakeholder theory and cultural strategy as part of my Masters degree in Organisational and Business Psychology.

On paper, stakeholder and culture management appears highly analytical. Organisations identify who holds power, who has influence and whose interests matter the most, strategically speaking. Excellent tools and frameworks like the Johnson & Scholes “Cultural Web” model or easy-to-follow visual varieties of stakeholder maps exist to support in bringing to life a logical understanding of who we are, who we serve and how we should behave (Whittington et al., 2019, pp.128–195).

But the longer I spend around smart people in smart organisations, the more clear I think it becomes that people are rarely managed through process maps and governance chains. They are managed through relationships.

This is perhaps why R. Edward Freeman once described stakeholder management as more of a “creative art than a science” (ESSEC Business School, 2013).

A stakeholder may technically have “low power” on a chart somewhere, but if they are frightened, angry, unheard or publicly vocal, suddenly that influence changes very quickly. Equally, a senior leader with enormous formal authority can become almost ineffective if people no longer trust them emotionally... I challenge you to get out of that with an Excel formula!

We remember how people made us feel and whether we felt respected. We remember whether we felt safe to speak up on a difficult truth and we remember whether leaders stayed calm when things got difficult.

The past few years alone have shown how quickly organisational behaviour changes and its impact. Interestingly, it often happens in organisations filled with extremely intelligent people.

Boeing

Following the issues surrounding the 737 MAX crashes, investigations repeatedly pointed toward concerns around internal pressure, communication culture and fear around raising concerns. Reports noted siloed decision-making and prioritisation pressures.

Nobody thinks Boeing lacked technical expertise, the organisation was full of some of the most intelligent engineers in the world. But intelligence alone did not protect the organisation from communication breakdown and a defensive culture.

The Post Office

The Horizon scandal was another example of a system not lacking in intelligent people. It involved governance structures, legal processes, data systems and senior leadership. Yet over time defensiveness appeared to override curiosity and truthful voices were dismissed.

The public reaction was not just outrage at the technical failures, but disbelief that people raising concerns seemingly went unheard for so long.

Twitter/X

The dramatic cultural shifts following the takeover by Elon Musk created a very public example of stakeholder anxiety in real time.

Regardless of political standing, what became visible was communication becoming emotionally charged, employees publicly questioning safety and trust and rapid culture destabilisation.

Again, an organisation full of exceptionally intelligent people.

***

Not to get too negative, I also want to share a couple of examples that demonstrate the importance of EQ (Emotional Intelligence) rather than the absence of it.

Google

Google’s famous Project Aristotle research found that the highest-performing teams were not necessarily the teams with the highest combined IQ. The strongest predictor of team success was psychological safety, i.e. people feeling safe to speak, safe to admit mistakes, to contribute ideas and to disagree.

NHS

During COVID, many NHS leaders and teams were praised not just for technical competence, but for their emotional steadiness, compassionate communication, adaptability, trust-building and calm leadership under near-impossible pressure. Many healthcare workers became emotional anchors for frightened colleagues and the public.

I think this reinforces the point, that the best leaders need to regulate emotional systems, not just operational systems.

Traditional corporate culture has historically rewarded confidence, decisiveness and authority, but modern workplaces increasingly require people who can also regulate themselves under stress and navigate conflict calmly. A good leader should seek to be able to communicate with empathy, read emotional dynamics and build trust across differences with their peers and colleagues. I still struggle with this sometimes, but it's important to learn how to tolerate uncertainty without infecting everybody else with panic. Perhaps one of the stranger things about adulthood is that many workplaces still reward people for appearing emotionally unaffected, despite the fact that organisations themselves are entirely emotional systems made up of human beings.

American Psychologist and Author, Daniel Goleman (1996), popularised the concept of emotional intelligence decades ago, arguing that intellectual capability alone is often insufficient for effective leadership and healthy relationships. As he famously observed:

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”

Looking at modern workplace culture, this feels less like a soft wellbeing concept and more like an operational necessity. The organisations struggling most publicly are often not lacking intelligence, but lacking trust, psychological safety and emotionally mature leadership under pressure.

The best leaders I’ve personally encountered were not necessarily the loudest, the most academically impressive or even the most technically gifted person in the room. In fact, more often than not, they are the ones who can admit openly to what they don't know and have the trust and respect to remain quiet while a genuine expert explains a subject. I, personally, have been incredibly lucky to have met and worked with people who carry both academic credibility and a healthy dose of EQ. I also, somewhat unexpectedly, count myself lucky to have encountered the opposite, so I know what both good and bad looks like in an organisation.

That also means I know it's possible for the bad to become good...

I think that change often starts in much smaller ways than organisations expect. Not through another 84-slide PowerPoint about values, or a colourful wellbeing poster Blu-tacked next to the printer, but through ordinary daily interactions.

It's the manager who encourages collaboration, or the senior leader who says “I got that wrong”. It's the colleague who asks one extra useful question instead of succumbing to the collective groan of the people eager to leave the meeting. It's the team that can raise a risk early and be met with a useful discussion about decisions and escalations instead of everyone behaving like the bureaucracy of where it gets logged is the important piece of the puzzle. It's somebody understanding what you do and putting things in place to support you, instead of asking for another contribution to their whizzy spreadsheet that you absolutely know they won't read again until they ask for another update next month.

Those things sound tiny, but repeated over time, they completely change how a workplace feels to exist in. Once people feel safe enough to think clearly, contribute honestly and challenge respectfully, organisations often become more intelligent naturally.

Not IQ smart... EQ smart.

If you found this useful or interesting, you can contact Happy Citta to get an obligation free quote for a review of your own workplace and how to introduce emotionally intelligent practices, among your other valuable operational processes, to make everyone more productive through positive wellbeing at work! Find out more about workplace support, here:

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