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#BizTrends2025: #CuratingtheFuture with emotional intelligence to unlock leadership doors in 2025
24 Jan 2025
In today’s evolving workplace, diversity and inclusion are paramount. Organisations are working hard to create environments that embrace different perspectives, cultures and experiences, challenging leaders to adapt their approaches.
Brian Eagar, CEO of Towerstone
Central to this effort is the importance of fostering a culture of psychological safety and belonging, where individuals feel safe to fully contribute without fear of judgment. Key to this is developing emotional intelligence, providing a sound foundation to build your leadership competence on. Without emotional intelligence, leaders will struggle to create environments that drive high-performance, ultimately to the detriment of the company’s success.
The term “emotional intelligence” was first defined by psychologists John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey and later popularised by Daniel Goleman, who emphasised its critical role in leadership. He stated,
The most effective leaders are all alike in one crucial way: they all have a high degree of what has come to be known as emotional intelligence. It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions. My research, along with other recent studies, clearly shows that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership. Without it, a person can have the best training in the world, an incisive, analytical mind, and an endless supply of smart ideas, but he still won’t make a great leader.
So, how will emotional intelligence support the skills you need to develop to be successful in 2025?
Heightened self-awareness and empathy
Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to recognise and manage your own emotions, while understanding and influencing the emotions of others. Studies show that high levels of emotional intelligence account for over 60% of people’s personal and professional achievements, underscoring its significant impact on success.
However, only about 36% of people worldwide are emotionally intelligent, highlighting the need for leaders to further cultivate EI within themselves and their teams.
Self-awareness is an integral part of EI. This is why it is essential for leaders to take the time to understand their SCARF%20Summary.pdf SCARF domains—status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness—and to identify what switches them on or off when engaging with others.
Leaders who deeply understand their own emotions can accurately identify how triggers like stress, frustration or anxiety influence their decision-making, reactions and interpersonal interactions. By recognising these emotional patterns, they can better manage their responses, ensuring that emotions do not unintentionally harm relationships, objectives or team cohesion.
Self-awareness can be cultivated through daily self-reflection, mindfulness practices, and actively seeking feedback on how those you lead experience and perceive you. This approach enables leaders to recognise recurring behavioural patterns, make necessary adjustments, and foster healthier, more productive workplace dynamics.
Further to this, self-awareness cultivates empathy in turn. Leaders who practise empathy are better equipped to recognise how factors such as status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness influence their team members’ motivations, challenges, and aspirations, enabling them to respond in ways that foster trust and collaboration, switching others on.
Empathy is the first step toward understanding those you lead and being able to make intentional behaviour changes that get the best out of them. One-on-one conversations, feedback loops and active listening allow leaders to connect with individuals on a deeper level. In fact, employees with empathetic leaders report a 76% increase in engagement and a 61% increase in creativity, directly contributing to higher performance.
Enhanced ability to lead diverse, multi-generational teams
As workplaces become more diverse, complex and decentralised, the role of EI in leadership has become more critical. With up to five generations working side by side, each with unique backgrounds, personalities and values, leaders face rising complexity in the workplace.
This underscores the critical role of emotional intelligence (EI), a skill that enables leaders to manage and engage all team members effectively, create a sense of belonging and safety, and help them perform at their best.
Intentional leadership behaviour change
Once you show empathy and understand those you lead in a deeper way, the next step is to intentionally change your behaviours. Leaders need to intentionally cultivate behaviours that switch on those they lead.
To truly cultivate a culture of psychological safety and belonging, emotionally intelligent leaders must actively model the behaviours they wish to see, as their actions set the tone for those they lead. Without this active demonstration, the desired culture is unlikely to manifest.
Intentional behaviour involves consciously choosing how to act in specific situations, considering the emotional needs of both you and others. This approach ensures that responses are not driven by impulses or unchecked emotions but by intentional actions that actively drive the desired organisational culture.
Intentional behaviour change requires leaders to make intentional choices in how they respond to others. For example, instead of reacting impulsively in stressful situations, emotionally intelligent leaders pause, assess their emotions, and choose a response that switches others on instead of off.
This approach helps foster trust and respect, as team members see their leaders consistently act with intention, not impulse. However, these necessary behaviours cannot be sustained if the correct systems are not put in place to support them. Leaders need frameworks, processes, and a culture that reinforce these intentional actions, ensuring they are not just occasional responses but consistent habits.
Increased appetite for feedback
Lastly, leaders who understand the importance of accepting feedback, reflecting on their actions, and acknowledging mistakes show signs of high EI. This openness to self-assessment builds trust with teams, as employees see leaders as approachable and committed to their own growth. When leaders model accountability, they set a powerful example, encouraging the same behaviour in their teams and promoting a culture of continuous improvement.
Conclusion
With the leadership landscape leaning more on influence and less on authority, knowing how to engage your team members to get the best out them is critical. Understanding self, connecting with others, being intentional about developing fit-for-purpose leadership behaviours and being open to feedback will distinguish exceptional leaders from the rest in 2025 and beyond.
About Brian Eagar
Brian Eagar is the founder and group CEO of TowerStone. From being voted as the naughtiest kid most likely to fail at school, Eagar found success in the information and technology sector as a young sales and marketing executive, culminating in an executive sales and strategy role for one of the Siemens businesses based in Germany. On his return to South Africa, his passion to inspire leadership led to the creation of TowerStone Leadership Centre in 2006.