Let me share a statistic that should stop every leader in their tracks: 90% of top performers are high in emotional intelligence. 80% of poor performers are low in it. And EQ accounts for approximately 60% of job performance across all industries and roles.

You can do the math. But the more important question is: what are you actually doing about it?

In my experience, most organisations treat EQ as a soft concept: something acknowledged in theory, discussed in induction programs, and then conveniently set aside when the quarterly numbers need attention.

This is a catastrophic strategic error. Because every expensive problem you’re dealing with as a leader (underperforming teams, poor retention, stalled innovation, toxic culture) almost certainly has emotional intelligence at its root.

“People who understand themselves and can manage their emotional state, while empathising with others, build the best relationships and get the best results. Every time.”

I’ve consulted with organisations across financial services, government, retail, and professional services. The presenting issue is almost always practical: “We need better communication across departments.” “Our next level of leadership isn’t developing fast enough.” “We’re losing our best people and we don’t know why.” The diagnosis, in most cases, traces back to the same source: leaders who do not understand themselves well enough to understand (and genuinely connect with) others.

This is not a soft problem. It has hard commercial consequences.

Consider what low EQ actually looks like in practice. It’s the manager who escalates a conflict because they can’t regulate their own frustration in the moment. It’s the executive who can’t retain talent because they’ve never learned to make people feel genuinely seen. It’s the team that never brings problems forward because the leader’s emotional unpredictability makes honesty feel risky. None of these show up on a balance sheet; until they do.

High EQ, by contrast, is not about being warm or likeable. Some of the highest-EQ leaders I know are extraordinarily direct and demanding. What distinguishes them is self-awareness: they know their own triggers, biases, and defaults with enough precision to choose their response rather than simply react. And they understand others (their motivations, their fears, their unexpressed needs) with enough empathy to communicate in ways that actually land.

The Enneagram has become central to the EQ development work I do with leadership teams for exactly this reason. It doesn’t just measure your current emotional competencies; it reveals the underlying personality structures that generate your emotional patterns in the first place. That’s a fundamentally different conversation, and a far more useful one.

When a leadership team engages with this work seriously, the shift is palpable. Not because they’ve all suddenly become more agreeable. But because they have a shared language for what’s actually happening in the room: a way of naming the dynamics that were previously invisible but enormously costly.

If you lead a team, a division, or an organisation, the single highest-leverage investment you can make in performance right now is not another strategy refresh. It’s understanding yourself (and your people) at a deeper level than your current operating system allows.

That’s what I do. And if you’re serious about it, let’s talk.