State of the Heart: leadership’s role in reversing the decline in emotional intelligence
The global workforce is struggling.
That’s what Six Seconds found when they published their annual State of the Heart report in 2024. Working across 169 countries, Six Seconds found that the emotional intelligence of employees – their capacity to meet, navigate and solve emotional challenges – has been in consistent decline since 2018, across every metric measured for the report.
What does that mean in practice? It means that only 23% of the employees surveyed felt engaged with their work, while 60% described themselves as emotionally detached from it. It means that burnout is soaring as reported levels of motivation and optimism fall. And it means that human-to-human relationships at work are suffering as teams struggle with the emotional literacy, empathy and connection they need to realize their potential together.
In the State of the Heart report, the effects of the pandemic are put forward as the key factor behind this decline – after rising in the pre-pandemic years, global emotional intelligence competencies saw a steep fall through 2020 and 2021 especially. But while the pandemic is certainly part of the puzzle, there are more elements at play here.
The escalating climate crisis, major international conflicts, increased acceleration and competition in business, our rapidly evolving relationship with technology – all of these are landing heavy blows on our resilience, energy and emotional intelligence.
Undoing that damage won’t be as simple as waiting for times to get better. It will take a proactive focus on developing leaders with a renewed focus on empathy and emotion, on creating deeper and more intentional interactions at work, and on changing how we measure success at work and in life.
Building emotional capacity with vertical leadership development
Six Seconds defines emotional intelligence as “accurately gathering emotional data and effectively using it to solve emotional challenges”. In other words, it’s how well we can interact with others socially, understand their needs outside of our own, and how our actions impact upon them.
Our ability to make these judgments is hurt when we’re under stress. If our priority is keeping our head above water as our workload bloats, or if we’re overwhelmed by the chaos of external triggers, the natural response is to turn our gaze inward. Fight or flight thinking kicks in, and it becomes more difficult to see how our actions impact anyone beyond ourselves.
The answer to this lies with leadership – or more specifically, with vertical leadership development. The idea behind vertical leadership development is increasing a leader’s capacity to understand themselves and others, to integrate different points of view, and to think of needs beyond just the company’s bottom line.
It’s a concept that’s fundamentally tied to emotional intelligence. The more we can all invest in developing leaders to improve their emotional capabilities, the better equipped they will be to approach setbacks and stresses with curiosity, patience and empathy, rather than with fight or flight reactions.
How technology accelerates stress and burnout
When looking at the global decline in emotional intelligence and the reality of a human energy crisis, we also can’t ignore the role technology plays.
There’s no denying the benefits technology brings to business – connecting teams and clients regardless of location, automating processes that were once just a time sink, and opening the door to new skills and training opportunities.
But those benefits haven’t been without their drawbacks. We’re sitting in more virtual meetings than ever before, sometimes taking them while on the move or when we should be having a break, all because instant connection demands our constant availability. We’re being bombarded with tools for artificial intelligence, productivity boosting and data tracking, with the expectation that we’ll understand every change as it comes.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to see why so many teams and leaders around the world are feeling overwhelmed, overstimulated and overburdened.
As we grapple with a decline in emotional intelligence and resilience, part of the solution will be interrogating how we use technology. We need to do more to understand the nuance behind when to use or take a step back from tech tools, and to understand our own limits when it comes to overstimulation.
And for leaders, there will also need to be a much greater investment in bringing team members together in person – not calling for an end to hybrid or remote working, but enabling more intentional, human-to-human conversations even as we embrace technological connectivity.
It’s time for a more sustainable approach to leadership
If you spend time talking to leaders, either in your organization or from others, you probably don’t need the State of the Heart report to tell you that people are more burned out and less resilient than ever. You can see it in those leaders’ faces, hear it in their voices as they tell you about the increasing competition they face each day, the rising financial stakes, and the need to produce more in less time.
Chances are, you can see it in your own work as well.
This need to produce more and more is part of what’s causing the inward turn we see in leaders and employees around the world. But as well as harming our capacity for emotional intelligence, it’s also deeply unsustainable – both in terms of the energy and output of leaders and employees themselves, and also for society and the environment.
If we’re to stop this sense of rampant acceleration from doing more harm to ourselves and the world around us, we need to find a more sustainable approach to leadership. That means leaders will need to learn to expand their self-awareness to include other perspectives, and also to motivate teams with purpose and authenticity rather than orders and demands.
But above all, it will mean reframing how we measure success – by choosing to judge ourselves less by our profits, results and annual pay raises, and more by the impact our actions have on the people and the world around us.
