State of the Heart: Vertical leadership development – a pathway to reversing our emotional intelligence decline
Last year, Six Seconds released their 2024 State of the Heart Report and with it, their findings that the global workforce has been struggling for several years now.
Since 2020, global emotional intelligence, resilience and wellbeing have been in steady decline among leaders and employees alike, while burnout continues to rise. Only 23% of employees reported feeling engaged in their work, while scores for quality of life, relationships and effectiveness reached a new low point in 2022.
These figures don’t just show a serious problem for individual employees and leaders. They also show a bleak picture for organizations as a whole – as EQ falls, it takes with it the ability of teams to navigate stress and collaborate effectively together.
In order to reverse this decline, organizations will need to embrace a more vertical approach to leadership development – one that builds the capacity for empathy, open mindedness and curiosity. To learn more about this, we spoke to Christian Scholtes, Global Chair at TPC Leadership, and Andrea Cardillo, Managing Partner of TPC Leadership in Italy.
The root of the decline goes deeper than 2020
While the numbers showing the emotional intelligence decline are clear, the cause of it isn’t as obvious. The State of the Heart report suggests a correlation with the pandemic – global EQ and energy levels saw their steepest drop between 2020 and 2021 – but the pandemic hasn’t been the only stress to have rocked us collectively in the last five years.
“We have to dig deeper into what else might be at play,” says Christian. “We’ve been living in times of heightened global uncertainty, social isolation and division, and under rising workloads, managerial control and pressure to perform.
“All of those stresses made it hard enough to find reasons to be optimistic, so when the pandemic arrived it found us already tired and worn out. But if the world was in a different place in 2020, would we have processed the pandemic differently?”
This backdrop of stresses is where vertical leadership development comes in. The reason our emotional intelligence suffers when we’re under heavy stress is because if we can’t deal with those triggers, our brain enters fight or flight mode – our gaze turns inward, and we think only of the impact our actions will have on ourselves or on the company’s bottom line.
Vertical leadership development is all about increasing the capacity of leaders to process those stresses without becoming overwhelmed. Rather than focusing on adding new tools and skills to the leader’s arsenal, vertical leadership development helps them to increase their understanding of the needs and limitations of themselves and others, and to approach intense triggers with curiosity, empathy and an open mind to different points of view.
Resisting the urge to turn our gaze inward
One of the reasons that vertical leadership development is so closely linked with emotional intelligence is because it involves broadening what Andrea calls our sense of “I”.
Our sense of “I” isn’t just our sense of who we are. It’s also our capacity to make sense of the network of people and systems around us – friends, family, coworkers, organizational structures, institutions, collective identities, and so on – and how their needs impact ours, and vice versa.
When we’re young our sense of “I” is not much bigger than what we want in the here and now. But it expands as we grow older and realize that other people have needs different from our own. For example, you learn that you can’t be happy at home if your partner or children aren’t happy as well. Or at work, you learn that your team can’t deliver the work you need unless they’re getting the inspiration, motivation and authentic purpose they need from their leaders.
“The current decline in emotional intelligence might be a sign that our sense of ‘I’ has contracted under the stresses impacting us,” Andrea says.
“For leaders in a business, their sense of ‘I’ might have pulled back in the last few years. It’s become limited to the needs of themselves and their business results, at the expense of the needs of immediate (teams, functions) or broader eco-systems (organizations, communities, environment).”
Ironically, the more leaders pull back their gaze to only take in bottom line needs, the harder those goals will be to keep meeting. When employees start to feel that their needs are going unmet or unnoticed, productivity inevitably falls, deadlines routinely get missed and turnover begins to rise.
Building the curiosity to challenge collective narratives
Lastly, leaders will need to embrace a more curious mindset when it comes to facing the stresses before them and finding solutions to those triggers.
As Andrea says: “It’s easy to see the narrative that everything’s falling apart and the world is in crisis and think, ‘If that’s the case, I’ll do the same to survive.’”
Or in the business world where everyone is under pressure to produce twice as much with half the time and resources<link to Blog 04 Sustainability and Leadership>, it’s easy to think the only way to stay competitive is to join that arms race.
“But accepting those narratives as true means pushing them onto others,” Andrea says. “To avoid that, leaders need to have the capability to critically assess the narratives they see, and understand that there’s more to reality than what we see on social media or in the news.”
Christian recalls an example of an executive coaching conversation he had with a past client, in which they discussed rethinking narratives by approaching stress with curiosity rather than anger.
“In one session he was telling me about a particularly awful day,” Christian says. “There were high financial stakes at play, but everything in the organization was going wrong.
“During the conversation he was getting more tense and ready to burst, but then he switched and said, ‘I’m really curious about what happens next.’ That moment seemed to untangle the whole dynamic for him.”
This kind of curiosity is what leaders will need when facing narratives like those shown in the State of the Heart. It would be easy to see the decline in emotional intelligence and resilience and think that it can’t be reversed, or to see your own burnout reflected in the figures and meet that with anger and inward thinking.
But in order to develop that curious mindset, leaders will need to make a determined effort to integrate new perspectives into their thinking, and to interrogate where their decisions sit in the bigger picture of the people around them. And for that to happen on the scale we need to start undoing the EQ decline, vertical leadership development has to be part of the solution.
