Every Decision Is Emotional. Here Is How to Improve Emotional Intelligence

I spent much of my career at McKinsey helping companies run their physical assets at 80-85% efficiency. Somewhere along the way I realized we were running the humans at less than 30%. The gap was not a skills gap or a strategy gap. It was an emotional one. Leaders who wanted to be rational were being run by feelings they had never learned to name, and workplace culture was absorbing the cost.

Dr. Robin Hills, a business psychologist and the director of Ei4Change, whose emotional intelligence courses have reached more than 500,000 people in 200+ countries, reached the same conclusion by a different road. He began his career selling pharmaceuticals to doctors in London’s teaching hospitals, and he noticed something he could not explain: he approached every doctor the same way, yet some engaged with him openly and others would not give him the time of day. The answer arrived in the mid-1990s when reading Daniel Goleman’s books. Robin had been telling doctors about the product instead of finding out what they needed. Thirty years later, his definition of emotional intelligence is the cleanest I have heard: being smart with your feelings, so that thinking and emotion work together to produce good decisions, authentic relationships, and the right action.

Simple to say, but very hard to do. Here is what our conversation, and the research behind it, suggests about how to improve emotional intelligence where it counts: in the moment, under pressure, when a decision is about to be made.

Why every decision is emotional, including the logical ones

Robin drives a gold Polestar. He will tell you, cheerfully, that if gold had not been available he would not own the car. There is no rational case for gold, there is only how it felt.

His larger claim is that every decision works this way; the only difference is how well the emotion is disguised. Most of us would push back on that. The neuroscience does not. In the 1990s Antonio Damasio described a patient he called Elliot, who lost part of his prefrontal cortex to a tumor. His IQ, memory and logic stayed intact. His emotions flattened. He became unable to make even trivial decisions, because without the feeling that one option is better than another, reason has nothing to steer by. Emotion is not the enemy of good judgment. It is the fuel.

That reframes the goal. Removing emotion from decisions is impossible. Noticing it before it decides for you is a skill, and it is the skill most leadership training for managers never teaches. As Robin put it, people “have an emotion, react, and then have to pick up the consequences weeks afterwards.”

A simpler way to name what you feel

When I ask a room of leaders to name what they are feeling, I get five words: stressed, frustrated, fine, tired, busy. Only one of those is an emotion.

This is not their fault. As I said to Robin:

We never teach the science of emotions growing up. We don’t learn it in schools, we don’t learn it in colleges, and we accidentally trip over it in the workplace.”

Robin Hills

Robin’s answer goes the opposite direction from most emotional-vocabulary advice. Rather than a bigger palette, he suggests a smaller question. Does this feel pleasant or unpleasant? Is the state I am in pushing me to build this relationship or to damage it? Two questions, asked in the moment, are enough to move a decision from automatic to chosen.

The research supports starting small. Matthew Lieberman’s lab at UCLA showed that simply putting a feeling into words reduces activity in the amygdala and engages the prefrontal cortex; the act of labeling is itself a brake. Todd Kashdan and Lisa Feldman Barrett found that people who could differentiate their emotions were 20-50% less likely to retaliate aggressively when hurt. You do not need a poet’s vocabulary. You need to say something true about your state before you act on it.

Professor Ethan Kross, Ross School of Business, who joined me recently on a podcast, adds one move I use daily: address yourself by name. “Ashish, what are you actually feeling right now?” The distance created by the third person is small and measurable, and it opens exactly the gap Robin is describing between the feeling and the reaction.

How top performers become fear-based leaders

Here is the pattern Robin and I have both watched for decades. The best individual performer gets promoted. She assumes the way she succeeded will scale, so she tells people to do it her way. When they do not, she pushes harder, then louder. Shouting gets short-term results. The organization sees the results and rewards them. Within two years a capable, well-meaning person is leading through fear and calling it standards.

My own research during my McKinsey years put the figure at 70-80% of people leaders operating from fear, anxiety or scarcity most of the time. Gallup’s data explains why that matters so much: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement, and in Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report manager engagement has fallen to 22%, down nine points since 2022.

Robin’s diagnosis is not ignorance. It is incentives. Leaders keep reacting because the reaction has worked for them, and because most of them misjudge what the skill is. In his words: “It’s not a soft skill, it’s a power skill.” Daniel Goleman’s analysis of nearly 200 companies found that at senior levels nearly 90% of the difference between star performers and average ones came down to emotional intelligence rather than cognitive ability. Nothing about that is soft.

Emotional intelligence is not about being soft. It is about being able to have the hard conversations in a way that allows the other person not to get defensive.”

Robin Hills

Servant leadership starts with one question

Robin told me about a leader who had built his authority on telling. My way or the highway. People disengaged and waited for him to leave the office.

The turnaround did not involve a program. He started asking. What is the best way for you to do your job? How can I help? What is in your way that I can remove? Within months the people who had avoided him were coming to him for support, and results improved because the whole team’s capability was finally in play.

This is the part of servant leadership that gets lost in the phrase. It is not softness or abdication. It is the recognition that you were promoted for a job you no longer do, and the people who do it know more about it than you. Asking is the fastest route to the information you need, and in my experience it is the shift that moves an organization from using 30% of its people toward what they are capable of.

How to improve emotional intelligence in the moment: the 10-second move

Everything above is easy to agree with on paper and brutally hard to do at 4:45 on a Thursday when someone has just pressed your hot button in front of your team. The theory is simple, the moment is not.

So I asked Robin for the smallest possible move for the first ten seconds. His answer has three parts.

1. Name the emotion out loud and own it. “The way this conversation is going is making me feel very angry.” Notice the grammar. You are not telling the other person they are wrong. You are reporting your state, which Lieberman’s research says is already calming it.
2. Take the minute. Walk out if you need to. One long out-breath, shoulders down, feet on the floor. That is how you tell a fight-or-flight system that the tiger has gone.
3. If the heat is still there when you return, move the decision. “Let’s pick this up tomorrow” is a complete sentence. Robin is clear that none of this is weakness: “You’ve got every right to do that. Just give yourself permission to do it.”

Here is the deeper principle as I understand it. Fear itself is rarely the problem. The problem is what we do to avoid feeling it: we push harder, we shut down, we decide too fast so the discomfort will end. Every one of those moves costs us the decision. The 10-second move works because it gives the fear somewhere to go. You feel it, you name it, and you are still the one choosing.

Why AI makes emotional intelligence a power skill

AI can describe empathy and increasingly detect emotion. What it cannot do is feel. It has no lived experience, no relationships to protect, and no stake in the outcome. When the task is done, it switches off.

The evidence is more unsettling than that. A 2026 study led by Stanford researchers found that leading AI models affirmed users’ positions 49% more often than humans do, and that people who received the flattering answers became less willing to repair a conflict while trusting the AI more. The risk for leaders is subtle. A tool designed to keep us engaged tends to agree with us, and a skill we hand to a tool for long enough weakens. If a system smooths over every hard conversation for you, you gradually lose the ability to have one yourself.

Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists resilience and agility, leadership and social influence, self-awareness, and empathy and active listening among the top ten skills employers want. The market is telling us what Robin is telling us. Hand the machines the logic and the automation. Keep the choices, the values, the relationships and the purpose. That is the interface that makes us human, and it is the only part of your job that cannot be copied.

It is also why Robin argues that emotions belong in the school curriculum well beyond kindergarten. The evidence already exists. A review of 213 school programs that teach children to recognize and manage their emotions found that students in those programs scored 11 percentile points higher academically than their peers. We know how to teach this. We simply stop teaching it at the age when it starts to matter.

Three things to try this week

Pick one.

1. Before your next significant decision, ask the two questions: pleasant or unpleasant, and is this feeling pushing me to build or to damage? Write the answer down. You will be surprised how often the “rational” case is a feeling with a business plan.
2. In your next one-on-one, replace one instruction with one question: what is the best way for you to do this, and how can I help? Then stop talking.
3. Identify your top hot button. Rehearse the sentence you will say out loud when it is pressed, so that in the moment the words are already there.

In the REWIRE work we do with leadership teams, we call this inner work for outer impact: regulate the leader before you redesign the system, because the system takes its emotional cues from the top. My full conversation with Dr. Robin Hills is on the Flourishing Edge podcast, and if you have ever defended a decision that was really a feeling, it is worth an hour of your week.

Learn more about Robin Hills on LinkedIn.

Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Robin Hills. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.

Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.

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