THE GROWTH EDGE
The Leadership Edge
Development Insights for Leaders Who Do the Work
June 2026 • Issue #3
The phrase I hear most often from leaders who are stuck isn’t “I don’t know what to do.” It’s “I know what I should do, I just can’t seem to do it in the moment.” The manager who knows she should slow down and ask a question, and instead hears herself deliver the verdict. The executive who knows the dissent in the room is valuable, and still feels his jaw tighten when it arrives. The gap there isn’t knowledge. It’s the distance between understanding something intellectually and being able to act on it when your nervous system has other plans.
That gap has a name, and it’s the subject of one of last month’s posts. Emotional intelligence gets dismissed as a soft skill, which is exactly backwards. It’s the hardest kind of development there is, because you’re not learning new information — you’re rewiring automatic responses that have been running, unexamined, for decades. The other post last month, on building trust, makes a parallel point at the team level: trust isn’t a feeling you decide to have. It’s a conclusion people draw from watching your behavior, repeated over months.
Both posts circle the same uncomfortable truth. The development that actually matters is slow, it’s behavioral, and it can’t be shortcut with a workshop or an offsite. The research this month reinforces it from a few directions — including a finding I find quietly hopeful about how a single, ordinary behavior compounds into both higher emotional intelligence and stronger teams.
What We Published Last Month
Emotional Intelligence Isn’t Soft — It’s the Hardest Leadership Skill to Develop
This post opens with a CFO who was brilliant on paper and losing his team — top-quartile analytical scores, an Empathy score at the 18th percentile. It breaks emotional intelligence into the 15 measurable dimensions of the EQ-i 2.0, walks through the four patterns that show up most often in coaching, and explains why EQ is harder to build than any technical skill: the emotional system is faster than the cognitive one. The development work is real, slow, and specific — and it starts with knowing which dimension is actually creating the problem.
Read it: Emotional Intelligence Isn’t Soft →
Building Trust on a Leadership Team: It’s Slower Than You Think
A CEO opens an offsite with “we have a trust problem and we’re going to fix it today.” Eight hours later, the team feels good. Two weeks later, nothing has changed. This post explains the asymmetry at the heart of trust — it takes dozens of consistent behaviors to build and a single violation to break — and names the unglamorous behaviors that actually build it: kept small commitments, admitting what you don’t know, direct conversations instead of triangulated ones. If you lead a team, the three actions at the close are worth trying this week.
Read it: Building Trust on a Leadership Team →
Worth Knowing: What the Research Is Saying
Quality & Quantity (peer-reviewed), 2026. A study of 217 leaders across multiple organizations, using structural equation modeling, found that emotional intelligence significantly improves leadership effectiveness through three specific channels: communication, decision-making, and conflict resolution. The effect on outcomes like job satisfaction ran through employee engagement — EQ didn’t just make leaders feel better, it changed how their teams performed.
What I appreciate about this study is the specificity. “Emotional intelligence makes you a better leader” is easy to nod along to and hard to act on. “Emotional intelligence improves your conflict resolution, which improves your team’s engagement, which improves their satisfaction” is a chain you can actually work on a single link of. If conflict resolution is your weak link — and for a lot of technically strong leaders, it is — that’s the development target, and it’s measurable.
Workhuman, 2025 Recognition Study. In a study of nearly 5,000 workers, employees who receive recognition from their managers were five times more likely to demonstrate higher emotional intelligence — and employees who give recognition were seven times more likely to show high-EQ traits. Recognition, in other words, isn’t just a morale lever. It’s a behavior rooted in empathy and social awareness, and practicing it appears to strengthen those very capacities.
This is the quietly hopeful finding I mentioned. Most EQ development feels abstract — “build your empathy” isn’t an instruction you can follow on a Tuesday. But noticing something specific a colleague did well and saying so out loud is concrete, repeatable, and apparently compounds. It’s also one of the trust behaviors from last month’s post. The same small act builds your emotional intelligence and your team’s trust at the same time. If you’re looking for one behavioral experiment to run this month, that’s a strong candidate.
Harvard Business Review, February 2026. In a piece co-authored by Amy Edmondson — whose research defined psychological safety — HBR describes a pattern emerging on AI-equipped teams: individual productivity rises while team performance declines. People begin second-guessing their own judgment and stop voicing concerns, and the trust that lets a team challenge each other quietly erodes.
For an individual leader, the takeaway is about what you model. When your team is using AI tools, they’re watching to see whether it’s safe to say “I think the model is wrong here” or “I’m not sure about this output.” If you treat those moments as friction to be smoothed over, people learn to stay quiet. If you treat them as exactly the judgment you’re paying for, you protect the thing that makes a team worth more than its tools. As with trust generally, your behavior in the small moments sets the norm.
Resource Spotlight
7 Hidden Signs You Are Headed for Burnout. Most people don’t recognize burnout until they’re deep in it. This guide names the early warning signs — the ones that show up well before the obvious exhaustion — and what to do when you spot them. A useful companion to this month’s theme, since the emotional capacity that EQ and trust depend on is the first thing to erode when you’re running on empty.
Get the 7 Hidden Signs You Are Headed for Burnout guide →
Curious what assessment-driven development would look like for you?
Discovery calls are free, 30 minutes, and there’s no pitch — just an honest conversation about where you are, what you’re working on, and whether structured coaching or assessment work would help you get there.