The leadership skill most people ignore
Jul 31, 2026Edge of Possibilities | Liz Murray | Leadership Reading time: 6 minutes
You got here on competence. You solve problems faster than most people in the room, you make the calls nobody else wants to make, and on paper, you're doing everything right.
So why does it feel like something's still not landing with your team?
Most leaders never connect the dip to the one skill nobody put on their job description. Not because it isn't there, but because it doesn't show up on a scorecard. It shows up in the room, in the ninety seconds after someone disagrees with you, in whether your team brings you problems early or hides them until they're unavoidable.
That skill is emotional intelligence. And it's not the soft skill you've been told it is.
Why smart people still get stuck
Competence gets you promoted. It rarely explains what happens after.
Once you're responsible for other people, the job stops being about how well you do the work and starts being about how well you read and respond to what's happening around you, in the room, under pressure, mid-conflict. That's a different skill. Most leaders never separate the two, so when things stall, they assume it's a team problem, a hiring problem, or a communication problem. Sometimes it is. Often, it's the one gap nobody's checking for.
What emotional intelligence at work actually means
It's not about being nice. It's not a personality trait you either have or don't.
Psychologist Daniel Goleman first applied the concept to business in his 1998 Harvard Business Review article, What Makes a Leader?, after studying leadership behaviour inside nearly 200 large companies. He identified five components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill. His finding, in plain terms, was that IQ and technical skill get you in the door, but this is what determines whether you're effective once you're leading people. It's a measurable, learnable set of behaviours, not a vibe.
Two leaders, the same problem, two different outcomes
Two leaders came to me around the same time with what looked like the same issue: team members bringing personal problems into work, distracted, underperforming, dragging down morale.
Dean's response was to bring me in for one-to-one coaching with the team members themselves, so they could work through whatever was going on and leave it at the door. Sensible on the surface. He treated it as their issue to resolve.
Greg's response was different. He asked me to coach him. He understood that how his team was showing up was connected to how he was showing up for them, and that was his to shift, not theirs to fix alone.
Through the coaching, Greg changed two specific things. He started asking deeper questions before responding to a problem, instead of reacting to the surface behaviour. And he got clearer on setting expectations and ground rules after he understood what was actually going on, not before.
The shift in his team wasn't something he had to force. Once they felt understood, and felt he genuinely cared, their performance started improving on its own. Greg had built the skill to respond instead of react, and his team felt the difference before he ever said a word about it.
Dean's team members felt supported in their individual sessions. But the culture around them didn't move, because the one thing that needed to shift, how Dean led, never did.
Same starting problem. One leader changed his own behaviour. One outsourced the fix. Only one got a lasting result.
The specific behaviour that made the difference
It wasn't a personality change. It was three observable moves:
- Pausing before responding to a problem, instead of reacting to it
- Asking a genuine clarifying question before deciding what's going on
- Setting expectations after understanding the real issue, not before
None of that requires becoming a different person. It requires noticing the gap between reacting and responding, and closing it on purpose.
Two questions before you close this
Not to feel bad about, just worth being honest with yourself about.
When a team member's performance dips, where does your attention go first, what's wrong with them, or what's mine to adjust?
Where in your leadership right now are you investing in fixing someone else's behaviour, when the faster lever might be your own?
If either question landed, that's worth a closer look. The Leadership Mirror takes three minutes and shows you exactly where your authority might be drifting, and why.
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