The leadership skill most people ignore

You got promoted on competence. That's not always what keeps you leading well. This episode names the one skill that quietly costs leaders their authority, and walks through two real leaders who hit the exact same wall, only one of whom actually shifted it.

Key takeaways:

- Competence gets you promoted, it rarely explains what happens after

- Emotional intelligence is measurable and learnable, not a personality trait, per Daniel Goleman's five components: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill

- Two leaders faced the same team problem, only the one who changed his own behaviour got a lasting result

- The shift comes down to three moves: pause, ask, then set expectations

- Noticing where your attention goes first is the entire first step Ready to go deeper? Be Exceptional is Liz's signature leadership course for leaders who are ready to stop over-functioning and start leading with clarity and authority.

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/XV2BtHzwavI

Read the blog: https://www.edgeofpossibilities.com.au/blog/the-leadership-skill-most-people-ignore

🎓 Ready to go deeper? Be Exceptional is Liz's signature leadership course for leaders who are ready to stop over-functioning and start leading with clarity and authority. 👉 Join here: https://www.edgeofpossibilities.com.au/joinus-2c00a25f-6b1e-43de-9f69-9caa21b5ecbc

Connect with Liz:

🔗 Start Here, everything in one place: https://www.edgeofpossibilities.com.au/start-here

▶️ Take 5 With Me on YouTube, weekly leadership videos: https://www.youtube.com/@lizmurray_Leadership

🎧 Leading From The Edge on Spotify, the audio version: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Hbdf0kFgsuhDVNLnanQRc

💼 LinkedIn, weekly newsletter and insights: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizmurrayedgeofpossibilities/

📩 [email protected]

PUBLISH DATE: Monday, 3 August 2026 at 6:00am AEST
EPISODE LENGTH: 4 minutes 57 seconds
THUMBNAIL: The leadership skill most people ignore cover, not yet supplied

Transcript

You got here on competence. So why does it still feel like something's not landing with your team? I coach leaders on exactly this pattern, so let's get straight into it. Most leaders never separate being good at the work from being good at leading people. By the end of this, you'll know exactly if the gap is yours, and what it actually looks like to close it: the problem, the cost, the insight, and the one shift you can take away today. Here's the problem. 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. It becomes about how well you read and respond to what's happening around you, in the room, under pressure, mid-conflict. Most leaders never notice that shift has happened. So when things stall, they blame the team, the hiring, the communication. Sometimes it's one of those. Often it's a specific gap that no one's even checking for. So what is that gap? Emotional intelligence. And before you switch off, it's not the soft skill you've been thinking it is. Psychologist Daniel Goleman first applied this to business back in 1998, in a Harvard Business Review piece, after studying leadership inside nearly 200 companies. He broke it into five parts: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skill. It's measurable, it's learnable, and it's not a personality trait. Here's the cost when we're missing it. It doesn't show up on a scorecard. It shows up in whether your team brings you problems early, or hides them until they're too big to hide. Let me show you what that actually looks like in two real leaders. Two leaders came to me around the same time with what looked like the same issue: team members bringing personal stuff to work, distracted, underperforming, dragging the whole team down. Dean's response was to bring me in for one-to-one coaching with the team members themselves, so they could work through it and leave it at the door. Sensible on the surface, he treated it as if it was their issue to fix. Greg's response was different. He asked me to coach him instead. 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 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 of it. And he got clearer on setting expectations and ground rules after he understood what was actually going on, not before. He didn't have to force the shift in his team. Once they felt understood, and felt like he actually cared, their performance started improving on its own. Dean's team members felt supported in their individual sessions, but the culture around them never moved, because the one thing that needed to change, how Dean led, never did. Same starting problem. One leader changed his own behaviour. One outsourced the fix. Only one of them saw lasting results. So here's what actually made the difference, and it's not personality change. It's three things you can start doing this week: pause before you respond to a problem, instead of reacting to it. Ask genuine clarifying questions before you make a decision on what's going on. Then set expectations after you understand the real issue, not before. None of that requires becoming a different person. It requires noticing the gap between reacting and responding, and doing it on purpose. Two things worth being honest with yourself about, not to feel bad about, just to notice. When a team member's performance dips, where does your attention go first: what's wrong with them, or what's mine to adjust? And where in your leadership right now are you paying to fix someone else's behaviour, when the faster lever might be your own? If either of these landed, don't sit with it, go find out. The Leadership Mirror takes three minutes and shows you exactly where this might be costing you. The link's below.