How to pick your way through a jumble of ambiguity, pressure, and contradictions
Written by Dan Parry • 20 January, 2026
Interpersonal Communication Skills Article
Over the next 12 months, the impact of change is expected to raise demand for emotional intelligence skills. AI tools support steady processes and routine. But when unexpected developments throw a spanner in the works, organisations need individuals and teams to work together effectively. In those moments, human skills can offer more than artificial alternatives.
What does emotional intelligence look like in 2026? In years gone by, there were references to ‘soft skills’. Diversity, equity, and inclusion were more prominent. Today, emotional intelligence (EI) has a name that feels like it’s from a gentler time.
Something labelled as ‘emotional’ can be a hard sell, so perhaps EI can be reframed. In a business context, EI is not about prioritising empathy over everything else. It’s about working effectively with other people. Grounded in neuroscience (for example, research relating to trust), EI can be regarded as psychological intelligence. What does this mean in practice?
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand, and manage emotions – your own and other people’s. When you’re under pressure, emotions can be regulated through social awareness.
A culture of emotional intelligence supports skills in influencing, resolving conflict, and building commitment. Individuals are more likely to work better together when they feel trusted, understood, and respected.
Effective EI matters at work because it enables people to interpret nuance, sense risk, manage tension, and communicate decisions in ways that sustain trust and momentum.
Teams that struggle to connect may lack resilience. When problems develop, perhaps through incomplete data or contradictory market signals, poor emotional intelligence can allow blame to set in, along with other unhelpful behaviours that delay solutions.
EI relies on theory of mind – the idea that the person across the room has a mind just like yours. You can’t see inside their head, but you can easily imagine that they tuned out of the presentation even earlier than you did and right now they’re thinking about lunch.
EI is about thinking of a colleague as a person. Hidden beyond their professional sheen, there are unspoken thoughts, hopes, and expectations. Since we all share similar feelings, it’s no great leap of imagination to think someone works broadly in the same way as you. This is important because it allows forward projection. In other words, you can guess how someone might respond to something you want to say before you’ve said it. So, before you speak or act, you can adjust your words, tone, and behaviour accordingly.
It’s the same thing as tweaking a presentation to suit an audience. Before you even enter the room, you know for sure that the audience will regard a ton of data as death by a thousand cuts. You also know they’ll want eye contact, and that they’ll expect you to be clear, persuasive, and brief.
Understanding these things – and responding to them – involves treating people with care, respect, and basic humanity. This is emotional intelligence in action, and it applies whether you’re addressing a roomful of people or just chatting with someone alone.
The importance of emotional intelligence is hard to see in a spreadsheet. However, when company culture turns sour, it’s easy to spot a correlating dip in productivity. A healthy culture supports core EI competencies such as:
Consciousness is awareness of self, others, and context. It’s noticing what you’re feeling and how it may shape your behaviour, before it spills into decisions. In the workplace, consciousness encourages judgement rather than reaction: spotting tension, recognising bias, sensing when data isn’t the whole story. It also includes situational awareness – understanding power, pressure, and timing.
Control is the ability to regulate emotion rather than be run by it. It’s about taking a breath in the heat of the moment, choosing to give a measured response by staying calm under pressure. It’s the difference between reacting defensively and responding constructively. In business, emotional control protects judgement, especially in conflict, negotiation, and uncertainty.
Confidence, in EI terms, is grounded self-belief – not bravado. It comes from knowing your strengths, limits, and values, and acting consistently with them. Emotionally intelligent confidence allows people to speak clearly, listen openly, and change their mind without feeling diminished. In the workplace, this looks like credibility and trust. You don’t over-assert, but you don’t disappear either.
Connection is the ability to build genuine rapport and trust with other people. Emotionally intelligent connection means creating space for others to contribute. Empathy, curiosity, and respect make it easier to understand how colleagues experience work, pressure, and change. In organisations, connection drives engagement, collaboration, and retention far more reliably than incentives alone.
Emotionally intelligent communication is clear, proportionate, and responsive to context. It balances honesty with care, challenge with respect. In business, this means fewer misunderstandings, faster decisions, and less friction. It also means listening properly – not to reply, but to understand. Notice tone, pace, and impact, and adjust accordingly – explaining your reasoning, not just conclusions.
To improve emotional intelligence in the workplace, an individual might start by noticing more about other people. Picking up clues about what makes someone tick leads to a better connection. This in turns makes it easier to read between the lines, and so the relationship develops.
Between individuals, stronger connectivity can look like a healthy level of trust. Between teams, it can generate deeper collective intelligence. In all cases, EI is about responding to someone with kindness and understanding. Even when you know little about them, you can assume basic politeness will go a long way towards getting the relationship started.
Large language models (LLMs) feel none of these things. They might know them through learning. But they are not sentient, they do not have emotions nor therefore emotional intelligence.
LLMs try to simulate EI in their connection with you, the user. They do this by adopting a ‘personality.’ By designing an LLM to respond as a person might, AI developers hope you’ll latch on to their product rather than someone else’s.
But the simulation involved is guesswork. LLMs are good at guessing, filling in the blanks, but only with regard to text and data. They’re less good at this with people.
The thing about AI is that it’s artificial. It lacks the genuine emotional intelligence that lets people fill in the blanks in relationships. An LLM can’t be trained to soak up the atmosphere in a room. It cannot be genuinely concerned about someone’s unsaid sadness, or encourage a quiet voice in a meeting.
EI between people is about vulnerability. I will give you trust and respect if you give me the same in return, each of us knowing the other will feel hurt if trust is betrayed. Without emotions to offer up, AI does not take part in this exchange. It offers less than people.
At Working Voices, our Emotional Intelligence Training Course gives people the confidence to work effectively with others. Participants learn to develop the trust, understanding, and respect that builds confidence, supports collective intelligence, and encourages cohesion.
The 2020s are a time of uncertainty. Modern workplaces are a spaghetti jumble of ambiguity, pressure, and contradictions. High-pressure organisations need to respond quickly to geopolitical tension or rapid AI developments. Expecting time-poor people to work faster is not the solution.
Artificial tools and systems can help, but businesses move faster by strengthening human talent not bypassing it. Authentic emotional intelligence remains the most reliable way people make sense of complexity, trust one another, and act decisively in a world that no system can fully predict.
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The founder and CEO of Working Voices, Nick Smallman has been at the top of his profession for 25 years. Advising global blue-chip clients on engagement, productivity, and retention, he counsels leaders on increasing revenue via simple cultural adjustments.
Overseeing the successful expansion of Working Voices across the UK, the US, Asia, and the Middle East, Nick supports the leadership and communication capabilities of clients in a wide range of sectors. In particular, he has advised companies such as JP Morgan, Barclays, Sony, Nomura, M&S, and Blackrock for more than 15 years.
Developing his reputation for thought leadership, in recent years Nick has been leading work on The Sustainable Human, the subject of his forthcoming book. A concept unique to Working Voices, The Sustainable Human offers a package of solutions focusing on leadership enablement, future skills, and cultural harmony.
Working closely with HR specialist Mercer, Nick has developed solutions to four key modern workplace challenges:
“I’m excited to share the conclusions of three years of research that, if implemented, can make an immediate practical difference to leaders and their organisations.”
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