Leadership, Emotional Intelligence & Technology

Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness, and Organisational Behaviour

A hub for understanding how psychological insight supports better leadership in a world shaped by tech, uncertainty, and complexity.

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Leadership today requires a lot more than technical skill, expert knowledge, and strategic acumen. Sure, those things go a long way, but if a leader doesn't have the psychological, emotional, and communication skills required to deploy their vision, all their skill and experience will remain under-utilised. I'm not just saying this because as I psychological consultant, these are the areas that I seek to develop: there's plenty of research to back me up.

Did you know that 90% of top performers in business score highly in emotional intelligence (EQ) competencies? According to the same research, EQ alone accounts for more than half what makes them successful (that means even more so than subject knowledge!). Historically dismissed as "soft skills" psychological and emotional intelligences enables us to better understand interpersonal dynamics, navigate uncertainty, recognise blind spots, and work more effectively with colleagues, staff and customers or clients.

The Elements of Personal Leadership is a model that I have developed over time that combines theories and practices from clinical psychology, emotional intelligence, and mindfulness that can be applied for maximum effectiveness in the workplace (they work pretty well outside of work too). While each of these theories work well in isolation, I have found that integrating them as a theory of leadership has a synergistic effect that makes them even more powerful:

Clinical psychology gives you better insight into yourself, loosens defence mechanisms, and grounds you as an authentic, open, yet resilient and robust leader.
Emotional intelligence enhances your capacity to engage with others, lead teams more effectively, and contribute to a flourishing workplace culture.
Mindfulness reduces reactivity, reduces stress and burnout, and helps you and your team re-connect with your vision and mission.

This page brings together the central ideas behind my work with leaders and organisations at the intersection of psychology and technology. It is written for executives, HR directors, law firms, tech companies, public institutions, and anyone responsible for guiding people through change.

Emotional Intelligence as a Competitive Advantage

Emotional intelligence (EQ) and mindfulness have been dismissed as wooly concepts developed by Boomer hippies for far too long. We now understand each of them to be fundamentally important skills across the board - not only for leaders. While we tend to be much more familiar with intelligence as represented by IQ, EQ is less familiar to most of us. EQ isn't just about being "nice and empathetic" there is a science to it. It is generally broken down into the two broad categories of persona and social competencies:

Personal Competencies:

Self Awareness: Accurate self-assessment of your characteristics, skills, self worth, and emotional states
Self-Regulation: Well-developed self-control, high levels of trustworthiness and conscientiousness, adaptability to change, and capacity for innovation.
Motivation: Drive towards self-improvement, initiative, capacity to follow through, and optimism.

Social Competencies:

Empathy: Understanding others, an interest in developing others, working with and leveraging diversity, and the capacity to "read a room."
Social Skills: Highly developed communication skills alongside a capacity to authentically influence others. Collaborative leadership style that inspires others to participate and cooperate. The capacity to manage conflict and ability to catalyse positive change.

Because we know more about IQ, we tend to overestimate its role in successful leadership. For example, one interesting study demonstrated that those that scored highly in analytic reasoning (systems thinking, pattern recognition, quantitative analysis, and conceptional thinking), which is associated with IQ, was correlated with a 50% increase in revenues compared to peers. Fifty-percent is no bad number - however it was the softer skills that proved even more effective:

Increase in revenues

Leaders who develop their emotional intelligence are not only better support their teams effectively to increase productivity and revenue, but even more importantly, to increase fulfilment and happiness in the worksplace. When psychological dynamics are recognised rather than dismissed, organisations become more adaptable, less reactive, and more capable of thinking clearly during periods of disruption.

Mindfulness is the Key to Grounded Leadership

Emotional intelligence is great in theory, but practicing it is much harder. The key challenge to it is the emotional reactivity that most of us experience when we are stressed out, overwhelmed, over-committed, or even just not in the right mental space to make good, grounded decisions. By regularly practicing mindfulness mediation you are able to "regulate down" your system, which over time makes you less reactive and more responsive. There are also benefits to practicing mindfulness in small ways, like taking a few deep breaths or taking a short walk before banging off an angry email response.

“Mindfulness should no longer be considered a “nice to have” for executives. It’s a “must have”: a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress” (Harvard Business Review).

As someone who has worked across industries, I know it's a lot to ask (and too much to expect) that leaders and managers can or will find the time to practice regularly. That's why I work with them to find ways to incorporate mindfulness practices that make sense within the context of their lives and organisations - alongside finding ways to offer the opportunity for employees to enjoy its benefits without making turning it into a tickbox exercise or obligation.

Forget Work/Life Balance: Work as an Expression of Life

Leaders often come when they are struggling with overwhelm, stress, burnout, or conflicts in their team or organisation. Other times I'm brought in to help them manage change or to help them increase productivity. While all of this is perfectly reasonable, I always think it's interesting that one important thing often has been lost at this point - why you are doing what you're doing in the first place. While many of us may not have a great deal of choice about how we make a living, those in positions of leadership have generally got there because they have been driven by something. Sometimes that is a conscious vision or mission. Other times it's an unconscious push towards something they are just discovering.

Check out my series of articles that speak directly to finding alignment in your career:

By enhancing your insight into yourself, developing emotional intelligence, and practicing mindfulness, you are better able to hook into the motivation that pointed you towards your career in the first place - your vision, and mission - what drives you to do what you do (or drove, if you've lost your mojo, which I can help you re-find). The more aligned leaders are with their vision, the more inspirational they can be, and with that, better they are able to communicate and inspire their teams. In the most ideal conditions, the workplace becomes an opportunity to thrive and flourish as an important aspect of life, not something apart from it that we have to survive until we get home.

The Leader's Inner World

Leadership always involves the inner world. Anxiety, ambition, uncertainty, and defensive patterns shape organisational culture just as much as policies and strategy. When leaders understand their internal landscape — the pressures they carry, the narratives they inhabit, the fantasies they project — they make decisions with greater clarity and communicate with more authenticity. Every single person is unique, which is why the consultation I offer is psychological. Just like in a therapy session, we aim to get deeper knowledge of you as an individual, what you are good at and what you struggle with, in order to develop an approach that is aligned to you, your personality, and your context. My work with senior teams and executives offers practical, psychologically informed frameworks for improving emotional insight, leadership presence, and cultural intelligence.

For Leaders, Organisations and Senior Teams

It is upon these principles that I tailor inspirational keynote addresses, event talks, staff workshops, or individual psychological consultation. In my keynotes I offer theories and practices that attendees can take home with them and benefit from immediately. In workshops and consultations, these principled are drilled into more deeply to support the task at hand. These sessions support:

The Elements of Personal Leadership - how to develop and enhance your own personal leadership style
Integrating individual psychology, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and mindfulness in an organisational context.
Enhancing meaning-making in work by clarifying your organisation's vision and re-assessing priorities.
Sessions to inspire commitment to organisational vision and addressing work/life balance.

Contact details or booking link here:

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My Resource Recommendations

These pieces deepen the ideas introduced here and connect to the wider psychological landscape of leadership, technology, and culture:

Emotional Intelligence and Mindfulness:

Personal Change:

Productivity:

You can also follow my Substack to keep up with all my writings on this and similar topics.