What happens when you sense something is going on beneath the surface - someone goes quiet, pushes back, or pulls away - and you’re not sure how to respond?
Learn how to lead through emotion with:
Awareness.
Safety.
Trust.
Leading with Emotional Intelligence turns emotional intelligence outward. Where Emotional Intelligence Foundations looks at your own reactions, this course looks at the people around you: how to read what’s happening beneath the surface, create the emotional safety people need to speak up, and respond in ways that build trust and keep performance on track.
What You'll Explore
- What social awareness really means, how to listen beyond words, and how to read the room in meetings and conversations.
- Why emotional safety matters (drawing on Amy Edmondson’s work), and which leadership behaviours build it or threaten it.
- What empathy is, and what it is not, including how to validate emotion while holding clear performance expectations.
- How to tell understanding gaps from performance gaps.
- How to respond to defensiveness and emotional resistance without escalating, and how to check in with yourself during the conversation.
- How your leadership shapes team culture, how to repair trust after a mistake, and how to adapt your approach across different people.
What You'll Gain
- You’ll leave with a stronger ability to read what’s happening beneath the surface, create the emotional safety people need to speak up, and respond with empathy while keeping expectations clear.
- You’ll practice navigating emotionally charged conversations and take away strategies you can use immediately to build trust and strengthen team performance.
- The goal isn’t to manage everyone’s emotions. It’s to lead in a way that helps people feel understood, safe, and accountable, so teams can perform at their best.
Read Beneath the Surface → Create Emotional Safety → Respond With Empathy → Navigate Difficult Conversations → Strengthen Trust and Influence.
The learning journey moves from recognizing emotional cues and social dynamics beneath the surface, to creating the emotional safety that lets people speak up, responding with empathy while keeping expectations clear, navigating emotionally charged conversations with curiosity, and ultimately strengthening the trust and influence that help your team perform at its best.
The MCE Learning Experience
This is a highly interactive, reflection-based course. You’ll move between short learning segments, reflection, partner and group discussion, side-by-side comparisons of poor and effective responses, and structured practice with realistic workplace conversations, including self-regulation check-ins along the way.
Your workbook is an important part of the experience. It brings together the key concepts, models, tools, and reflection activities from the course, giving you a place to capture your own insights and examples. Use it throughout training and reflect on it afterwards to apply the tools in your day-to-day leadership.
Ready to Lead with Emotional Intelligence?
Leading with Emotional Intelligence is a CORE course in the BUILD pathway. Take it on its own to build a specific skill, or as part of a pathway to turn that skill into lasting change.
Cohorts are available for this course. Or ask us how it fits into a pathway.
Want to start with your own emotional intelligence? See Emotional Intelligence Foundations in the DEVELOP pathway.