The EQ Myth: Why Emotional Intelligence Training Is Making Australian Managers Worse

Here's what's not talked about in corporate training rooms across Australia: we've turned emotional intelligence into a corporate buzzword that's actually making managers less effective, not more.

I've been watching this train wreck unfold for seventeen years now, and frankly, I'm sick of pretending that the current approach to emotional intelligence training is anything more than expensive feel-good theatre. Every second manager who walks into my sessions thinks they're going to learn some magical formula for reading people's minds and manipulating emotions. Wrong.

The real problem? We're teaching emotional intelligence like it's a customer service script instead of what it actually is: genuine human connection and self-awareness. And Australian workplaces are paying the price.

The Corporate EQ Con Job

Walk into any Fortune 500 company in Melbourne or Sydney and you'll hear the same buzzwords bouncing around boardrooms: "emotional quotient," "empathetic leadership," "feelings-first management." But scratch beneath the surface and what you'll find is managers who've been trained to perform empathy rather than feel it.

I had a client last month—a senior manager at a tech company in Brisbane—who told me with complete sincerity that he'd "implemented emotional intelligence protocols" in his team meetings. Protocols! As if genuine human emotion could be systematised like a quality assurance checklist.

This is exactly the kind of thinking that's destroying workplace relationships across the country. We've taken something as fundamentally human as emotional awareness and turned it into another corporate competency to be measured, tracked, and optimised. No wonder 73% of employees report feeling disconnected from their managers despite record investment in EQ training.

What They're Getting Wrong (And It's Everything)

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most emotional intelligence training is complete rubbish. There, I said it.

The standard approach goes something like this: managers attend a two-day workshop where they learn about the four pillars of emotional intelligence, complete some personality assessments, role-play a few scenarios, and walk away thinking they're the next Daniel Goleman. Three weeks later, they're back to their old habits because no one taught them the most important lesson: emotional intelligence isn't a skill you learn—it's a practice you live.

I remember working with a mining company in Perth where the regional manager proudly showed me his "emotional intelligence action plan." It was a laminated card with bullet points like "Acknowledge employee feelings" and "Use active listening techniques." When I asked him how he felt about his own emotional state during high-pressure situations, he looked at me like I'd asked him to explain quantum physics. The bloke had completely missed the point.

You can't fake emotional intelligence. You can't checklist your way into genuine empathy. And you certainly can't train someone to care about their people in a conference room over stale sandwiches and PowerPoint slides.

The Real EQ: It's Messier Than You Think

Real emotional intelligence is uncomfortable. It means acknowledging when you're being a complete ass to your team because you're stressed about quarterly targets. It means admitting that your "constructive feedback" was actually just you having a bad day and taking it out on someone else.

I've seen more genuine emotional growth happen during five minutes of honest conversation than in entire training programs. Because here's what they don't tell you: emotional intelligence starts with being emotionally honest with yourself.

Take Sarah, a operations manager I worked with in Adelaide. She spent months trying to apply textbook EQ techniques with her struggling team member, Mark. Nothing worked. Then one day, instead of following her training manual, she simply said, "Mark, I can see you're having a tough time, and honestly, I don't know how to help. Can we figure this out together?"

That moment of vulnerability—of admitting she didn't have all the answers—created more trust and connection than six months of "best practice" emotional intelligence techniques.

The Australian workplace culture makes this even more challenging. We're not naturally comfortable with emotional displays. We value directness, practicality, and getting on with things. So when we import American-style emotional intelligence training that emphasises constant emotional check-ins and feelings validation, it often feels forced and inauthentic.

The Small Business Advantage

Interestingly, I've found that smaller Australian businesses often demonstrate better emotional intelligence without ever calling it that. When you've got twelve people in an office in Geelong, you can't hide behind corporate protocols. You know when Jenny's stressed about her sick mum, when Dave's struggling with the new software, or when the whole team's energy is off because of budget cuts.

It's not sophisticated. There's no framework or assessment tool. But there's something real happening there that many larger organisations have trained out of their managers in favour of systematic approaches to human connection.

The difference is that small business managers are often forced to be genuinely present with their people because there's nowhere to hide. They can't delegate emotional intelligence to HR or hide behind company policies. They have to show up as actual humans.

What Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Simpler Than You Think)

After nearly two decades of watching managers struggle with this stuff, I've learned that effective emotional intelligence comes down to three things that no corporate training program will ever teach you:

First: Stop trying to manage other people's emotions and start managing your own. The number of managers who think emotional intelligence means being responsible for everyone else's feelings is staggering. Your job isn't to make people happy—it's to be emotionally present and responsive.

Second: Curiosity beats technique every time. Instead of applying emotional intelligence frameworks, try being genuinely curious about the people you work with. Ask better questions. Listen to the answers. Stop thinking three steps ahead to your response.

Third: Admit when you get it wrong. The most emotionally intelligent thing you can do is acknowledge when you've misread a situation or handled something poorly. It's called being human, and it's far more powerful than any technique you'll learn in a workshop.

I worked with a construction company in Darwin where the site manager transformed his team's performance not through emotional intelligence training, but by starting each Monday morning with a simple question: "How's everyone travelling?" No techniques, no frameworks, just genuine interest in his people.

Within three months, productivity was up, turnover was down, and morale had completely shifted. When I asked him about his emotional intelligence strategy, he looked at me like I was mental. "Strategy?" he said. "I just started giving a damn about my people."

The Future of EQ in Australian Workplaces

We need to stop treating emotional intelligence like another corporate skill to be mastered and start recognising it for what it really is: the foundation of good leadership. This means moving away from training programs that teach emotional intelligence as a set of techniques and towards approaches that help managers become more self-aware, genuine, and present.

The companies that get this right—and there are some brilliant examples across Australia—tend to focus less on emotional intelligence training and more on creating environments where authentic human connection can flourish. They understand that you can't train someone to care, but you can create conditions where caring becomes natural and valued.

For managers reading this, my advice is simple: forget everything you've been taught about emotional intelligence frameworks and start with this question: "What's it really like to work with me?" Then ask your team the same question and actually listen to the answer.

Because at the end of the day, emotional intelligence isn't about following a corporate manual for human feelings. It's about showing up as a complete person in a workplace full of other complete people, and figuring out how to do good work together despite all the messy, complicated, wonderful humanity that entails.

And if that sounds too simple to be effective, well, maybe that's exactly the problem with how we've been approaching this whole thing.

---

Related Articles:

• Managing Difficult Conversations
• Building Leaders