I used to think being professional meant being clinical, neutral.
Stick to facts. Keep emotions out of it. Be calm, collected, and logical at all times.
That mindset worked just fine when I was deep in engineering work. In design reviews, technical meetings, or pulling together documentation, emotional neutrality was an asset. I could focus. Stay objective. Not get riled up.
But once I started leading projects, that approach stopped working—and I didn’t understand why.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was being efficient, rational, even polite. But something was off. Tensions would linger after meetings. Team members would come to me privately and say they “didn’t feel heard.” Stakeholders wouldn’t push back in meetings, but later I’d learn they weren’t on the same page at all, and that caused all kinds of problems (rework, lost trust, hard conversations, etc). I wasn’t getting into fights, everything seemed to be going well on the surface.
For a while, I chalked it up to personality mismatches. Or politics. Or people being “too sensitive.”
It took me a long time to realize the real issue:
I was emotionally underdeveloped for the new leadership role I was in.
Why this is a problem for leaders that are also engineers
Engineering education and early career roles don’t just not train emotional intelligence—they often devalue it. We're trained to be accurate, efficient, and correct. Success is measured by technical performance, not interpersonal connection. And often a certain type of personality is drawn to engineering in the first place, one that tends to work better alone, enjoy clinical, logical, correct and efficient work, so it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.
As an engineer, you often spend years refining how to spot flaws in a design, how to validate assumptions, how to work within constraints. You’re rewarded for precision and independence. And when you make mistakes, they're often technical—something you can trace back to a miscalculation or a spec error. Emotional dynamics rarely come into play.
But when you start managing projects, everything shifts. Now you’re dealing with ambiguity, competing interests, and teams of people who don’t think like you do. You’re no longer being evaluated on the quality of your own work, but on your ability to help others do theirs.
That’s where emotional intelligence starts to matter. A lot.
Yet most engineers stepping into leadership roles still try to operate like individual contributors. They show up to meetings with data and expect it to carry the day. They escalate issues the same way they’d report a defect. They give feedback like they’d review a drawing: direct, precise, impersonal.
And then they wonder why the team doesn't follow their lead.
I did. And many of the engineers I coach did too.
What emotional intelligence actually means in project work
One of the biggest misconceptions about emotional intelligence is that it’s about being nice.
It very much isn't.
It’s about being aware—of yourself, of others, and of how your presence affects the room. It’s about being able to read the emotional context of a situation, and then choosing your response with intention.
It starts with noticing.
Noticing when someone goes quiet in a meeting who’s usually engaged. Noticing when your email gets a one-line reply from someone who normally writes in paragraphs. Noticing when a team that used to raise concerns early suddenly starts staying silent until things go sideways.
These aren’t just interpersonal hiccups. They’re signals. Emotional intelligence is what allows you to see them, interpret them, and adjust course before problems escalate.
But it doesn’t stop at noticing.
It also means being able to talk about these things out loud.
That doesn’t mean becoming a therapist. It means being able to say, “I noticed there was some hesitation when we talked about the new deadline—are there issues that you can see with it?” Or “It feels like there’s some frustration building around this task. Let’s talk about it and see what we can do about it.”
This kind of communication builds psychological safety. It tells your team: I see you. I’m not just managing timelines—I’m managing how we get there together. I will not sacrifice your health and mental wellness in favour of a timeline or scope brief.
The difference between delivery and standards
Here’s the mistake I made early on: I thought emotional intelligence meant lowering expectations.
I didn’t want to seem “soft,” so I kept things professional and matter-of-fact. I assumed that was the only way to maintain high performance.
In reality, the best leaders I’ve worked with—and now try to emulate—hold their teams and everyone they work with to incredibly high standards. But they adjust their communication and delivery based on the people they're working with.
Some team members thrive on direct feedback. Others need context to feel safe receiving it. Some need space to process. Others need frequent, informal check-ins.
You don’t change the bar. You change how you help people reach it. It's about giving them what they need, in the way they need it, so they can give you what you need.
And that requires emotional range. If you only know how to operate in one tone, you’ll keep missing the mark for a majority of the people in the room.
How this changed my approach to leadership
Once I started taking emotional intelligence seriously, my entire approach to project leadership changed.
I stopped showing up to meetings thinking my job was to “run them efficiently.” I started thinking about how to surface concerns that weren’t being voiced. How to frame problems in ways that spoke to different stakeholders differently. How to create conditions where people wanted to speak up, not just felt allowed to.
I also started paying closer attention to myself. I’d check in after meetings: Was I present? Did I dismiss something too quickly? Did I rush to solve when I should’ve listened?
This self-awareness didn’t come naturally. I had to work at it. But the payoff was undeniable.
Communication improved. Trust deepened. People brought me issues earlier. They were more open to feedback. My influence grew—not because I got louder, but because I got better at reading the room and responding with intent.
I didn’t need to be a different person. I just needed to stop hiding behind being “professional” as an excuse for being emotionally unavailable.
Most engineers aren’t cold.
They’re just untrained in this domain.
But once you learn to lead with emotional intelligence, you stop feeling like you’re trying to control the project from the outside.
You become the center of gravity.
People start moving with you, not just around you.
Your weekly actionable Tip:
Build a micro-EQ habit:
At the end of every meeting this week, take 2 minutes to reflect:
- Who showed up stressed?
- Who was quiet when they’re usually engaged?
- Did I misread or miss someone’s emotional cues?
Then jot down one thing you’ll try in the next meeting with that person.
This habit will build your pattern recognition faster than any course ever will.
This isn’t about fixing everything. It’s about building your awareness muscle.
Over time, that muscle becomes instinct. You'll start to feel these patterns and signals throughout an ongoing meeting or interaction and will be able to adjust live without thinking or reflection.
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