New Research: Emotional Intelligence Is Structural to Every Leadership Behavior

SAN FRANCISCO (May 6, 2026) — SIY Global, an EQ-powered leadership development company, today released On Edge, a research brief examining how the components of emotional intelligence connect to leadership performance.

The study is based on data from 514 leaders across four continents. Findings from the study indicate that the leadership behaviors organizations invest the most in developing — including regulation, influence, decision-making, and resilience — are consistently dependent on underlying emotional capacities that most leadership development programs do not directly address.

Key Findings

The study, conducted between 2024 and 2026 using SIY Global's proprietary Leading with Emotional Dynamics Insights assessment, identified seven findings. Among them:

• Self-precision drives group influence: Leaders who could identify their own emotions with precision were 19.4 times more likely to excel at influencing group dynamics. The most outward leadership skill turned out to be driven by the most inward capacity.
• Awareness predicts regulation: Leaders in the top quartile on emotional awareness were 9.3 times more likely to also land in the top quartile on managing emotions. Regulation without awareness, the study argues, is a script that breaks the first time conditions change.
• Reframing requires regulation: Reframing and emotional regulation were so tightly linked in the data that they functioned as a single integrated capability. This is crucial for change management, which depends on leaders' ability to reframe and engage with changes in a positive way.
• Change degrades decision quality: Leaders who cited navigating change and uncertainty as a top challenge scored 8% lower on emotion-enhanced thinking, which is the capability that determines decision quality under load. This suggests that the leaders carrying the most change are the ones whose thinking is most at risk.
• Stress and weak regulation reinforce each other: Among leaders who cited stress as a top challenge, only 31% reached adequate levels on managing emotions, compared with 51% of those who did not. Without intervention, leaders can end up in a self-reinforcing loop between stress and regulation.
  
  

A Call to Move Upstream

The research concludes that the traditional model of leadership development — identifying desired behaviors and training them repeatedly — is failing with increasing frequency, particularly in high-change, high-pressure environments. The brief calls on L&D leaders to shift focus from drilling downstream behaviors to developing the perceptions and emotional responses that produce those behaviors.

"For decades, our industry has been trying to make thousands of behaviors into habits," said Ryan Heinl, CEO of SIY Global. "This research shows why that approach keeps hitting a ceiling. Every leadership behavior we examined depended on the emotional wiring underneath. When that wiring is strong, the behavior is available under pressure. When it's not, leaders revert to autopilot regardless of how well they've been trained. The path forward isn't to drill harder. It's to build the system that makes the right behavior the natural response."

About the Study

The study is based on data from 514 leaders who completed the Leading with Emotional Dynamics Insights assessment between 2024 and 2026. The sample includes leaders participating in SIY Global programs and an independent panel sample, providing a cross-section of industries, role levels, and geographies across four continents. The assessment measures five scales and 17 subscales using a validated behavioral frequency instrument. All findings met standard thresholds for statistical significance (p < .05) unless otherwise noted.

About SIY Global

SIY Global delivers EQ-powered leadership development, which puts emotional intelligence at the foundation of every leadership skill. Born from the premier emotional intelligence program at Google, today we serve leading organizations worldwide to develop high-performing, change-ready leaders.