This article was originally posted in my EPIQ Success newsletter. I am cross-posting it here for your enjoyment. 

 

I’ve traveled all over the world telling the story of the EQ movement at Amazon: how we scaled from a small group of 12 to a global community of 70,000 members, spanning every business unit and level of leadership up through SVPs. One question comes up often:

 

“How did you get hundreds of thousands of data-driven, results-obsessed technical leaders to buy into emotional intelligence?”

 

Here’s the counterintuitive answer: I didn’t.

 

The biggest misconception about EQ at Amazon was that it didn’t exist before the movement. The reality is that it was already present. It just wasn’t called EQ.

 

Think about why millions of customers love buying from Amazon, or why so many organizations trust AWS with their most important workloads. A big part of the answer is customer empathy. It’s baked into the culture through Leadership Principles such as Customer Obsession and Earn Trust, and mechanisms such as Working Backwards and Correction of Errors. Those systems forced leaders to deeply understand customers and invent on their behalf. That’s empathy, operationalized, whether or not anyone called it “emotional intelligence” in their narratives.

 

So we already had mechanisms and mental models that drove empathy at a systemic level, especially for customers. The challenge was helping leaders practice empathy at a personal and organizational level and create environments where high-EQ behaviors could spread. Over 6 years, we built a global movement that helped leaders strengthen empathy, purpose, inspiration, and connection at scale.

 

Here’s one of the most important lessons I learned: culture does not change because you give people training. Culture changes when your systems, incentives, and daily behaviors all reinforce the same values.

The best workshop in the world won’t move a culture if everything around the participant pulls in a different direction. I’ve watched the glow from a brilliant offsite evaporate 48 hours later for exactly that reason.

 

Researchers at Yale explained why this happens (credit to Zehavit Levitats, Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, and Marc Brackett). They describe emotionally intelligent behavior as the result of three drivers working in unison:

 

Ability: the skills for self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management

 

Motivation: behaviors that are expected, supported, and rewarded, along with the belief that practicing them will help you reach your goals

 

Opportunity: the space and safety to practice, take risks, learn, and grow

 

Ability is necessary but not sufficient. A person can be highly capable and still never deploy their skills, either because nothing motivates them to, or because the environment gives them no chance to. Most organizations pour their budget into training the ability and assume the other two will sort themselves out. They don’t.

 

Here’s how we built all three at Amazon.

 

Ability: build the skill and keep the bar high

You can’t practice what you can’t do, so ability comes first. But how you build it determines whether it survives for the long haul.

 

We boiled the whole thing down to four letters: EPIC. It stands for Empathy, Purpose, Inspiration, and Connection. We could have made it sound fancy, but we deliberately didn’t, because in a company of 1.5 million people, simplicity is what travels. A framework that takes more than 30 seconds to explain goes in one ear and out the other.

 

A key tenet: it can’t be head knowledge. It has to be experienced and practiced. This is the knowing-doing gap, and closing it is the whole job. I framed the EQ growth journey as a progression: first, it’s awareness, then practice, then proficiency, then mastery. We built a system to move people along the whole spectrum.

 

For awareness, we delivered hour-long keynotes all over Amazon. The goal was simple: bring the science, data, and stories to persuade people that EQ actually mattered for their career, their growth, and their life. This inspired them to start the journey.

 

Then came workshops to build proficiency, anywhere from three hours to a full day. These were immersive. They didn’t just teach content; they gave people room to practice, discuss, and reflect until the light bulbs went on in their heads. They also connected people to each other in a human way, and that was deliberate. We wanted the experience to be genuinely interpersonal, which is why we avoided making it self-service (even though that would have been easier to scale). I mean, how do you learn social skills by yourself?

 

We also learned to match the experience to the audience. Our first version leaned heavily on interactive discussions. Engineering leaders found it a bit exhausting and wanted more time to reflect on their own, so we dialed back the social activities and gave them more space to think and write. Not surprisingly, the salespeople were energized by all the interaction so we kept it all for them. Same content, different delivery.

 

We experimented with the EQ assessment that was part of the workshop. We started with the very popular EQ-i 2.0, but it was overkill for our purposes (it had over 120 questions). We didn’t need a full psychometric; we just wanted enough data to spark honest discussion in the workshop’s peer-coaching section. So we switched to a more lightweight assessment, Kindred EQ, with about 30 questions. It worked beautifully.

 

All of this taught us what actually helps people change. Not every EQ concept survives in a high-octane, deliver-results environment. The research gave us the foundation, but vetting it with high performers and testing it in the field made it real. Engaging tens of thousands of leaders, at Amazon and at our biggest customers, gave us a rare data set and helped us build one of the most effective training programs I’ve ever seen. We took theory and put it into practice. The feedback bore it out.

 

Joel Martinez, an HR Director at Amazon, said: “Rich was able to effectively introduce the concept of EQ in a way that was relatable and relevant for our leaders. Most leaders appreciated the importance of why it was critical but lacked the skills and mechanisms for how to make it real for them. Rich designed an approach that worked and has now gained traction such that this has become a built-in aspect of our culture.”

 

Today, I leverage these insights and experiences for the EQ workshops I deliver to executives around the world and for my online masterclass available to leaders everywhere.

 

Motivation: make the behavior expected, supported, and rewarded

This is the pillar most organizations skip, and it’s where culture lives or dies.

 

The biggest problem with training is what happens after it. People leave excited, go back to real life, and their newfound lessons fall by the wayside because the systems around them don’t support what they just learned. People do what’s expected, supported, and rewarded.

 

So we built systems that reinforced behaviors such as:

• Seek to understand what others feel and think (empathy)
• Express gratitude
• Show humility (”Tell me what I’m missing”)
• Show people they’re valued and cared for
• Seek out diverse perspectives
• Reflect on what the team has done well
• Find fun ways to release stress and tension
• Create space for the team to connect as humans
• In 1:1s, surface people’s challenges, hopes, and dreams, and offer support

 

In practice, that means leaders set explicit norms for their teams. It means people get reinforced for trying to exhibit EQ, even when the first attempt is clumsy. Learning involves experimenting and failing. (I often refer to FAIL as First Attempt In Learning.) If that process isn’t supported, no one risks it. And it has to be rewarded, called out in a positive way, with genuine appreciation and the occasional shoutout.

 

The Yale model maps this: people engage when they believe they can succeed at the behavior, find it worth doing, and see it leading to outcomes they want. When people watch a behavior get rewarded, through recognition, expanded scope, or simply becoming the kind of leader others want to follow, they decide it’s worth their effort.

 

Our EQ Champions and Evangelists were a study in motivation. None of what they did was in their job description. They got no extra pay, and they were already slammed with work. But they were on fire to do it because of how much meaning they derived. Evangelists would regularly tell me, “Delivering an EQ session was the highlight of my week.” They gave a lot and received a lot in return. As a bonus, teaching also deepened their own skill, enabling them to move closer to mastery. Many got so good they began certifying other Evangelists. It’s the old adage: the best way to master something is to see it, do it, then teach it.

 

Opportunity: give people room and make it safe

Here’s the pillar I underestimated and now consider the secret ingredient.

 

You can train someone beautifully and motivate them sincerely, and the skill will still atrophy if they work on it once a year at an offsite. EQ is a practice. Use it daily or lose it. These opportunities need to be ambient, woven into the daily workflow.

 

The pièce de résistance was building an EQ community of practice.I started sending an EQ & Success newsletter, just one article a week that I had found useful. It began with a handful of colleagues and friends. Then it grew and grew, because people kept forwarding it to their colleagues. Eventually it became the largest opt-in mailing list at the company with 50,000 subscribers and often forwarded to VPs and whole orgs. Someone told me the best “perk” of working at Amazon was getting my email each morning (even though it wasn’t an official perk!). A colleague suggested starting an EQ Slack channel. I resisted, since I was already drowning in Slack, but I’m glad I took their advice. It grew to 15,000 members trading reflections and questions every day. We added a monthly podcast called Amazon Talks where we interviewed world-class experts such as Daniel Goleman, Marc Brackett, Amy Edmondson, Adam Grant, Paul Zak, Vanessa Druskat, Charles Duhigg, and Jamil Zaki. EQ stopped being an event and became ambient. The EQ growth flywheel was now spinning rapidly.

 

But opportunity is about more than channels. It’s whether people feel safe enough to use the skill at all, and that climate flows downhill from the leader. Leaders set the emotional weather. When a leader manages their own reactivity and makes it safe to propose a half-formed idea, people take creative risks. When a leader shuts the first risky idea down, the smart people go quiet. Amy Edmondson at Harvard has spent decades showing that teams with higher psychological safety perform better, learn faster, and are more innovative. Google’s Project Aristotle found it was the single biggest factor behind their top teams. Fear doesn’t drive performance. It drives silence, and silence is where innovation dies.

 

I’ve watched this up close. I’ve coached C-suite leaders who genuinely wanted disagreement, who craved people poking holes in their ideas. What they got was a room of agreeable nods. The problem wasn’t a shortage of opinions. People just didn’t feel safe voicing them.

 

So we worked on it. The leaders started going first, leading with curiosity and intellectual humility: “I’m sure I’m not seeing the full picture here. Help me find the gaps.” And when someone took the risk of disagreeing, they rewarded it out loud: “Thank you. That’s exactly what we need.” It wasn’t instant. But as the leadership behavior became consistent, the conversations got candid. Teams voiced more diverse perspectives, caught gaps in thinking sooner, and moved with conviction on initiatives that used to stall from unspoken doubts. These EQ opportunities were created on purpose.

 

After working with the CTO of a global healthcare company, he told me: “There’s been a noticeable increase in people sharing their ideas as well as their challenges. People are more confident and self-aware. They are 20% to 25% more willing to take calculated risks. Word has gotten out about our culture, and we’ve become a destination for talent in our geo. Our people are actively inviting their friends to work here.”

 

Now that’s EPIQ.

 

Why this matters more than ever

If you’re leading through AI transformation, this is the real game.

 

In 2010, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and MIT studied 699 people in groups and asked whether teams have a kind of collective intelligence, a “c factor” the way individuals have IQ. They do. The surprise was what predicted it. The collective intelligence of a group had almost nothing to do with the average or highest IQ of its members. What predicted it was: 1/ average social sensitivity (how well members read each other’s emotions), 2/ conversational turn-taking (whether everyone got to talk), and 3/ percentage of women in the group (women tended to have higher social sensitivity. The smartest teams didn’t have the highest IQ; they had the highest EQ.

 

McKinsey has found that roughly 70% of transformations fail, and a leading cause is a lack of genuine buy-in and conviction. Those are emotional factors, not logical ones. To pull off real change, leaders have to win hearts and minds (not minds and minds).

 

AI transformation is, at its core, a human transformation challenge. The organizations that win won’t be the ones with the “best” foundation model (that distinction is changing every few weeks). They’ll be the ones whose people learn faster, adapt better, trust more, and figure out how to work together in novel ways. I’ve been talking about this for the past 3 years, but companies are finally waking up to this reality. Atlassian reported that only 4% of companies are experiencing true transformation, even though 90% of people say AI is helping them work faster.

 

The biggest blocker is a lack of working together. People are getting individual results, but entire workflows need to be reimagined. That’s disruptive and uncomfortable, and it asks people to adapt in a big way. It requires sharing institutional knowledge and trusting each other. It requires shared ownership at every level, from senior leaders to front-line operators. It requires a learning culture where people can experiment, fail at the right scale, share what they learn, and move toward AI proficiency together. Every one of those is a human capability more than a technical one. Atlassian calls it the AI speed paradox: “AI can make it easier to get work done, but harder to work together.”

 

The winning combo: integrate EQ with IQ

We’ve been taught that innovation lives in the land of IQ, in raw knowledge and cognitive horsepower. Those things are important but insufficient. People who manage their own emotional states think more clearly. Teams with higher social sensitivity solve harder problems. Leaders who create psychological safety tap into the full creative range of their people. It’s integrating EQ with IQ into what I call the EPIQ^TM skill set.

 

This is what we helped hundreds of thousands of leaders develop, at Amazon and at our enterprise customers. Today, my mission is to equip a billion leaders with these skills. I certainly can’t do this alone. I’m partnering with EQ Ambassadors globally who are passionate about making an outsized impact together.

 

If you want to be an EQ change agent, know this: you likely have more emotional intelligence in your culture than you think. It might be hiding inside your values, your rituals, the behaviors you already reward. Your job is to name what’s already there. Then boost ability, motivation, and opportunity. Synergize these three and the culture evolves. If it can happen at Amazon, it can happen at your organization.

 

To invent the future, leaders need to reinvent themselves. AI just raised the stakes and made it more urgent. The good news is that EPIQ skills can be developed and EPIQ cultures can be built. In a world moving and changing at warp speed, the gap between those who invest in these skills and those who don’t will only widen. Make the investment. It will pay compounding dividends for the rest of your career and life!