Resilient teams don’t just happen. They’re built. In today’s world, the ability to adapt, pivot, and bounce back from setbacks separates the successful from the unsuccessful. According to Kenton Epard, founder of the executive coaching firm The Nexus Initiative, the secret ingredient for cultivating resilience is emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence – the ability to perceive and understand others’ emotions and effectively manage emotions in yourself – is a superpower that’s too often overlooked or undervalued. But Kenton’s Nexus Thinking approach integrates analytical or rational thinking with emotional know-how.
“Resilience isn’t only about perseverance or having thick skin,” Epard explains. “It also comes from looking for and understanding the emotions flowing through your team and having the self-awareness and empathy to respond in ways that create psychological safety, trust, and collaboration.” When team members feel safe, they can more easily adapt to changes, foreseen or unforeseen.
On the surface, injecting emotions into team dynamics may clash with corporate cultures focusing exclusively on reason and denying the emotional aspects of their employees. But Epard argues that an emotionally detached view is one-dimensional, and undermines performance rather than enhances it. True optimal decision-making, he contends, harmonizes reason and emotion in a finely balanced dance.
“When emotional intelligence is embraced, an environment of openness, where people feel safe expressing ideas, concerns, doubts, and even vulnerabilities, thrives,” says Epard. “That candor is absolutely vital because it allows honest dialogue about challenges without fear of ridicule or rebuke.” If employees don’t – feel – safe, they won’t share everything they know, and for reason and logic to work effectively, they rely on everyone sharing everything.
The workplace benefits of emotional intelligence are well-documented: boosted engagement, retention, innovation, and job satisfaction. Emotionally engaged teams navigate conflicts more constructively, are more adaptable to changes, and rebound more easily from setbacks. Why? Because they have a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the emotions and motivations driving their colleagues’ behaviors and mindsets.
But building real emotional intelligence doesn’t happen overnight. It takes sustained effort over the long haul. Epard recommends that teams commit to practices like regular check-ins to discuss group emotional dynamics, active listening exercises to build empathy muscles, and open forums for vulnerability and tough conversations.
Crucially, leaders must model the emotional intelligence they want to instill in their teams. “Executives and managers play an outsized role in setting the emotional tone,” Epard notes. When those in charge walk the walk, demonstrating authenticity, emotional awareness, and emotional attunement and creating safe spaces for others to follow suit, it sends a powerful message. Emotions aren’t weaknesses to be suppressed, but parts of the human experience we can strategically lean into as individuals and teams to unleash peak performance.”
Over his 30 years moving between different industries and organizations, Epard has seen the profound upsides of emotional intelligence and the material downsides of low emotional intelligence play out repeatedly. He has witnessed firsthand how leadership teams that push this hard-nosed, super-rational, emotions-are-weaknesses mindset often end up cultivating dysfunctional cultures – even when they’re brilliant strategists on paper with prestigious pedigrees.
In these emotionally vacant places, people start hoarding information and spinning things positively to protect their own skin. Meanwhile, major underlying issues are brushed aside and allowed to grow into existential crises before anyone feels safe enough to finally speak up. By then, it’s often a case of too little, too late, with an organizational crisis unfolding and teams paralyzed, unwilling, or unable to change course.
The takeaway? Ignoring emotional intelligence doesn’t protect organizations against threats. It leaves them blind, unaware of gathering storms until they have become crises. True resilience demands feeling safe enough at the moment to confront harsh truths head-on and course-correct as needed. To do that requires an emotionally attuned, vulnerability-accepting culture.
“Building emotional intelligence ensures a full universe of data points for informed decision-making; not only the rational metrics and quantitative inputs but also invaluable emotional insights that provide crucial qualitative context,” Epard says. “It’s recognizing that we humans aren’t purely rational actors but profoundly emotional and multi-dimensional beings. Denying that core emotional reality is a path to missed cues, blind spots, and failures.”
At its core, Epard’s approach cultivates resilience by balancing two mindsets: honoring both the analytical rigor of the left brain and the creative, emotionally oriented intuition of the right. It’s a classic both/and situation. It’s about achieving an integrated “Nexus Thinking” state where emotions aren’t feared or suppressed but strategically leveraged to galvanize collaboration, spark innovation, and continuously adapt as the tide changes.
The path isn’t always easy. It demands patience, vulnerability, and sometimes a mindset change for teams accustomed to emotional avoidance or dismissal. But mastering emotional intelligence is akin to acquiring a secret weapon, one capable of spelling the difference between resilience and obsolescence.
“At the end of the day, business is human,” Epard says. “Emotional intelligence is about optimizing our innately human capacities. It’s the skill that allows us to be so much more than robotic computational machines trapped in rigid linear models – and achieve so much more than they ever could.”
