The culture your company creates is built in the way people feel around their leaders every day. As a leader, you set the emotional temperature for every job, meeting, and conversation you’re part of.
This was the message shared by Amanda Gore, a relationship expert who specializes in emotional intelligence, during this year’s Business & Leadership Conference—and it’s a concept worth revisiting, whether you were in the room that day or not.
Her takeaways are a great starting point for re‑examining how your leadership impacts people.
Your Presence Sets the Tone
Leaders obsess over metrics involving utilization, backlog, revenue, and margin. Those numbers matter, but they’re downstream from something far less visible: how people feel when they work with you and for you.
When you walk onto a jobsite, into a service department, or into a project meeting, people can “feel” your leadership before you say a word. They read it in how everyone around you interacts, and whether problems surface quickly or get buried. If your presence is read that closely, then changing what people see starts with you.
Emotional Intelligence Starts with Self‑Awareness
Changing what people see starts with where you choose to look — and most leaders look in the wrong direction.
It’s easy to focus on what employees aren’t doing: They’re not proactive enough, not engaged enough, not acting like stewards of the business. But it’s much harder to turn the mirror back on yourself. As a leader, when you sit in the back of the room and avoid interaction, you send a clear message: “This doesn’t matter.”
Ask yourself: “In a group setting, do I gravitate toward the empty table so that I don’t have to talk to anyone? Do I stay on my device instead of being present with people? Do I mentally check out the moment something feels uncomfortable?” Your team feels you (and sees you) withdraw. And they copy it, whether you mean to teach it or not.
Remember, You’re Always Modeling
Emotional intelligence means managing your own behavior because you know it’s being absorbed by everyone around you. You can tell your team what you expect until you lose your voice, but they learn far more from what you model (your actions). Just like kids are always watching their parents, your employees are always watching you, too.
If you talk about accountability but deflect blame when something goes wrong, you teach everyone that self‑protection beats ownership.
If you preach responsiveness but show up late or distracted, you show that other priorities win.
If you say you value your people but never ask for their opinions, your real value system is clear.
Leadership shows up in small, repeated behaviors that take you out of the center of the story:
- Being fully present in conversations instead of half‑listening while you check email
- Admitting when you didn’t get something right and thanking the person who helped you see it
- Talking about customers respectfully, even when they’re not being easy to work with
- Giving credit publicly and handling criticism privately
Humility Is the Foundation
Every one of those behaviors asks the same thing of you: to be humble.
Humility might be the most practical skill you can bring to your leadership role. Contrary to what many think, humility isn’t about being meek or indecisive. It’s about being grounded enough to focus on others instead of protecting your own image. That outward focus is one of the clearest markers of emotional intelligence in a leader.
In an integration firm, humility can look like:
- Asking field techs what’s getting in their way and taking their answers seriously
- Inviting a project coordinator to poke holes in a new process before you roll it out
- Saying “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” instead of bluffing
- Being generous with your knowledge, time, and praise
People want leaders who feel real: Leaders who can laugh, share appropriate struggles, remember details about their lives, and don’t need to be the smartest person in every conversation. Those leaders are easy to trust … and trust is what keeps people telling you the truth when projects aren’t going well or when customers are unhappy.
Connection Requires Discomfort
That trust is built through small moves that help build connection: sitting with someone you don’t usually talk to, making eye contact for more than a second, or asking, “How are you … really?”, and waiting for the answer.
Many leaders avoid these moments because they feel awkward. But, if you’re not willing to tolerate mild discomfort in low‑stakes situations, it’s unlikely you’ll lean into harder conversations about performance issues, your own missteps, or conflict inside your team.
To build connections, try:
- Sitting somewhere different during meetings and engaging with the people you rarely hear from
- Starting one-on-one conversations with a genuine question about how the person is doing and staying with that for a moment
- Putting your phone away during site visits and focusing on the people in front of you
Remember Who Your Employees Truly Are
As Gore reminds us, connections matter because people do. In her words: Your people are hearts on legs. They bring skills and experience, but they also bring their own hopes, fears, family pressures, pride in their craft, and a need to feel seen and valued. Language like this can sound soft, weak, or irrelevant, but the reality is true.
You don’t have to become a therapist for your employees, but you do have to remember that every decision, interaction, and habit you model will be experienced by a human who will feel it before they analyze it. Those feelings are what people will remember about working with you.
The next time you walk into your office or a project meeting, or onto a jobsite, pay attention to the atmosphere before you say anything. What does the room feel like? And what would it require from you for it to feel a little safer, a little more energized, and a little more human?
