By Contributor,Kevin Kruse

Copyright forbes

Wedel has observed that emotional intelligence and its core concepts have become increasingly embedded in the way people speak and think across the organization.

AI is speeding up busywork and making us more productive, but it’s not solving the hardest problems at work—the human ones. At Cytek Biosciences, Chief People Officer Connie Wedel encourages her team to use AI for efficiency, but she emphasizes that the real performance differentiator for leaders lies in character and connection. As she put it, “The best leaders are the ones who have the most emotional intelligence.”

And the research backs Wedel up. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report, global employers expect the biggest growth in demand to be for cognitive and self-management skills. These include skills like resilience, agility, and self-awareness. And McKinsey projects demand for social-emotional skills to surge roughly 26% through 2030.

So, how do you go about training social-emotional skills at scale? Or better yet, how do you embed emotional intelligence in your company culture? To learn, I had the chance to interview Wedel, who has successfully scaled emotional intelligence to 700 employees across 23 countries. Here’s what she had to say.

Connie Wedel, Chief People Officer at Cytek Biosciences

The Key To Scaling EQ Training: Pull, Don’t Push

Wedel’s mission as CPO is to help Cytek teams across the globe to build trust, navigate cultural differences, and keep relationships strong when the stakes (both human and scientific) are high. In comes emotional intelligence training.

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To deliver EQ training at scale, her team focuses their resources where they have the most leverage: leaders and managers. “Leadership and management have the most impact on the greatest number of people, and they directly impact every employee on the frontline,” she explained.

With time, she’s found that the most effective programs operate on a “pull model.” Meaning, rather than make EQ training mandatory for all leaders, her team makes it optional and readily available. “We don’t force emotional intelligence training on people. When forced, it doesn’t stick. It just feels like another mandatory class to get through.”

The Manager Effect: Fix Relationships to Improve Employee Relations

Ask Wedel where most employee relations issues originate, and she doesn’t hesitate: “Probably 90% [are] the managers.” That insight shapes her team’s playbook. Rather than letting leaders “throw their problems to HR,” they train them to handle people issues directly and deliberately. It’s the employee relations equivalent of “teaching their managers to fish.”

When Wedel and her team do targeted coaching work, they’ve found that the work gravitates to one quadrant of emotional intelligence: relationship management. “I think it all rolls down to relationships,” she emphasized. “If trust is strong, teams can survive the occasional misstep. If it isn’t, even small mistakes spiral.”

That’s why in her team’s work with managers, they lean on a simple, sticky concept around trust: The Emotional Bank Account. This is the idea that deposits (credibility, care, consistency) cushion the inevitable withdrawal (mistakes). And for tougher cases, Wedel actually draws out Stephen M. R. Covey’s Speed of Trust “Credibility Tree” on a whiteboard to diagnose at what point trust broke. Often, she finds it’s around intent.

Early signals for emotional intelligence training and coaching are promising. Wedel and her team track employee-relations patterns, and their reports show significantly fewer flare-ups between employees. “Folks come to us or their manager more often before they react. They pause a bit more and take some time,” she explained. She has also observed that emotional intelligence and its core concepts have become increasingly embedded in the way people speak and think across the organization.

Hiring for EQ: Using The “Golden Target”

Wedel influences Cytek’s culture of emotional intelligence from beginning to end. One of the best ways to do this is by screening for emotional intelligence during the hiring phase. To do so, Wedel teaches a simple yet powerful model to hiring managers. It’s called the Golden Target, and she’s been using it with great success since the 90s. It consists of three concentric rings. The outer ring is technical skill, the next ring is communication and interpersonal skills, and the bull’s-eye is aptitude and attitude. Emotional intelligence encompasses both the “communication and interpersonal skills” ring and the “attitude” portion of the bullseye. This model, which she calls the “Golden Target,” helps managers stop hiring “just [for] technical skills” and start screening for coachability, continuous learning, EQ, work ethic, and growth mindset.

The Golden Target: EQ drives two of the three circles

AI for Speed, EQ for Judgment

Wedel says her lean HR team uses AI “every single day” because it helps her team do many of their administrative tasks and ideation more quickly. “AI shouldn’t do your thinking for you,” she said, “but it definitely should make you quicker, faster, and more efficient.” After decades in HR, Wedel’s takeaway is simple: “The best leaders are the ones that have the highest EQ.” In practice, that means using AI to accelerate your work and EQ to decide what to do and how to do it with people.

Make EQ Your Operating System

Wedel’s lesson from scaling EQ across 23 countries is simple: Don’t force it. Create pull, equip managers to handle people issues directly, and hire for emotional intelligence using a clear model (like her Golden Target). When leaders build trust first, employee relations problems shrink, teams recover from mistakes, and performance compounds. As Cytek’s example shows, in a world where tools keep changing, emotional intelligence remains a steadfast driver of a thriving culture.

Kevin Kruse is the Founder + CEO of LEADx, an emotional intelligence training company. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is Emotional Intelligence: 52 Strategies to Build Strong Relationships, Increase Resilience, and Achieve Your Goals.

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