Why is emotional intelligence necessary for DEIA? Simply put, it helps us nurture a culture of respect and understanding. But just as people are complex, our emotions have layers that deserve to be explored.
Whether we need to self-regulate after a tense meeting or energize colleagues before a large project, emotional intelligence plays a pivotal role in a healthy workplace. Our ability to manage emotions equips us with the lens to observe, empathize, and then act, contributing to our interpersonal relationships and communication skills.
Jenny Woo is the Founder of Mind Brain Emotion, a multifaceted tool created at the renowned Harvard Innovation Labs. She boasts various accomplishments with a background in research, education, and entrepreneurship, including a socio-emotional skill-building card game for all ages. Driven by a passion for helping others build their emotional intelligence, Woo leverages her experiences to make change tangible.
Here, she discusses the importance of awareness and empathy and how emotional health can further empower DEIA initiatives within an organization.
1. What has been your source of empowerment throughout your career? Where has it taken you?
My entire career has been focused on human development. As a Human Capital Consultant at Deloitte, I started with adult human development right out of college, working with Fortune 500 companies on learning and development, change management, and building new organizations and business processes.
I continued down that route, got my MBA, and stayed in Silicon Valley. Then, I was in HR at Cisco Systems, a leadership rotational program focused on talent, development, and strategy succession planning.
I love developing people. When I became a parent, I realized we all need to work on ourselves not just as leaders but as calm, composed, and thoughtful individuals. That’s where I realized emotional intelligence comes in. It’s a central skill we never learned growing up.
So, I pivoted from adult development into child development and became a Montessori school director. I still work with adults, like parents and executives, and this has helped me become an expert in human development—understanding how people learn and apply their knowledge at every stage of their lives.
As a female leader, entrepreneur, and academic, I’ve realized the need for self-advocacy. When I was young, managers told me my work would speak for itself. But that’s entirely a myth. At the end of the day, you have to know your worth and showcase it verbally.
Emotional intelligence is a great motivator for equipping women. I’ve taken leadership roles and spoken to female ERGS on self-advocacy and using emotional intelligence the right way. How do you achieve an equal, equitable footing for your career path? How do you get permission to speak up? Where do you learn the language for all of it?
My card game series helps with such communication. It’s about getting a team or supervisor together during an ongoing meeting and fostering the psychological safety for you to have those conversations. My cards are bite-sized actions that you can weave into what you’re already doing. It’s fun and playful. It helps you execute what you want to say or do while building human skills, emotional intelligence, and critical thinking.
2. Why do we need emotional intelligence in DEIA?
A highly emotionally intelligent leader, team, or organization will have a better success rate with their DEIA initiatives. Research states that managers with high EQ recognize the impact of their emotions on themselves and other people, and there’s greater empathy and social awareness. These are competencies of emotional intelligence that help you understand: how do I make my environment inclusive? What does it actually look like?
Research also shows that leaders with high EQ have less turnover. You can imagine why people may want to leave: they don’t feel heard, recognized, or seen, and they don’t feel safe to be themselves.
It’s about self-awareness to identify unconscious biases, understand communication, and capture a lens that sees things differently from other people to resolve conflicts equitably. It’s important to have the empathy to understand.
3. What are some emotionally intelligent ways for organizations to create safe spaces?
Here’s a practical example: I get asked to go into organizations and conduct training for ERGs or individual teams. We use my card game to create how-to-work-with-me guides where each person describes what type of support they need, their quirks and peeves, and communication styles. Everyone has access and visibility over all responses. It’s an actionable and sustainable way for people to support each other. It gets you thinking, how do I make information more accessible for all users, abilities, and needs?
Some of my best practices are:
- Implement more emotional intelligence training programs to help employees and leaders develop self-awareness, empathy, and interpersonal skills. For DEIA, we really want to focus on advocacy—but if you backtrack, you need allyship, and before allyship, you need awareness. Awareness is really the foundational skill set and evolves from self- to social- to community- and civic-awareness.
- Have a more open communication feedback system, and not just from people you know. Seek honest feedback from people of color, women, and those with differing abilities. It’s daunting to remove the blindfold and see biases everywhere, so find a village or partner to keep you accountable and remind you to take a breather. These are not problems to solve in one day. Set your expectations by documenting, journaling, creating timelines, and micro goal-setting.
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