The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Quinn Harwood

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:19)
Welcome back to the show everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach again here with my co-host Tullio Siragusa and our special guest who we'll introduce in a moment. So, leaders who can recognize, regulate, and respond thoughtfully to emotion, tend to build stronger teams and healthier cultures. And as businesses grow more complex, the ability to remain grounded and aware becomes a competitive advantage. And so today we explore how emotional intelligence influences leadership, culture, and results. And Tullio, introduce our guest today.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:53)
Absolutely. Our guest today is Quinn Coach Q. Harwood. He is a professional certified coach, speaker and author of Growth Time, a coaching fable, the clear path to unlocking your best life and leadership. He's passionate about empowering the next gen of mission movers to make real impact, drawing from a journey that includes professional basketball, more than two decades in corporate leadership, and thousands of coaching sessions. Coach Q helps emerging and established leaders break through barriers and lead with bold confidence. His mindset is rooted in faith, resilience, and the belief that growth happens when intention meets action. Quinn, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast. We're excited to have you.

**Quinn Harwood** (1:39)
Hey, Tullio, Stephen. I'm just thrilled to be on, just connecting with you both a little bit and knowing the mission you're on and the mission you're moving that just brings joy to the heart. That next generation of, I call them the zillineals, that Gen Z millennials and the desire to make an impact in that business and their work and their professionalism is in you and it's in your DNA and it just moves my heart. So I'm excited to be on, hopefully add some value to your audience and hopefully help them step up their game and next level emotional intelligence and be the great 21st century leaders. They're called the created be. So thanks for having me on.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:14)
Yeah. So Quinn, like 15 years ago, I don't think we're talking about emotional intelligence too much. But so there's a little bit more in the conversation a lot now than it has been. But I think maybe it can still feel abstract to some leaders. In practical terms, what does it look like every day in business situations, would you say?

**Quinn Harwood** (2:38)
The core of emotional intelligence is kind of managing your emotions and then really looking at how you read, respond, and influence the emotions of others. I mean, that's the central concept. Then you have different places of self-regulation. You have social skills. You have motivation. They're all part and the key lead in that is empathy, which I know is big with our group here today. So in that space, it's central. It's central to business.
The generational patterns have shifted. As I call it, we're out of the do-your-job generation. And emotional intelligence is important to connect people to the higher purpose and be able to just navigate relationship skills and leadership by managing yourself and managing how you interpret things and your emotions through it. It's just a powerful space. And living through the corporate culture and coaching executives now and leaders that are frontline up to executive, you just know that the shift is important. It's impactful and it's catching wind. It's going to keep catching waves. And that's a California term for, I know we're out there in California, right? It's going to keep catching some waves. And I spent 18 years in California. So there's a little bit of DNA in me other than my Jersey edge. And now my Texas roots, man, it's, it's cool.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:57)
I got a similar trajectory here. Now, Quinn, what happens when it's missing? What happens to leaders and their team when the emotional intelligence just isn't there?

**Quinn Harwood** (4:09)
Well, the end result, like in most businesses, you're concerned with the bottom line. And the bottom line, unfortunately, is when you miss emotional intelligence, the leader, you cause pain, you create pain, and that leads to this world of disengagement. So Gallup does some great studies and currently in our market, in our world place, you got 70% of people that are either actively not engaged or disengaged with the work they do. So there's an impact. And there's two layers to it, Tullio and Stephen. You got the impact of missing emotional intelligence on the individual. When you're not growing and you're not evolving and you're not progressing in your own growth time, what happens is you leave more of a stressed, less energized, connected, fulfilled life. And that's a challenge to you as an individual. But the offset of that is, gosh, you create some really emotional wakes in the workplace with the people you lead. You challenge them to trust you and to think that you value them. And you create all this disruption. And what happens is that you get the burn and the burnout. So the burn is when people you work for, they feel like, wow, I don't know if I can trust this organization or team. I don't know if they really care. And I don't know if they're really committed to me. And then you get the burnout, right? They get sluggish, disengaged, frustrated. And then they just start scrolling their phones, right?