Emotional Intelligence at Work: When Your Manager’s Words Don’t Match Their Behaviour

Why Nice Words Can Sting

0:21 SPEAKER_00: This great story teaches us something about being human. I'm Cheryl Paris and this is Work Stress Anxiety. Together, let's borrow a little wisdom from a story to help us navigate a very modern world.

0:43 SPEAKER_01: Oh wow, that email is lovely. Calm, thoughtful, supportive. There's a sentence about appreciating your perspective, another one about wanting you to feel able to raise concerns. Perhaps there's even something about creating a safe space for open communication, and you read it and think, well, that sounds very reasonable. Then you actually sit down with the person who sent it, and somehow you are still measuring every word. You notice yourself editing sentences before they've even left your mouth.

1:27 SPEAKER_01: You soften things, you add explanations you probably don't even need. You find yourself saying, I'm not criticizing, I just wanted to explain. And perhaps afterwards, you know, you walk away thinking, How can someone sound so emotionally intelligent in writing and that and yet leave me feeling so uncomfortable when we actually talk? That's what I want to explore today because emotionally intelligent language and emotionally intelligent behaviour are not necessarily the same thing. And I think with AI becoming increasingly good at helping us so-called communicate, I think that distinction is becoming even more important.

Jane’s Puzzle With Her Manager

2:17 SPEAKER_01: But before we get to that, I just want to say a particular thank you to a listener in Washington State. I'm not going to butcher the name, um, but I'll spell it. S-P-O-K-A-N-E, who recently listened to Grief Before You React, relieving work stress through breathing. Thank you for choosing to spend some of your time with me. I never take that for granted. You know, there are a lot of things competing for our attention these days. So whenever you are, wherever you're listening from, um whether it's that play lovely place in Washington State or somewhere more closer to home for me, thank you for being here.

3:08 SPEAKER_01: Now, picture someone, I'm going to call her Jane. Jane receives a message from her manager, it's warm, empathetic, almost textbook, actually. Her manager acknowledges Jane's concerns, thanks her for raising it, and says that they welcome honest conversations. Nothing particularly wrong with that, of course. In fact, it shows someone, you know, if you were to show someone that message without any other context, they might say, Oh, that sounds like a really good manager. Except Jane has context. She knows what happens when she disagrees.

3:47 SPEAKER_01: She knows what happens when she raises something uncomfortable. She knows that conversations can become defensive. She knows that occasionally something she has said seems to be interpreted as a criticism when she thought she was just simply raising a problem. And now Jane has a strange little psychological puzzle. The words are telling her one thing, her experience is telling her something else. And because the words sound so reasonable, she begins questioning herself. You know, maybe I'm being unfair.

4:26 SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I'm being a bit too sensitive. And this is where I think we need to be careful.

Relationships Are More Than Sentences

4:34 SPEAKER_01: Because sometimes we treat communication as though it's primarily a wording problem. You know, it's about finding the right sentence, using the right tone, avoiding the wrong phase, saying it more constructively. And yes, words matter, of course they do. But relationships, in my experience, are not built on individual sentences floating around independently. Relationships carry history, they carry tone, power, trust, consistency. What happens when someone says no? What happens when someone disagrees?

5:19 SPEAKER_01: What happens when the conversation becomes uncomfortable? And what happens afterwards?

AI Writes Empathy Without The Muscle

5:27 SPEAKER_01: I think AI complicates this in quite an interesting way. Because AI can produce the language of empathy remarkably quickly. Yeah. You can give it a fairly blunt email and say, can you make this sound warmer and more, you know, empathetic? And within seconds, you can have something that sounds calm, compassionate, and beautifully considered. Useful. Absolutely. I use AI myself. I think it can be incredibly useful for helping us organize ideas, notice tone, and communicate more clearly. But there I think it ends.

6:12 SPEAKER_01: At this point in time, okay, from my experience, there's a difference between knowing the sentence and having the capacity underneath the sentence. Imagine watching someone demonstrate a physical move. Just say, I don't know, um, I remember when I first started using kettlebells, I watched this guy on YouTube, honestly, who talked about the kettlebell swing, and what he would do, he would demonstrate it. It would show you exactly how to lift the weight, how to do the hip um hinge, you know, where your feet should go, where your hands should go, you know, how you position your back.

7:03 SPEAKER_01: You you can understand the movement perfectly. You probably could describe it to someone, but understanding the move doesn't suddenly give your muscles the strength to perform it. That requires practice, right? And emotional intelligence, I think, can be a bit like that. Someone may know the language. I appreciate your perspective. I want us to have an open conversation. I can understand why you might feel like that. Lovely. But what happens when your perspective conflicts with theirs? What happens when feedback touches something uncomfortable for them?

7:43 SPEAKER_01: What happens when they feel criticized? What happens when they don't have an immediate answer? What happens when their authority and you challenge a decision, a decision? That is where the muscles get tested, is it not? And this is one of the things I think we're going to have to become much more sophisticated about as AI becomes part of everyday work in life. I'm talking about everyday work in life for everybody out there as well. You know, we cannot automatically use polished communication as evidence of relational competency because AI can improve wording, you know, literally in seconds.

8:35 SPEAKER_01: Self-awareness doesn't usually work quite like that. Neither does emotional regularity, neither does the ability to remain curious when someone disagrees with you. Neither does trust. And I'm not saying that that because everyone using AI to improve an email, the sentiment in that email is somehow fake. No, that would be ridiculous even for me to suggest. I'm talking about something, someone genuinely means what they are trying to say and simply need help expressing it. Good intent and poor relation relational skill can exist in exactly the same space and time.

9:23 SPEAKER_01: That's the important distinction I'm talking about. Because this episode is not about catching managers out, right? It's not about that. It isn't about deciding that every polished email has some secretly generated, you know, being secretly generated somewhere. No, no. It's about giving yourself another way of assessing what is happening. And if this conversation is useful to you, do follow WorkStressAnxiety at follow the podcast.com, WorkStressAnxiety, because we are going to keep exploring this increasingly strange interaction between work, human behavior, and AI.

10:10 SPEAKER_01: Not from the position of AI, AI is wonderful, not from the position that AI is terrible, but from the slightly less exciting and considerably more useful position of asking, what is actually happening here?

Three Questions To Spot Patterns

10:29 SPEAKER_01: And that brings me back to Jane. Because perhaps Jane doesn't need to decide whether her manager is emotionally intelligent. This is actually quite a large conclusion to reach. She doesn't have to do any diagnosis. She doesn't even need to work out what their motives are. Who cares? What she can do is slight, slightly step outside the immediate emotional reaction and look at the pattern from a few different angles. What was said, what was done, what happened next? These are three very simple questions.

11:07 SPEAKER_01: Suppose the message that she receives says, I really value open discussion. Fine. What happens when there is open discussion? Suppose the message says, please feel able to raise concerns? Fine. What happens after a concern is raised? Or I understand your perspective. Good. Does a conversation remain respectful when that perspective is differ uh perspective is different? You can begin separating the sentence from the behavior and then behavior from the pattern that follows. The reason why I think it matters is because we are stressed, right?

11:55 SPEAKER_01: Particularly in relationships where there is a power imbalance. It can become very easy to zoom in on individual moments. That email was lovely, the meeting was horrible, that was very nice to meet you yesterday, they were defensive today, and your mind can bounce back and forth trying to decide which version is real. Perhaps neither single moment gives you the whole picture. It's the broader pattern, usually telling us more. And I like this way of looking at things because it gives you room for complexity, right?

12:35 SPEAKER_01: A manager might be trying, uh, they might genuinely want to communicate well, they might even believe very strongly in good leadership and psychological safety, and they may still struggle when they feel challenged. Those things can actually coexist because human beings are irrationally inconvenient like that. Haven't you noticed? We really neatly fit into categories we would like to put each other into. And noticing that complexity doesn't mean ignoring behavior that repeatedly leaves you feeling unsafe or undermined.

13:17 SPEAKER_01: It just means you don't have to turn uncertainty into self-doubt. There's definitely a difference. You know, you can say, I don't know exactly what is going on for that person, and still notice what repeatedly happens when I speak. So here's a tiny experiment I want to leave you with. Take one interaction, just one, not six months of evidence, okay, not the dossier, and write three lines. What was said, what was done, what pattern followed it. That's it. What was said, what was done, what pattern followed.

14:01 SPEAKER_01: So no attempt to prove intent, no mind reading, just observable evidence. What was said, what was done, what happened next. You may begin to notice that these three questions quietly quieten some of the mental noise that sometimes goes on. Because rather than asking, am I imagining this? you are asking something much more useful. What am I observing? And that small change matters because the goal is not to convince yourself that everything is fine when it's not, right? It is to see more clearly, and clarity gives you more, way more, better information from whatever decision comes afterwards.

14:57 SPEAKER_01: Perhaps you discover that the behavior actually is becoming more consistent with the language. Perhaps somebody is learning, perhaps trust is beginning to build or rebuild slowly, or perhaps you notice that the warm wording keeps appearing while exactly the same difficult pattern continues underneath. The thing is, either way, you know a little bit more than you did before, right? AI might be becoming extraordinarily good at producing the language of emotional intelligence. I suspect it's really good at it now.

15:38 SPEAKER_01: But leadership is not ultimately demonstrated by producing perfect sentences. It's demonstrated in the slightly untidy human moments afterwards. When someone disagrees with you, when somebody says no, when someone gives feedback you don't particularly want. Well a conversation doesn't follow the script. That is where the muscle matters.

Takeaways On Trust And Leadership

16:06 SPEAKER_01: So if you take one thing from this episode, let it be this. Notice the pattern, not the polish, not the shiny bit. Warm words do matter, but repeated behavior tells you far more about whether those words are safe to rely on. And your tiny challenge there is simply to take one interaction, separate those three things: what was said, what was done, what happened next. You may simply need to see things more clearly. And perhaps the sentence to remember is this emotional intelligence isn't proof by knowing the right words.

16:54 SPEAKER_01: It's revealed by what happens when those words are tested. So remember, every step you take, no matter how small, is a step towards a brighter, more balanced future. Trust your journey and remember, progress is progress no matter the pace. Bye for now.

17:20 SPEAKER_01: I hope today's episode gave you something useful to carry into your week. Now finish your coffee, take a breath, and remember progress is progress no matter the pace. Until next time, bye for now.