Wang Yajun: Emotional Intelligence Is No Universal Fix for Organizations

Wang Yajun first separates being “liked” from being “useful”: a person may be liked by the boss without being useful to the company. EQ can help someone read needs quickly, but it can also turn feedback into calculated appeasement.

Zhang Xiaojun says that as organizations grow from startups into large companies, expectations around EQ and the ability to survive inside an organization seem to rise. She asks Wang Yajun, former chief strategy officer at 龙湖集团, whether professional managers really benefit from being better at managing relationships.

After studying environmental engineering at Tsinghua, Wang worked in environmental consulting, studied and worked in the United States, and then joined McKinsey. In 2012 he entered real estate, serving as chief strategy officer at 龙湖 and later overseeing strategy, HR, and IT at 宝龙. He then moved into management research, consulting, and investing.

Zhang brings up familiar claims that senior executives are all savvy operators and that management is about managing human nature. Wang says that before calling someone “useful,” we should ask: useful to the boss, or to the company? The answer depends on whose interests we mean.

Wang separates two ideas often bundled together as EQ. One is reading people, managing relationships, and managing upward. The other is emotional intelligence in the more technical sense: recognizing, understanding, and using one’s own emotions and those of others. The first is everyday workplace usage, not necessarily the research concept.

Management discussions often put a new label on old habits, creating the impression that we have learned something new. Wang cautions that managing upward and reading social cues do not, by themselves, explain the relationship between IQ and emotional intelligence. First be clear about what “EQ” means in the conversation.

Wang does not expect an executive team to consist entirely of people with high EQ. The important question is what each role must solve and whether that level calls for reason, emotional information, or both. EQ is not a universal promotion standard.

Wang uses eunuchs as an extreme historical example: they were skilled at understanding other people’s needs and providing emotional value, yet their fortunes often ended badly. Building a country or a company also requires structural, rational thinking; EQ alone does not scale into an organizational system.

He compares two approaches to collaboration. One is to read another person’s emotions closely and adjust what you say. The other is to agree that everyone acts in good faith and will not harm others, then speak directly. The second may seem cold, but it reduces the cost of repeatedly translating views and guessing motives.

In a large company with poor collaboration, people may feel they have to play the EQ game. In a startup, making relationship tactics the main way to solve problems is hard to scale. EQ training cannot replace a shared method that everyone can use to solve problems.

Without a company-wide method, people from different backgrounds have to rely on personal adjustment and emotional cues to work together. Those who are good at reading others then take on more coordination. Senior leaders can design an overall system; front-line employees usually cannot change the structure, so their starting points should differ.

Zhang asks whether EQ is the lowest-cost way to solve problems. Wang says it may be cheaper for an individual who cannot change the environment, but it is expensive for the organization as a whole: repeated guessing and translation raise collaboration costs. The same tactic can have different effects at different levels.

Front-line employees may need to figure out what the boss wants in order to do their jobs well, but they should not overuse that tactic. If senior leaders establish rules based on good faith and candor, teammates can learn that a direct expression is a working style, not a personal attack.

Zhang asks whether people with high EQ are more likely to rise through the ranks. Wang says not to generalize from one company to all companies. Truly excellent companies are rare; many firms rely on relationship tactics, but an organization that only plays the EQ game will struggle to last.

When everyone simply agrees with the boss, feedback gets calculated and filtered. The boss gradually loses sight of what is really happening, and decision quality falls. Strong organizations seek contact with reality; Wang points to Huawei’s Blue Team and similar mechanisms that use opposing perspectives to challenge assumptions.

Wang cites Elon Musk and the early Steve Jobs as examples of people seen as low in EQ, while stressing that people change. In an interview he heard with a chip-design leader who worked with Musk, people could disagree in a meeting as long as they had sound reasons. Rational argument, rather than pleasing the boss, can improve decisions.

Wang also mentions General Su Yu, who reportedly preferred to serve as a deputy so he could focus on fighting. By contrast, smooth relationship management may help during stable periods in a company or country. In real competition or crisis, emotional value cannot replace the ability to solve problems.

If a group of people with low EQ works toward a clear common goal, their arguments may eventually be channeled by that goal. If the goal is weak or unclear, the group can quickly fall apart. Real teams usually include people with different temperaments who play different roles.

A company’s stage of development and the competitive market change which skills are valued. When the priority is creating value, people who solve problems directly have more room. When the organization focuses on distributing existing value, relationship managers may become more prominent and creators may be pushed aside.

Wang says people with low EQ may have more room to survive when there is external danger and value must be created. He presents this as a logical hypothesis, not the result of a large study: one group prioritizes getting the work done, another prioritizes preserving relationships, and those aims lead to different choices.

Zhang asks how Wang, who considers himself low in EQ, reached a senior role. He says his move from strategy consulting into a company came at a moment when 龙湖 was bringing in outside strategy talent. His background fit the job, and timing played a part; strategy work also demands a broad, deep, long-term view.

Wang says his strength is rational analysis rather than reading emotions. That has made him less reliant on one-to-one relationship tactics and more inclined to design systemic solutions. He dislikes the word “workplace” because it suggests a game with fixed boundaries, while executives can redefine the environment.

Executives should not separate strategy, execution, and organization. If a strategy cannot be carried out, the answer is not simply to blame the people executing it; the people who set the direction share responsibility for the overall result. Treating boundaries as fixed can become a way to evade responsibility.

Wang argues that a company should let both the business and its people grow. If employees are treated as disposable screws, they will focus on short-term earnings rather than the company’s success. Repeated layoffs also make it harder to recruit strong people when the market recovers.

Zhang asks Wang for advice for people with high or low EQ. He resists offering a one-size-fits-all career guide, but has a clear principle for senior leaders: do not make EQ the main problem-solving tool. Treat emotion as information and bring it into a rational decision framework.

Wang describes emotional intelligence as a skill that can be practiced, not a fixed high-or-low trait. In his book 《企业即算法》, he explains behavior through four interacting motives: sex, fear, love, and belief. Understanding a person’s state can help a team solve a problem together, rather than merely read social cues.

At the front line, individuals usually cannot change the system and have to choose a strategy that fits their strengths. But organizations can create conditions that let front-line behavior influence how the company is managed. Wang says middle managers have the hardest role: they must connect reality on the ground with senior leaders’ strategy, identify the tensions, and propose systemic solutions.

People with low EQ may appear stronger at the work itself partly because organizations have already filtered out people who failed to meet a basic ability threshold. Early EQ research suggested that emotional skills could help once people had reached a certain level of intelligence; it did not say that EQ simply matters more than IQ.

Wang notes that a small number of excellent companies often capture most of an industry’s profit, while most firms operate at an average level. A company may need people who create value directly at a particular stage, but that does not mean every company should follow the same model.

When everyone is busy keeping relationships smooth and nobody asks how the company should develop, EQ can become a tool for maintaining harmony. If advancing the business might damage relationships and the organization puts harmony first, people will likely avoid the hard choice, and the company may become mediocre.

Zhang asks what should make a company worry about how it uses EQ. Wang says it is dangerous when many people believe that “knowing but not saying” is necessary to survive and advance. It is hard to define abstractly, but people can often sense it quickly once they are inside the environment.

The way people address one another can reveal organizational relationships. Wang recalls that at 龙湖 people were not to use “leader,” “brother,” or “big brother”; the company emphasized professional relationships. New employees who did not know the norm were corrected. No form of address is automatically good or bad, but each connects to a wider management system.

Calling a customer “brother” or “sister” in a sales context may be fine, but internal titles can change the sense of power. If one “leader” always makes the final call, other people’s views may stop mattering; the leader may begin to see himself as invariably right and drift away from reality.

As a company grows, each additional management layer has to abstract and compress information from the front line. Good synthesis reduces the information load while preserving contact with reality. Empty language that could describe any company or department has lost its grounding.

Understanding a company is not just a matter of assembling a set of metrics. Its present reality was formed by what it did consistently over several years and by how the outside world changed. Without that history, financial, organizational, or ESG indicators alone will not explain the company.

Wang says experienced observers do not start by studying the org chart; they look at how the company makes decisions. Whether the structure is matrixed or functional is secondary. What matters is how people across functions make decisions around a product and turn them into action.

A CEO does not need to label team members as high or low in EQ first. The question is how to help everyone solve problems together. Some people may be good at connecting departments, others at noticing emotions; what matters is whether those strengths support collaboration.

A strong rational thinker can treat emotion as an input, while teammates can help fill gaps in emotional observation. Wang’s main concern is the quality of each decision and its execution, not a predetermined ratio of people with high and low EQ.

Zhang notes that it is hard to divide a person neatly into high-EQ or low-EQ categories. Wang agrees: rather than pursue a perfect profile, look at how a team thinks and acts and how its members’ different abilities fit together.

Wang recalls his work on organizational transformation at McKinsey. After joining 龙湖, he saw that real estate policy and market cycles were hard to predict. Gathering information can sharpen judgment, but it cannot eliminate uncertainty.

If the future cannot be predicted reliably, strategy cannot be set by a few people and mechanically handed to another group for execution. A company must adjust strategy and working practices together through practice. Organizational capability is not an abstract quality created by training; it is a team’s ability to solve real problems repeatedly.

Wang says companies do not separately do strategy or organization; they run a business. Good strategy and organization emerge when people make sound decisions together, face new problems, and keep learning. They cannot come only from a boss setting a direction and demanding execution.

Moving from McKinsey into a company also meant moving from delivering reports to being accountable for performance. Consulting, training, media, and operating businesses have different products and payment models, so their teamwork, working methods, and management theories differ too.

Wang distinguishes two kinds of work: creating value by making a product or business better, and distributing value by focusing on how to claim a share of what already exists. The two involve different products, strategies, and ways of working.

As a company moves into the flatter part of its growth curve, roles and preferences change. Some founders leave because they no longer fit the stable-stage culture; others cannot keep up. Leaders from mature companies may know how to operate at scale without knowing how to build a company.

Zhang asks whether people who combine high EQ with strong business ability are rare. Wang says they are more likely to become CEOs, because the role requires them to handle the business, collaboration, and overall balance. He points to improved collaboration under Microsoft’s leadership as an example.

Wang adds that one real part of EQ is empathy and understanding another person’s situation. When front-line collaboration improves, leaders encounter more reality. Emotional perception is one kind of information for decision-making, not a substitute for other forms of judgment.

Wang says the strongest research he found showed a correlation of about 0.2 between EQ and performance, which is not enough to claim a strong relationship. There is also no clear model showing whether EQ and intelligence complement or reinforce each other.

He sees some value in asking ChatGPT to make a difficult message more professional when the sender struggles to express it. But if both sender and recipient use a model to filter the exchange, anger, sadness, and conviction may be edited away.

An unidentified participant says the generated wording still sounds too formal. Wang replies that two-way editing puts a filter over language and emotion. People lose real information and can end up in separate bubbles; important conversations need the feelings that help us judge what is happening.

Zhang thanks the audience and invites listeners to subscribe, leave comments, or suggest guests and topics for future episodes. The show ends with a goodbye.