Key takeaways from this year that we should carry into 2026
When we look back at 2025, a few key terms will stand out as descriptors: economy, tariffs, AI, shifting workforce landscape, uncertainty, change. It was a year of innovation and risk-taking, but it was also a year of hesitancy and fear. Some companies won big, some companies lost big, and many companies simply managed to survive.
Short-term gains may have gone to tech giants and AI startups, and only time will tell whether risky investments will lead to big payoffs. But under the surface of the choppy waters of innovation and uncertainty, the organizations with resilience and adaptability were in the best position to navigate this year’s complexity. When change is the only constant and volatility is high, healthy organizational culture becomes the foundation for long-term success.
As we head into 2026, let’s count down the top 5 EQ lessons we’ve learned in 2025 that will help leaders develop their people and shape their cultures in the year ahead.
Lesson 5: Empathy Became a Performance Skill
This year employees and leaders had to navigate differences, uncertainty, and emotionally charged environments, making empathy essential to performance.
In TalentSmartEQ’s 2025 State of EQ Report, social awareness was the lowest-scoring EQ skill, with 23% of individuals scoring in the low range and 30% reporting difficulty picking up non-verbal cues, a challenge only amplified in hybrid and virtual settings.
These gaps matter. When people can’t accurately read each other’s emotions, misunderstandings multiply, frustration escalates, trust erodes, and collaboration weakens.
The most effective teams in 2025 were the ones whose members could recognize when emotions were running high, understand the unique perspectives of team members, make space for differences, and maintain psychological safety during tough conversations.
Leaders also had to empathize with the real pressures their employees were carrying: burnout, economic stress, job insecurity, and the overwhelming speed of change all around them.
When people feel understood, they engage, but when they feel ignored or dismissed, they disconnect. Empathetic leaders make employees feel seen, heard, and appreciated, which leads to higher morale and better retention. Empathetic teams create a safe environment where all members are valued and diverse perspectives lead to greater productivity and innovation.
Lesson 4: As AI Accelerated, Emotional Intelligence Became the Differentiator
2025 was the year AI fully embedded itself into how we work. Every major tech company invested heavily in AI, startups built AI-first solutions, and teams adopted new AI tools at a dizzying pace. While exciting for some, these developments left many afraid of being replaced and anxious over how to keep up with such rapid technological advancements.
Technical capability alone was no longer enough to stand out in a crowd. Emotional intelligence was the differentiator that enabled people to navigate the fear and uncertainty surrounding AI, communicate honestly about role changes and skill expectations, manage ethical gray areas like bias, privacy, and misinformation, and blend the speed of technology with the wisdom of human judgment.
Top organizational priorities in the 2025 State of EQ report were collaboration, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement, all human-centered drivers of performance. AI can accelerate workflows, but it can’t replicate these human qualities.
To be successful, companies needed to integrate the tech side (AI tools, data, automation) with the human side (empathy, relationship management, ethical decision-making). 2026 will bring even more reliance on AI, which will necessitate more reliance on the emotional intelligence skills needed to use AI wisely.
Lesson 3: Navigating Change Required Self-Awareness, Resilience, and Clarity
This was a year marked by change and uncertainty, and 2026 shows no signs of slowing. In their 2025 Disruption Index report, global consulting firm AlixPartners states in no uncertain terms: “Normal is over. Disruption is the new economic driver.”
Geopolitical pressures, demographic shifts, market uncertainty, restructuring of work environments, and rapid AI adoption kept organizations and individuals worried that if they weren’t ahead of the curve, they were falling behind. Yet despite this environment of constant change, most companies still aren’t equipped to manage it.
Our State of EQ Report paints a stark picture:
- 90% of organizations undergo change frequently or moderately often
- Only 35% feel prepared to handle it
- Only 41% rate their change management effectiveness as high
In other words, nearly all organizations are navigating change, but the majority of them aren’t handling it well. And the AlixPartners Disruption Index found that the more proactive companies are at addressing disruption and adapting to change, the better their performance will be.
So what set apart the organizations who successfully navigated change in 2025? Leaders who exhibited these key skills:
- Self-awareness. Self-aware leaders know their own emotional tendencies and recognize when they need to keep a check on their emotions. Self-awareness allows leaders to be in control of situations, rather than letting situations control them.
- Stepping back from a challenging situation to shift your perspective on it is a key aspect of emotional regulation. When leaders can reframe a situation to see it in a more constructive light, obstacles become opportunities for learning and growth.
- Resilient leaders know how to adapt to change and setbacks, remaining flexible and calm even when things don’t go as planned. Adaptability allows leaders to navigate uncertainty with the confidence needed to carry employees and teams through the choppy waters of change.
- Stress management. Effective leaders know how to stay grounded when stress levels rise. When leaders can manage their own stress and remain emotionally stable, they are able to make rational decisions in uncertain situations.
- Clear communication. In the face of uncertainty, employees need honesty and clarity from leaders. Clear communication reduces fear and confusion and fosters a sense of trust and motivation, even when the way forward is unknown.
Now more than ever, organizations must be equipped to manage change, and the best leaders use EQ tools to be prepared for whatever may be on the horizon.
Lesson 2: Leadership is Evolving, with Relationships at the Core
2025 highlighted the growing importance of relationship-driven leadership. The best-planned processes and most strategic decision-making were no match for the fears, anxieties, and frustrations workers experienced in this year of uncertainty, and leaders able to keep employees encouraged and engaged reaped the benefits.
The leaders who stood out in 2025 were those who paired clarity with compassion. They set expectations, held people accountable, and still recognized the challenges their employees faced. They balanced assertiveness with empathy, creating environments where people could perform at their best without burning out.
In our work with executives, we break down emotionally intelligent leadership into three dimensions: anticipation, participation, and cooperation. High-EQ leaders anticipate change and how it will affect their employees, validating feelings while helping people focus on what is within their control. They participate in the work of their employees by setting meaningful goals, inspiring confidence through delegation, and creating an emotionally safe environment where feedback is empowering rather than demoralizing. And they model cooperation by listening, collaborating, and managing conflict well.
Emotionally intelligent leaders create a culture where people are encouraged and inspired to give their best, knowing that an emotionally intelligent culture has an outsized impact on the bottom line.
Lesson 1: Cultures Anchored in Connection and Trust Have a Competitive Advantage
The companies that weathered 2025 didn’t necessarily have all the cutting-edge technology or the most generous perks. They had cultures that empowered employees at all levels to take measured risks and made individuals feel connected, supported, and valued.
Writing for the World Economic Forum, AlixPartners executive chair Simon Freakley illuminates the emotionally intelligent culture underlying Siemens’s implementation of AI workflows to quickly iterate and pivot amid rapid change. The company has empowered factory-floor operators to use AI agents to help troubleshoot and optimize without needing to run issues up the chain to centralized engineering. This would not be possible without a culture of trust, collaboration, experimentation, and psychological safety.
“The best leaders combine clear direction with distributed autonomy,” Freakley writes. “They trust teams at every level to act decisively, shifting from slow consensus toward rapid cycles of execution and adaptation.”
In other words, emotionally intelligent cultures are foundational for success and innovation in today’s ever-changing environment.
Data from Gallup’s ongoing meta-analysis of workplace culture and business performance has consistently tied workplace culture to retention rates and performance outcomes across industries. Yet by the middle of 2025, engagement in the US was at only 32%, with the cost of disengagement at $2 trillion in lost productivity.
What did employees say their company cultures were missing? Responses fell into four core themes:
- Organizational culture: a sense of belonging, autonomy, wellbeing, values
- Leadership transparency: communication, employment stability, strategic vision, visibility, involvement
- Resource investment: compensation, perks and benefits, human and financial resources, tools and systems
- Performance management: development, accountability, recognition
Three out of the four core themes are inextricably tied to the emotional intelligence skills of leaders, teams, and organizational cultures as a whole.
High-EQ cultures don’t happen by accident; they emerge from consistent, deliberate practices like transparent communication, respect and curiosity, healthy conflict resolution, regular feedback and recognition, and support for stress management and wellbeing.
As AI tools proliferate and change becomes the new normal, culture becomes the competitive advantage, and EQ emerges as the foundation that allows cultures to thrive.
EQ Is the Skill That Makes Every Other Skill Work
2025 reinforced a truth that decades of research have already shown: emotional intelligence is not soft, optional, or secondary. It is a hard business skill, the operating system that allows people and organizations to adapt, collaborate, and perform in complexity and uncertainty.
L&D teams increasingly focused this year on sustainable learning, habit-building, and measurable behavior change. This shift aligns directly with the way EQ develops. EQ is trainable, improvable, and measurable, and it is most effective when embedded in the day-to-day of a company’s culture.
That’s why EQ training, coaching, and assessment have become central tools for building resilient organizations. With more than two decades of research, millions of assessment results, and demonstrated outcomes across industries, TalentSmartEQ’s approach continues to give leaders a measurable advantage.
As we move into 2026, the trends will keep evolving, but one thing won’t change: emotional intelligence will always be the skill that enables every other skill to work.