Can you train emotionally intelligent teams?

By Karen Klakegg, VP of Marketing at Attensi · Published: 26 September 2026

Whatever sector you work in, and whatever role you play in your organization, chances are that you have to deal with other people in some capacity or other. You could be a leader managing a team of healthcare professionals, a front-of-store retail worker dealing with the public, or part of a manufacturing team working together on the factory floor. The fact is, to be successful in your career and/or your business, you need people skills.

Understanding and responding to other people’s emotions and your own is a key part of being a ‘people person’. But this may not come naturally to everyone. Research suggests that you can train people to be more ‘emotionally intelligent’, and advances in AI and virtual simulations make delivering that training easier and more impactful than ever before.

What is emotional intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is essentially the ability to identify, understand, manage and express emotions¹. Every time you notice that your co-worker isn’t as upbeat as usual and might want some space, stop yourself from throwing your patchy wifi router at a wall when it cuts out during a meeting, or sensitively deliver difficult feedback to avoid unnecessarily hurting an employee’s feelings, you’re using emotional intelligence.

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, points out that being emotionally intelligent doesn’t just mean being ‘nice’². It’s a combination of four components³: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management.

• Self-awareness is the ability to recognize your own emotional state.
• Self-management refers to your emotional self-control, positive outlook and adaptability.
• Social awareness covers organizational awareness and empathy.
• Relationship management is your ability to influence others, manage conflict, work as a team, and lead effectively.

When you split emotional intelligence into those components, it’s easy to see why it comes in so handy in the workplace.

How is emotional intelligence a resource in the workplace?

Leadership

Gone are the days when having technical skills and the loudest voice in the room were enough to be considered a good leader. Modern workforces want authentic leaders with strong communication skills⁴.

It’s essential for leaders today to be emotionally intelligent - so essential that some experts say emotional intelligence is the most important skill a leader can have⁵. Emotional intelligence allows leaders to build positive relationships with the rest of their team while managing their own emotions. Essentially, it means they can create a working culture where employees can thrive.

Customer service

Anyone who’s ever worked a customer service job will tell you that you have to control your emotions daily when working with the public. Customers can be rude or abrupt when they’re upset, and understanding where they’re coming from, responding appropriately, and calming your knee-jerk emotional responses (in other words, having emotional intelligence) are successful front-of-house employees’ bread and butter.

Teamwork

If you’ve never had to work alongside someone who you don’t naturally gel with, you’re the exception. Most of us will have had the experience of managing our personal feelings about someone in order to work with them effectively - and that requires a good dose of emotional intelligence.

Training emotionally intelligent teams

Can you build emotional intelligence through training? Multiple research studies have found that targeted interventions can improve emotional intelligence. These interventions can also improve teamwork, conflict management and coaching skills, as well as employability and job satisfaction⁶.

Googling ‘emotional intelligence training’ will bring up hundreds of courses claiming to enhance your emotional intelligence. But the core focus of a lot of those courses is giving learners explicit knowledge about emotions⁷. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that learners aren’t always given the chance to practice applying their knowledge as part of the training process.

Levelling up emotional intelligence training

At Attensi, we believe that to achieve real-world impact, you need to be trained and assessed in real-world scenarios. That means instead of reading about how to recognize other people’s emotions and respond sensitively, you need to actually live out those scenarios in a realistic way - and practice repeatedly.

For example, imagine if you could train people who work with children to navigate emotionally difficult conversations by giving them hands-on experience and immediate feedback during those sensitive situations. Traditionally, this never would have been possible, but advances in computer-based simulations meant that we could do just that with the NSPCC. ‘Talk to Me’ is an interactive simulation that puts learners in the role of a teacher building trust with a child to help them open up about abuse. The programme develops emotional intelligence by providing instant feedback and opportunities to repeat the same scenario as many times as they need.

Emotional intelligence training need not revolve around difficult or sensitive topics. Picture leadership training that allows managers to practice a performance review with a difficult virtual employee or customer service training that gives staff practice dealing with customer complaints.

As emotional intelligence continues to be a hot topic in learning and development, alongside the advance of AI solutions like AI-roleplay simulations, we’re likely to see more training programmes based on simulations with realistic virtual avatars, putting learners’ emotional intelligence to the test in ‘real’ scenarios where they can fail safely. This kind of learning has huge potential for enabling emotionally intelligent teams in every sector, and better workplaces for all.