EQ Scores Are Declining Globally. Here's What That Means for Your Team in 2026.

The meeting ends, and nobody quite knows what was decided.

Not because the agenda wasn't clear or the wrong people were in the room. It's something harder to put a finger on — ideas got shared but didn't really build on each other. Feedback was offered and seemed to bounce off. Someone said something mildly charged, and the room moved on without addressing it. You leave with an action-item list and a faint sense that you spent an hour talking past each other.

If that experience is becoming familiar, you're not imagining it. There's a body of research behind it.

The numbers

Six Seconds, an organization that has tracked global emotional intelligence data for over two decades, publishes an annual State of the Heart report measuring EQ across populations worldwide. Their most recent data covers 2019 through 2023, and the finding is stark: the global average EQ score dropped by 5.54% over that period. Every individual's EQ competency declined. Every region declined.

The cohort hit hardest was Gen Z — 53.7% scored in the low workplace satisfaction category, a proxy measure that correlates closely with lower emotional intelligence in occupational contexts.

To be clear about what this means: the people entering the workforce right now, and in significant numbers, the people already in it, are scoring measurably lower on the emotional skills that make teams function — reading a room, regulating under pressure, giving feedback that actually lands, staying curious instead of defensive in a hard conversation.

This isn't a character judgment. It's a measurement of something that has been eroding across populations through years of disruption, isolation, and chronic stress. Research on what drives EQ development makes it predictable: extended periods of high stress, reduced social contact, and low psychological safety don't foster emotional intelligence. They shrink it.

What it looks like at work

Declining EQ in a team doesn't look like drama. It looks like friction that nobody can explain.

It looks like feedback conversations that go through the right motions but don't change anything. It looks like meetings where people are technically present but not really hearing each other. It looks like a team member who keeps getting the same note in performance reviews but seems genuinely unable to see the pattern. It looks like collaboration that requires more management overhead than it should, not because people are difficult, but because the baseline relational skills that make working together easy are thinner than they were.

It accumulates gradually. Someone eventually uses the word "culture."

Where your role comes in

Here's what makes this relevant to you specifically, rather than just an interesting data point: you're not a passive observer of your team's EQ environment. You're its primary architect.

The research on EI development is consistent on this. Emotional intelligence doesn't grow in isolation — it develops through relationships, feedback, and environments where emotional skills are modeled, expected, and safe to practice. The conditions for that development are almost entirely within a manager's control. Psychological safety, quality of feedback, whether hard conversations get had or avoided, whether the team sees how to navigate uncertainty with steadiness — all of that flows from the person running the team.

Which means that in a period where EQ is declining across the working population, the manager is either amplifying the problem or buffering it. There isn't really a neutral position.

The good news about EI

Here's something the "soft skills" framing gets badly wrong: emotional intelligence isn't a fixed trait that you either have or you don't. New research published in PMC this year mapped the neurological basis of EI — the specific brain regions and cognitive mechanisms associated with emotional skill. What they found is consistent with what IO psychology has shown for years: EI functions as cognitive infrastructure. It's measurable, specific, and responsive to development.

That matters for two reasons. First, it means the decline is not permanent. EQ that dropped under conditions of chronic stress and social disruption can recover when those conditions change. Second, it means the starting point for any leader trying to build a higher-EQ team environment is themselves — not a culture initiative, not a training program, not a team-building offsite. The most durable way to improve the emotional intelligence conditions on your team is to develop your own.

What to actually do

The practical implication isn't to become a therapist for your team or add another framework to your management toolkit. It's narrower than that.

Start by getting accurate about your own patterns. Most leaders have one or two areas where their EQ is strong and one or two where it creates blind spots — not because they're weak leaders, but because emotional intelligence isn't uniformly distributed. A leader who's strong on empathy but struggles with conflict navigation creates a very different team environment than one who's strong on self-regulation but low on social attunement. Both have real costs. Neither one is obvious from the inside.

Give feedback that's developmental, not just corrective. The research distinguishes sharply between feedback that evaluates performance and feedback that builds capability. Both have their place. But in a period where EQ is declining, the leaders who create the most growth are the ones giving the kind of feedback that helps people understand their own patterns — not just what they got wrong, but how they tend to show up and what that's costing them.

Create enough psychological safety for the real conversations to happen. Not every team interaction needs to be emotionally deep, but a team that never has a real conversation — about the hard thing in the room, about what isn't working, about what someone actually thinks — is a team where emotional skills atrophy. They develop in the same place they show up: in the moments when something matters and staying honest is harder than going along.

The data on EQ decline is useful not as a cause for alarm but as context. The world your team is operating in has measurably less emotional infrastructure than it did five years ago. That's the situation. What you do with it is still entirely up to how you lead.

If you want to understand where your own EQ patterns are strongest and where they're creating gaps, the quiz is a good place to start.

Sources: Six Seconds State of the Heart Report (2019–2023 data) | PMC / NCBI — Neural Correlates of Emotional Intelligence, Systematic Review (June 2026) | PMC / NCBI — Ability EI Profiles and Real-Life Outcomes (February 2026)