“As go the leaders, so goes the world.”
Mike Desjardins said this early in our conversation on The Wisdom Of… Show , and it’s one of those statements that sits with you. Not because it sounds profound, but because once you examine it properly, you realise it’s simply accurate.
Every major challenge facing humanity traces back to leadership quality. Climate response, political fragmentation, economic systems, AI governance, the growing isolation in an age of supposed connection, and all of it flows downstream from how leaders lead.
Mike Desjardins , CEO of ViRTUS , has spent over two decades in the trenches of leadership development, transforming businesses and the people inside them. What he’s discovered challenges everything most leadership programs teach.
Your IQ, your subject matter expertise, even your strategic thinking – none of these, despite their obvious value, are the determining factor that make you a great leader.
The foundation that determines whether everything else stands or crumbles? Emotional intelligence. But not the way most people think about it.
Building on Sand vs Building on Bedrock
Mike uses an analogy that makes the role of emotional intelligence impossible to misunderstand:
“Imagine you’re building a building and you decide to build it on sand – that’s what weak emotional intelligence looks like. As you start building upward and adding more leadership skills, the higher the building goes, the more it’s going to sway and rock. When an earthquake hits, or some business crisis shakes your organisation, the building’s going to be moving all over the place because your foundation is weak.”
Now imagine you developed your emotional intelligence into a concrete foundation with bedrock and rebar – this building is not going anywhere because it’s grounded.
Most leadership development gets this backwards when they try to build skills on weak foundations. Communication training, strategic planning workshops, delegation frameworks – all valuable, all necessary, but if your emotional intelligence foundation is weak, none of it holds when pressure arrives. And pressure always arrives.
The Leadership Triangle That Actually Matters
During our conversation, Mike revealed something most leadership experts won’t say publicly: subject matter expertise is table stakes, not what makes you a great leader.
“Subject matter expertise will not make you a great leader. It’s a table stake. You have to have it. But the rest of what we’ve described in this model is what is actually going to make you a great leader, irrespective of what your subject matter expertise is.”
The real framework? Three quotients working together:
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) – Your ability to think, analyse, and solve complex problems. Essential, but insufficient on its own.
EQ (Emotional Quotient) – Your ability to understand yourself, regulate your emotions, empathise with others, manage relationships, and stay self-motivated. This is the foundation that everything else builds upon.
AQ (Adaptability Quotient) – Your ability to operate in VUCA environments (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) with resilience and calm.
The combinations matter because leadership isn’t one-dimensional – modern organisational life demands leaders who can think clearly (IQ), connect authentically (EQ), and adapt rapidly (AQ).
The Me vs The We
Towards the end of our conversation, Mike said something that captures a critical pattern emerging everywhere:
“I’m concerned that the me has overtaken the we. If we focus more on what is right for the village and the community, it would work out for everyone in a much better way. And you wouldn’t have to worry about me.”
We’re watching fragmentation accelerate across political systems, organisational structures, and community bonds. Political polarisation, organisational silos, erosion of shared truth, and individual success celebrated at the expense of collective thriving.
Leaders who understand their role is to serve “the we” while developing “the me” create fundamentally different outcomes than leaders optimising only for individual or corporate gain.
The best leaders understand they’re stewards of something larger than themselves. They ask: “How does my leadership create more leaders? How does my success enable others’ success? How does my company’s growth contribute to human flourishing?”
The $330,000 Deal Closed in Five Minutes
Mike had a meeting scheduled to finalise a complex $330,000 deal. They had one hour, the numbers were significant, the terms intricate, the stakes high.
At the 55-minute mark, his partner said, “I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. We have to finish this deal.”
They finished it in five minutes.
What happened in those first 55 minutes?
“We spent the first 55 minutes talking about our lives together.”
But that’s not quite accurate as they weren’t “just chatting.” Mike was systematically building a genuine human connection.
“The level of trust and empathy that we built together was so great that what was supposed to take us an hour to hammer out, we hammered out in five minutes.”
Think about the mathematics of this. Fifty-five minutes of connection enabled five minutes of efficient decision-making, an 11:1 ratio that most leaders would dismiss as wasted time when it was actually the most valuable investment possible.
The Next Most Obvious Question
Mike’s technique for building connection is deceptively simple – he calls it “asking the next most obvious question.”
Most business meetings start with “How was your weekend?” followed by “It was great,” and then “Good. Let’s get down to business.”
Mike does something different by asking, “What made it great?” which opens the door to actual conversation. “Oh, well, I got to spend time at my daughter’s soccer game.” Then “How’d they do?” followed by “They actually won” and “Was your daughter happy with the outcome?” which gets “Yeah, it was awesome.”
He continues with “What else did you do this weekend?” and learns about the movie with the wife, whether it was worth seeing, building a complete picture of the person’s life and priorities.
Watch what happened in just two minutes of genuine curiosity. Mike now knows this person values family time, the emotional state they’re bringing (positive), their relationship priorities, their cultural interests, and the practical context about their weekend.
When they transition to business, Mike isn’t talking to “a counterparty in a negotiation” but now he’s talking to a human being whose context he understands completely.
The AI Advantage (When Combined With EQ and AQ)
People worry about AI replacing their jobs, but Mike said they’re worrying about the wrong thing.
“I would worry more about somebody who’s AI-enabled replacing your job. A peer who’s very good at using AI tools to become more efficient and effective in their role and happens to have a high EQ.”
Think about that for a moment. “Imagine they’ve got a high EQ, they’re intelligent, they’ve got an adaptability quotient, and they’re functional at AI. That’s somebody who’s scary. That person will take your job in a heartbeat because they’ll do something you can’t possibly keep up with.”
This combination creates an unstoppable competitive advantage: high EQ for human connection and self-awareness and empathy, high AQ for resilience in complexity and adaptability, and AI fluency for leverage and efficiency.
The future doesn’t belong to people who resist AI or to AI itself – it belongs to people who combine AI’s computational power with deep emotional intelligence and adaptive capacity. One without the others creates brittleness, but together they create leverage most leaders can’t imagine.
Watch Mike and I explore how leaders can develop this combination of capabilities in the complete conversation.
The Emotional Vocabulary Advantage
One of the most practical insights Mike shared was about expanding emotional vocabulary:
“If you just look on the internet and type in the wheel of emotions, there’s this wonderful wheel that shows you the different levels of emotions. The more words you have for emotions, the more you can actually be self-aware.”
Instead of saying “I’m mad,” you might say “Actually, I’m frustrated, I’m sad, and I’m disappointed,” which is much more accurate than mad or angry, and grounds you in a much different place.
Why this matters: “If I’m unable to have an understanding of my own emotional complexity as an individual by having the words that go with it, how am I supposed to understand what’s going on and empathise with someone else? I don’t even know what’s going on with me.”
Self-awareness and awareness of others use the same neural pathways, so when you train yourself to recognise and name your own emotional states precisely, you’re simultaneously training your capacity to recognise and understand others’ emotional states. It’s not two separate skills, it’s one capability applied in two directions.
The Video Test for Real Change
During our conversation, Mike shared a practical test for whether emotional intelligence training actually works.
“You need to be able to turn the sound off and just watch the video. Can you see the change in people’s body language? Can you see the emotional intelligence showing up in how they’re interacting?”
Most leadership training focuses on what people say, but Mike focuses on how they show up – body language, tone, energy, the space they create for others, the way they regulate their own emotional state under pressure.
“If you’re explaining a theory, anybody could have read that book. What we want is leaders who can actually explain practically how they can do that with somebody else that they need to be in conversation with.”
This is the difference between knowing about emotional intelligence and actually being emotionally intelligent. Theory is easy, but application under pressure is what separates great leaders from everyone else.
Where to Start
If you’re listening to this thinking your EQ might not be where it needs to be, Mike offers clear direction.
Start with emotional vocabulary by studying the wheel of emotions and begin naming your emotional states with precision instead of broad categories like “good” or “bad,” “happy” or “angry.”
Practise curiosity by asking the next most obvious question in every conversation – not the scripted question you prepared, but the one that naturally follows from what someone just said.
Slow down enough to humanise by investing in understanding who you’re actually talking to before you rush into “let’s get down to business.” Learn their context, their concerns, their world.
Develop your adaptability quotient by learning to operate with resilience in VUCA environments and practise calm in complexity.
Get functional with AI rather than resisting it – learn it, and combine your growing emotional intelligence with technological leverage.
These aren’t soft skills, they’re the concrete foundation determining whether everything else you build will stand or crumble.
What's Actually at Stake
Mike’s opening statement bears repeating: “As go the leaders, so goes the world.”
Every major challenge facing humanity traces back to leadership quality – climate response, political decision-making, organisational culture, community cohesion, and technological governance. The leaders who understand that emotional intelligence is the foundation, not a soft skill, are the ones who will navigate complexity successfully.
Not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve built on concrete instead of sand. Not because they have better strategies, but because they can execute under pressure without their foundation crumbling. Not because they dominate others, but because they elevate entire systems.
Mike closed our conversation with this: “I think if we focus more on what was right for the village and the community, it would work out for everyone in a much better way.”
That’s the leadership the world needs – leaders who understand their role is to serve something larger than themselves, who build genuine connection before transactions, who combine high IQ, high EQ, and high AQ with technological fluency. Leaders who build on concrete foundations.
Watch my complete conversation with Mike Desjardins and see the visual leadership framework I build.
The foundation determines everything, and Mike showed us exactly what that foundation looks like and how to build it.
