I had basically zero emotional intelligence when I was younger.
There wasn’t anyone around me who modeled it. No one talked about it. The concept didn’t even exist in my world.
I could build websites, run marketing campaigns, and solve technical problems. But I couldn’t read a room, manage my own reactions under stress, or understand why people did what they did.
It wasn’t until I started reading books on emotional intelligence that everything changed. Not just my business—everything.
Now it’s the single most important thing I look for when hiring. I don’t care what skills someone has on their resume. I don’t care about their years of experience or their technical expertise.
If their emotional intelligence is low, they’re not joining our team. Period.
Because here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: People with low EQ create drama. They blow up over minor things. They quit in emotional reactions. They poison team dynamics. They make everything harder than it needs to be.
And while you can teach someone technical skills in weeks or months, developing emotional intelligence? That’s a years-long journey that someone has to genuinely want to take.
The difference for us has been night and day. In the earlier days of our business (before we learned to hire for emotional intelligence), our team was often one of our greatest sources of stress – one guy thought it was OK to miss 4 out of 9 appointments. He said he “only missed 4!” Another had an emotional reaction to something imaginary and quit without notice. And there’s just the day-to-day stress of people not being able to follow through and get work done.
If you could calculate the real cost of hiring people who are not A players, I think it would be staggering.
By contrast, today, we regularly get comments like these:
“Awesome support as always. Love the team.”
“The best customer service experience I’ve had.”
“I love this team and how they help when asked. Thank you for this group, you have a special thing going.”
I agree.
That’s not by accident or coincidence.
I’m not sharing this to brag about our team (though they deserve it), but to illustrate the difference this one thing has made in our own business, and what it can mean for you.
The Syndication Blind Spot
When it comes to real estate syndication, a lot of people obsess over technical details like:
Cap rates. IRR calculations. Waterfall structures. Market analysis.
These things matter. But technical brilliance without emotional intelligence is like having a powerful engine with no steering wheel. You might go fast, but you’ll likely crash.
Think about it: What good is perfect underwriting if you alienate every investor you meet? What’s the value of finding great deals if you can’t maintain the partnerships needed to close them?
Daniel Goleman’s research shows that EQ accounts for 58% of performance in all job types. In leadership roles? It’s even higher.
That includes you. You’re running a business and must provide leadership in many areas.
In syndication—where you’re constantly managing relationships with investors, brokers, partners, property managers, and teams—emotional intelligence might be the difference between building a sustainable business and burning out in frustration.
What Emotional Intelligence Actually Means
Forget the academic definitions. Here’s what EQ means in practical syndication terms:
Self-Awareness: Recognizing when you’re making decisions from ego versus logic. Knowing when stress is affecting your judgment. Understanding your triggers before they torpedo a deal.
But here’s what most people miss: Self-awareness starts with simply recognizing what you’re feeling in the moment. So many people operate on autopilot, reacting to emotions they haven’t even identified.
You’re in a partnership meeting and your partner suggests a different strategy. Suddenly you’re arguing against it aggressively, picking it apart, finding every possible flaw. But what you haven’t recognized is that you’re not reacting to the strategy—you’re reacting to feeling dismissed or undervalued. If you had that awareness, you could choose a different response.
Self-Management: This is where the magic happens. Once you recognize what you’re feeling, you realize you have a choice in how you respond.
That frustration when a broker dismisses your offer without really considering it? You can recognize it, feel it, and then choose to ask professional follow-up questions instead of getting defensive. That disappointment when an investor backs out? You can acknowledge it without taking it personally or letting it shake your confidence.
I’ve seen people start acting passive-aggressively in meetings—making snide comments, withdrawing from discussion, or suddenly finding fault with everything. They’re feeling hurt or threatened but don’t recognize it, so it leaks out sideways. With self-management, you can catch yourself and choose a direct, professional response instead.
Social Awareness: This goes way beyond just “reading the room.” It’s about picking up on the emotional undercurrents that drive every business interaction.
When an investor keeps asking about the same detail from different angles, they’re not being difficult—they’re anxious about something specific. When a partner suddenly goes quiet in meetings, they might be feeling overwhelmed or excluded, not disinterested. When a property manager gets defensive about questions, they might be feeling criticized rather than consulted.
The syndicators who develop social awareness can address what’s really happening, not just what’s being said. They make people feel heard and understood, which is often more important than having the perfect answer.
Relationship Management: This is where all the other skills come together. It’s not just about being “good with people”—it’s about consciously building and maintaining relationships even through conflict and stress.
It means having difficult conversations without destroying trust. Disagreeing with partners without making it personal. Giving critical feedback in a way that strengthens rather than strains the relationship. Knowing when to push and when to give space.
Most importantly, it’s about creating environments where people actually want to work with you—not because you’re always easy to work with, but because you handle the hard moments with emotional intelligence.
This isn’t soft skills fluff. This is the hard reality of building a sustainable business.
The Attraction and Repulsion Principle
Here’s something I’ve learned that applies directly to syndication: You get to choose who you work with.
We once worked with a client whose entire team seemed emotionally immature. Every interaction was difficult. Very demanding. Communication was terrible. Simple conversations turned into emotional reactions. Any time their company name came up in conversation, there was a feeling of dread along with it. Eventually, we parted ways.
And honestly? It was a relief for our entire team.
That experience taught me something crucial: Some money isn’t worth taking.
Now we deliberately structure our business to attract the kind of people we want to work with and repel the ones we don’t. We’re clear about our values. We’re direct about our approach. We don’t try to be everything to everyone.
The same principle applies to raising capital.
You don’t have to take money from every investor who’s willing to write a check. You don’t have to partner with people who make your life miserable. You don’t have to build a business that requires you to work with people you don’t respect or enjoy.
The syndicators who understand this build businesses they actually enjoy running.
The ones who don’t? Everything becomes harder than it needs to be. They have strained partnerships and can’t figure out why. They go from deal to deal, relationship to relationship, each one ending badly when conflict arises.
They don’t have the self-awareness to recognize what they’re feeling and talk through it, or the skills to understand someone else’s perspective and find common ground. Every disagreement becomes a relationship-ending event. Every conflict becomes personal.
It’s exhausting. And it’s completely preventable.
The Empowering Truth
Here’s what changed everything for me: Unlike IQ, which is largely fixed, emotional intelligence can be developed.
You can learn to recognize your patterns. You can develop better self-control. You can become more skilled at reading others and managing relationships.
It’s not easy. It’s not quick. But it’s possible. And it’s very much worth it!
It’s very satisfying and fulfilling. Relationships get easier. You understand why people do what they do. You understand why you do what you do. You understand how to identify what it is you really need and find better ways to get what you need. You understand what other people need and how to create true win-win scenarios.
And in syndication, where relationships determine success more than any spreadsheet ever will, developing your EQ might be the highest-ROI activity you ever work on.
Where to Start
If you’re thinking, “Okay, but how do I actually develop emotional intelligence?”—here’s where to begin:
Start with observation. For one week, just notice your reactions without trying to change them. When do you get triggered? What makes you defensive? When do stress and ego override logic?
Practice the pause. Before responding to difficult emails, tough conversations, or stressful situations, pause. Take a breath. Ask yourself: “What response would serve my long-term goals, not just my immediate emotions?”
Read the room beyond the words. In your next investor conversation, pay attention to what they’re not saying. What concerns are they dancing around? What are they really worried about? Address the emotion, not just the stated objection.
Choose your partnerships consciously. Before taking on any new investor, partner, or team member, ask yourself: “Would I want to spend a week traveling with this person?” If the answer is no, reconsider—no matter how much money or expertise they bring.
Go deeper with a book. If you’re serious about developing your EQ, this email is just scratching the surface. “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves is a practical guide with an assessment and strategies you can actually use. It’s what I recommend to anyone who wants to genuinely understand and develop these skills.
The technical skills of syndication can be learned from any course or book. But the ability to build and maintain the relationships that actually fund deals, create partnerships, and build sustainable businesses?
That requires emotional intelligence.
The principled operators we work with might not always know the terms “emotional intelligence,” “EQ” or “emotional maturity,” but the successful ones have developed these skills—whether consciously or intuitively. They’ve learned that building a fulfilling syndication business isn’t just about finding good deals or raising capital.
It’s about becoming the kind of person others trust with their money, their partnership, and their future.
Because at the end of the day, people don’t invest in deals. They invest in people.
And people with high emotional intelligence are the ones worth investing in.