Modern leaders face more than just business challenges, they’re navigating purpose, pressure, and people in a world that often feels unmoored. What if the real leadership edge isn’t just empathy, but a deeper kind of awareness that connects values, meaning and resilience? Yosi Amram looks at a shift from within.
In today’s hyper-speed, AI-driven, burnout-ridden world, emotional intelligence (or EQ) is no longer optional for leaders. They’re expected to be self-aware, empathetic, and emotionally attuned, not just to bolster workplace morale but for the sake of the company’s overall performance.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more prevalent than in Silicon Valley among the tech world’s prominent CEOs. These leaders often attribute their success to “soft skills” such as emotional intelligence, but even more intriguingly, you can also hear them refer to a lesser known but equally powerful dimension of intelligence: spiritual intelligence (SI).
Leaders often speak about it as their hidden edge
For many of these CEOs, EQ alone wasn’t quite cutting it. Emotional intelligence equips leaders to navigate emotions, people, and relationships; spiritual intelligence uplifts us further, giving us the ability to find meaning in crisis, align decisions with our values, and inspire teams around a shared purpose. Leaders who tap into SI often speak about it as their hidden edge, the guiding compass at their core. And, for many CEOs, it’s often been a crucial factor in their healing, resilience, and growth—inspiring peak performance and transforming themselves and their organisations.
Case study: Lifelong spiritual intelligence
When Ted first came to me for CEO coaching nearly a decade ago, he needed so much more than just leadership advice. He was deeply depressed. He felt overcome with shame that he had disappointed his investors and employees when he was forced to lay off a sizable portion of his company’s staff. Furthermore, he didn’t know it, but he was repressing childhood trauma that was affecting his relationships both at work and at home. Simply put, his overall self-worth had crumbled.
The Ted I know today bears no resemblance to that man. Now, he leads his flourishing company from a place of grounded confidence and alignment. He speaks openly with his team, sometimes even telling them he loves them. He meditates regularly, sets intentions before meetings, vividly envisions his future, and makes decisions not just with his head, but with his heart and gut as well. He’s proud of the culture he’s built, one rooted in purpose, compassion, and egoless orientation towards service.
It was through SI that Ted was able to rebuild his foundation, working from the inside out. Not only was he able to become more emotionally open himself, but his life’s work also shifted from a source of stress to one of fulfilment, growth, and joy.
When I asked Ted to reflect on our time together, he said, “It hasn’t been a momentary epiphany, though I’ve had a few of those, but more of a slow, gradual, and consistent growth… It’s impacted all aspects of my life—not just my work, my leadership, and my company, but also all my relationships, including with my family, my wife, and my kids.”
The throughline for Ted, and for so many others, is SI development.
What is spiritual intelligence?
SI, to offer my definition, is a person’s ability to draw from and embody qualities hailed by the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions that have been shown to enhance functioning and well-being. This form of intelligence has been academically proven by independent researchers worldwide to enhance leaders’ ability to inspire motivation, commitment, and cohesion in their team members and themselves, while also significantly improving their companies’ financial outcomes. This concept of spiritual intelligence as something anyone can develop, regardless of their spiritual or religious affiliations, has helped it take root in even the most secular of working spheres.
As a quick overview, there are five core domains to SI:
- Meaning
- Grace
- Truth
- Consciousness
- Transcendence
Under the umbrella of these five domains are twenty-two capacities, including purpose, service, gratitude, compassion, freedom, openness, integrity, humility, and more. Together, these domains and capacities form a framework that supports leaders at any level of an organization.
Why now?
The rise of SI isn’t random. Increasingly, clients are coming to me facing a perfect storm of stressors: from social unrest to technological disruption to full-on existential burnout. The traditional markers of success, as we once knew them, feel hollow. And with so many remote or work-from-home employees, it’s harder than ever to check in with our teams, to combat isolation, or to create a sense of community among our employees.
SI can help us ground actions in meaning and show up with clarity, no matter the circumstance. I was unsurprised to read about how companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Salesforce have already incorporated mindfulness training into their leadership programs. This makes sense following the findings of consulting group Bain about what makes an inspirational leader. Going back to Danah Zohar’s work in the 90s to more recent studies, SI has been proven to contribute to job and work satisfaction, quality of life, resilience, mental health, and productivity (both individually and organisationally), while also positively impacting financial results.
Your turn: Getting started with SI
Leaders interested in developing their spiritual intelligence can begin by asking:
- What deeper purpose guides my work? Do I know what my purpose is?
- Which of my daily actions are aligned with my highest values and integrity, and which are not? How do I feel internally when I am in alignment, compared to when I am not? What impact do my aligned actions have on others, and how does that differ when I am out of alignment?
- How and where am I showing up in the way I know I can? For my colleagues and for myself?
From there, practices such as meditation, journaling, or breathwork can help build SI, just like any other intelligence or skill—focusing on one of the framework’s capacities at a time. Over time, these capacities shift from inner reflection to outer expression, impacting and transforming how leaders manage everything from board meetings to burnout.
For today’s challenges, we need both a modern approach and timeless wisdom that has been passed down through millennia of spiritual traditions worldwide. We need more than just empathy; we need to ground ourselves in our spirit (our life force energy) so it may express our potential and point us towards our purpose and calling.
The leaders who embrace SI will not only shape more effective companies but also more meaningful workplaces that support our sense of shared values, team purpose, and communal belonging. After all, work is where we spend the bulk of our waking hours. We need and deserve more than just workplaces. We need and deserve communities.
Yosi Amram is a licensed clinical psychologist, a CEO leadership coach, researcher in the field of Spiritual Intelligence and author of Spiritually Intelligent Leadership: How to Inspire by Being Inspired and you can find out more here
