Across more than 20 original interviews with heads of learning and leadership development, one challenge comes up again and again. Leaders invest in emotional intelligence training to help teams break silos and strengthen cross-functional collaboration, but those trainings tend to focus exclusively on the individuals themselves.
The challenge with emotional intelligence training programs that focus only on individuals (i.e., how leaders manage their emotions) is that these programs don't address the deeper structures that create silos.
That’s where Dr. Noah Askin’s work stands apart. Askin is an Associate Professor of Organization and Management at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business and the faculty director of its Leadership Development Institute. He’s a longtime networks scholar whose research spans creativity, collaboration, and music. His central insight is deceptively simple: if you want to break silos, you need to stop thinking only about people and start thinking about the connections between them.
When applied through this lens, emotional intelligence becomes far more practical and powerful, especially on the team level.
Why Silos Persist Even When Leaders Care About Emotional Intelligence
“When we talk about people in organizations, the fundamental unit isn’t just the person,” he explained. “It’s the connections between people.”
Most EQ training, however, is built around the individual. To help them develop self-awareness, regulate emotions, and improve their communication skills. Those capabilities matter, but they don’t automatically break down silos.
Silos persist because relationships follow patterns. Those patterns form networks. And networks, whether leaders recognize them or not, shape who talks to whom, who shares information, and who gets left out.
Without understanding those structures, even emotionally intelligent leaders can end up reinforcing the very silos they’re trying to dismantle.
What Leaders Miss When They Don’t Map Their Networks
One of the first things Askin teaches leaders and students is to visualize their networks.
“Imagine drawing a map of your organization,” he says. “Some leaders sit inside dense clusters where everyone knows one another and communicates frequently.” These networks feel supportive and high-trust, but they can quickly turn into echo chambers.
At the other end of the spectrum are “network brokers.” These leaders connect people and groups that would otherwise remain disconnected. They move across functions, translate ideas between domains, and bring in new perspectives.
“What we know from decades of research is that dense networks build trust,” Askin says. “But brokers get access to new and different information. That’s where creativity and innovation come from.”
For leaders trying to break silos, this distinction matters. You can’t collaborate across functions if your network only reinforces what you already know. Askin explores this idea at length in his book, Orchestrating Connection: How to Build Purposeful Community in a Tribal World, where he argues that effective leaders don’t leave connection to chance. They design it with intention, starting with clarity about what kind of network their role actually requires.
Breaking Silos Requires Trust. And Trust Requires Vulnerability
Understanding network structure is only the first step. The harder part is building the kind of relationships that allow leaders to move across boundaries. That’s where emotional intelligence shows up in practice.
Askin is blunt about what doesn’t work. “If you just tell people to introduce themselves or ‘network more,’ nothing changes,” he says. “Connection doesn’t deepen without some level of vulnerability.”
To demonstrate this, he starts nearly every course or executive session he runs in the same way. Instead of surface-level introductions, he gives participants a prompt like: “If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life who you don’t give enough credit or thanks to, who would that be, and why?”
The question demands a small act of vulnerability, and this changes the dynamic. “It’s amazing how quickly trust forms,” Askin says. “People realize that connection is built by revealing just enough of yourself to invite someone else in.”
Often, cross-functional collaboration doesn’t fail because people don’t understand strategy. It fails because people in disparate circles don’t trust one another enough to share ideas, admit uncertainty, or ask for help.
How Emotionally Intelligent Leaders Broker Across Differences
Once trust is established, leaders still face a practical challenge: different functions speak different languages.
Sales teams care about customers and revenue. Engineers care about systems and feasibility. R&D teams care about experimentation and long-term potential. Leaders who try to collaborate across these boundaries without adapting their approach often create friction instead of alignment.
Effective network brokers do something different. They adjust how they show up. “If you’re going to build relationships across these groups, you have to speak their language,” Askin explains. “What you bring to the table is often what gets reflected back to you.”
This is emotional intelligence applied at the network level. In addition to core EQ skills like empathy and one-on-one conversations, you need to apply more advanced EQ skills like reading contexts, understanding priorities, and translating ideas from one group to another.
In his classes and workshops, Askin reinforces this through role plays, time-pressured simulations, and feedback exercises that stress-test leaders in real time. Those moments reveal default behaviors and give leaders a chance to see how their emotional patterns either build bridges or reinforce silos.
Why Emotional Intelligence Can’t Be Outsourced to AI
As organizations rush to adopt AI, Askin worries about an unintended consequence: outsourcing the emotional work of leadership. “I worry that there’s a move to outsource emotional stuff to AI,” he says. “You don’t have to attune to a chatbot. You don’t have to read how it’s feeling or adjust to what it brings into the room.”
That might make interactions more efficient. But it doesn’t make leaders more effective. Emotional intelligence, in Askin’s view, is never something you “complete.” Each new relationship introduces a new background, temperament, and story to understand. That ongoing curiosity is the point. “You can never master emotional intelligence and networking,” he said.
3 Behaviors To Break Down Silos
Breaking silos requires a shift in how leaders think about emotional intelligence itself. The most effective leaders do three things differently:
- They understand the network they operate in, not just the roles on the chart.
- They build trust intentionally, using vulnerability as a catalyst rather than a liability.
- They act as brokers across differences, translating ideas and priorities instead of defending turf.
Emotional intelligence becomes powerful when it changes how—and with whom—leaders connect. And in organizations struggling with silos, that may be the most important leadership skill of all.
