Across hundreds of interviews with heads of leadership development, one of my go-to questions is:
If you could wave your magic wand, and you had no budget constraints and full executive buy-in, how might you build out your program?
The question is meant to be an imaginative exercise, so I was delighted when Ash Panjwani, the Head of Global Talent Development at Procore, responded by saying, “That’s exactly the opportunity my team and I had.”
That said, what stood out about her team’s work extended beyond the scale of the investment and buy-in from the C-suite. It was their long-term, holistic vision for building and sustaining great leaders and a great workplace. Her team built out a holistic system of leadership development that will continue to grow and impact the culture and the business for years to come. This article breaks down their approach.
The Pattern Panjwani Noticed at 17 That Determined Her Career: Emotional Intelligence
Panjwani traces her interest in industrial-organizational (I/O) psychology back to when she was 17, listening to her parents come home from work and talk about their days. “I came to see that humans are really at the crux of any business, whether that was operating a small business, as my father did, or being a marketing executive, as my mother was. And each time I was just very interested in what happens when someone shows up to work as not their best self. That really piqued my interest, and I just kept pulling at the string,” she said.
Both of her parents, she noticed, rarely talked about technical skills or knowledge skills. And they nearly always talked about people and human skills (or lack thereof). She found this fascinating, and her curiosity led her to her education (a Master's in I/O Psychology), to her career in leadership development, and, of course, to emotional intelligence.
Leadership Development at Scale: Foundational Skills Customized for Every Level of Leader
Now, granted this big opportunity to build something from the ground up at Procore, her team was careful to put a thoughtful system in place. She recounted asking one fundamental question: What behaviors do we expect from our leaders, why, and how will we know if they’re meeting those expectations?
Ultimately, they arrived at core leadership expectations, each comprised of key behaviors that hinge on emotional intelligence skills:
- Psych safety & Engagement: Creating environments where people feel seen, heard, and accountable
- Setting Clear Direction: Reducing ambiguity by aligning work to what matters most and holding people accountable.
- Feedback: Addressing performance directly, constructively, and consistently
- Coaching: Developing and empowering others to unlock their full potential.
Rather than designing separate leadership models for every level, Panjwani made a deliberate choice: the foundational skills remain the same across the organization. What changes are the context, risk, and scale.
High-level, Panjwani breaks it down as follows:
VPs benefit most from in-person connection: Leadership summits, facilitated dialogue, and group coaching that allow them to work through friction together. “VPs need to be in the thick of the friction, working themselves through difficult situations that are occurring across the company,” she explained.
Directors require consistent coaching and a trusted sounding board as they navigate cross-functional complexity.
Frontline managers thrive in cohort-based learning, where peer networks accelerate learning and build long-term connections. “This group needs to build a network, connective tissue. This is what drives retention,” she told me.
By delivering the same skills across all leaders, the company has adopted a kind of common leadership vocabulary and a sense of accountability for those behaviors from top to bottom.
Onboarding Is a Key Lever in Procore’s Leadership Development System
With specific behaviors as their target, onboarding is a key leverage point. For this reason, her team put disproportionate energy into making leadership expectations explicit from day one: What does effective leadership look like here? How do managers show it? How do leaders model it? And how does it show up in performance conversations?
Those behaviors show up in biannual performance reviews, in manager effectiveness ratings, and in team engagement surveys. This helps leaders stay accountable, and it helps them to track their progress and find new areas for practice and improvement.
AI Didn’t Change the Need for Emotional Intelligence. It Exposed It
“We’re increasingly talking about EQ in the age of AI,” Panjwani told me. “The reality is, the need for EQ hasn’t changed. We’ve been talking about EQ as a top leadership capability for decades now. AI just exposed the lack of it.”
Before AI, leaders were rewarded for having answers and knowledge. “Now answers are cheap,” she pointed out, “but good judgment is what's needed. Now more than ever, we need leaders who are grounded. They recognize the weight they carry when they walk in a room, and they are aware that their tone, timing, and reactions set the ceiling and the floor for their teams.” In other words, this current era, perhaps more than ever, calls for leaders who are emotionally intelligent.
Curiosity Over Judgment: Her Guiding EQ Principle
Panjwani’s most trusted EQ practice is simple yet highly effective, especially in the AI era: Leading with curiosity, not judgment. “I repeat this in my head over and over again: curiosity over judgment,” she said. “Lean in with curiosity before you decide to make a judgment.”
“Many leaders are promoted because they were excellent individual contributors,” she said. “That makes it easy to default to judgment – to tell people what to do.”
Curiosity shifts that dynamic. By asking before prescribing, leaders unlock better ideas, stronger ownership, and more resilient teams.
How Panjwani Built Leadership Development That’s Scalable and Sustainable
When Panjwani was handed the opportunity to build leadership development from the ground up, her team built something that scales, that impacts culture holistically, and very importantly, that her team can sustain over the years to come.
After delivering their development program to over 95% of their leaders, future sustainment will come in the form of podcast-style interviews with senior leaders discussing how they implement these core leadership behaviors on the job, digital coaching access in the flow of work, and strategic use of AI coaches.
By treating leadership development as a system (rather than a series of programs), Panjwani has built something designed to endure.
In a world where technology continues to accelerate change, Procore’s approach reflects a simple truth: emotional intelligence is no longer optional. It’s core infrastructure.
