What if the smartest founders are actually sabotaging their own success?
In this eye-opening episode, we dive deep with Lee Povey, a transformation coach who's spent two decades turning technically brilliant founders into emotionally intelligent leaders who can scale. Discover why 70% of high IQ founders struggle to break the $10 million revenue barrier, the four-part emotional framework that Navy SEALs use under pressure, and why Reed Hastings fired his entire Netflix executive team despite their technical prowess. Lee breaks down the simple six-emotion model that successful founders use to regulate themselves and reveals why being right isn't the same as being effective. This isn't feel-good advice—it's battle-tested neuroscience for founders who want to stop being their own biggest bottleneck.
Here's the brutal truth most founders refuse to accept: your intelligence got you in the game, but it won't win it for you. Research shows that emotional intelligence accounts for 58% of performance across all job types, but for leaders, that number jumps to 90%. Meanwhile, brilliant founders routinely hit walls at the 20-50 employee mark, not because they lack technical skills, but because they can't let go of control.
The problem isn't your IQ—it's that you're trying to do everything yourself. When you can solve problems faster than anyone on your team, delegation becomes torture. You watch others struggle with tasks you could complete in minutes, and every mistake feels like a personal failure. This protective mechanism that served you well as a scrappy startup founder becomes your Achilles heel as a scaling leader.
The solution starts with a simple question: Do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective? Most founders instinctively choose being right, but effectiveness requires something different—the ability to regulate your own emotions and connect authentically with others. This means recognizing when fear, anger, sadness, joy, interest, or disgust are driving your decisions, then choosing conscious response over reactive behavior.
The most successful founders master a deceptively simple practice: when triggered, they pause and ask themselves what they're feeling and what that emotion is telling them. Anger usually signals a boundary violation. Fear indicates unpreparedness. Once you understand the message, you can move from fight-or-flight mode into curiosity—the founder's most powerful emotional state.
This isn't about becoming touchy-feely. It's about upgrading your operating system from reactive to responsive. When someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of flipping them off, you wonder what's happening in their world. When an employee makes a mistake, instead of swooping in to fix it, you ask questions that help them learn. When investors challenge your strategy, instead of defending, you get curious about their perspective.
The payoff is immense. Founders who develop emotional intelligence build teams that can operate without them, create cultures where people want to stay, and scale past the revenue ceiling that traps most technically brilliant leaders. They stop being the bottleneck and become the catalyst.
Watch the Full Episode on Why Your IQ Won't Save Your Startup (But Your EQ Might) with expert Lee Povey below:
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