Marc Brackett

Marc Brackett runs the research center that most corporate emotional intelligence programs are quietly borrowing from, and he is direct about the thing those programs usually skip: that people cannot manage an emotion they have never been taught to name.

He is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in Yale's Child Study Center, and the lead developer of RULER, an evidence-based framework now running in more than five thousand schools worldwide. RULER is an acronym for the five skills the research identifies: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing and regulating emotion, in that order. The order is the point, because an organization that jumps to regulation without the first three is asking people to manage something they cannot yet identify.

Permission to Feel, his book on the subject, has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Its argument is that emotional suppression is expensive rather than professional: it degrades decision-making, attention and health, and the workplaces that treat feelings as a distraction pay for it in the numbers they do measure.

He has keynoted more than seven hundred conferences, including at the White House, the US Departments of Education and Defense, the Surgeon General's office and dozens of Fortune 500 companies, and advises corporations on building emotional intelligence into how they actually operate rather than into a values statement.

He suits leadership development programs, manager training, culture and wellbeing initiatives, and any organization whose engagement data points at how people are treated rather than at what they are paid. Sessions run as a keynote and often as a keynote plus a workshop, since the five skills are practiced rather than described.