A good emotional intelligence workshop changes how a team works together: how people handle pressure, give feedback and listen to each other. A poor one is a pleasant afternoon that’s forgotten by Monday. The difference is usually practice. This guide shares seven practical activities you can use in an emotional intelligence workshop, and how to make the learning last.

Before you start: set up the room

  • Agree simple ground rules: what’s shared in the room stays in the room, and everyone chooses how much they share.
  • Explain the why. Link the workshop to real challenges the team faces, such as deadlines, change or difficult conversations.
  • Keep groups small for anything personal: pairs and threes feel safer than the whole room.

7 emotional intelligence workshop activities

1. Emotion check-in

Ask each person to name how they’re feeling using a specific word, such as “curious”, “stretched” or “relieved”, rather than “fine”. Offer a list of feeling words to help. It builds self-awareness and shows how varied a team’s emotions are at any moment.

2. The pause

Describe a common trigger, such as a sharp email or a missed deadline. In pairs, people practise noticing their first reaction, pausing, and choosing a response. It makes self-regulation concrete: the space between trigger and response is where better choices happen.

3. Listening pairs

One person talks for three minutes about a current challenge while the other only listens. Then the listener reflects back what they heard, including the feelings behind it. Swap roles. Most people discover how rarely they listen without planning their reply.

4. Walk in their shoes

Take a real or realistic workplace situation and discuss it from the point of view of each person involved: the manager, the team member, the customer. It builds empathy and often reveals why a situation feels so different to different people.

5. Feedback rehearsal

Practise giving feedback using a simple structure such as Situation, Behaviour, Impact: describe when it happened, what the person did, and the effect it had. Rehearsing in pairs makes real feedback conversations less daunting.

6. Strengths and stress map

Each person shares what helps them do their best work and what tends to stress them. Capture it on a team map. It helps colleagues understand each other and adjust how they work together.

7. One commitment

End with each person choosing one small habit to practise, such as pausing before replying to difficult emails. Pair people up to check in with each other over the following weeks.

How to make the learning last

One-off workshops fade quickly. Lasting change usually comes from follow-up: short refresher sessions, coaching for managers, and assessments that show each person where to focus. Emotional intelligence isn’t a fixed trait, so regular practice makes a real difference.

How RISENLEAD can help

We run emotional intelligence workshops, assessments, coaching programmes and team building for organisations: see our corporate training. For managers and senior leaders, our leadership training is built on emotional intelligence. And if you’d like to run sessions like these yourself, the Emotional Intelligence Practitioner & Coach certification teaches you to develop EI in yourself and others.