Emotionally intelligent leaders are often excellent dealing with hard conversations, challenging decisions, or a major change taking place because they know how to treat feelings as inputs to plan for, rather than obstacles to get past.
Most organizations measure trust and engagement because they are strongly associated with high-performance culture and productivity. Few leaders stop to consider what they’re measuring. Chuck Wolfe’s answer: “Trust and engagement are emotions and raising them quickly and reliably requires emotional intelligence.”
Capable leaders, excellent critical thinkers, and problem solvers often get stuck dealing with issues involving strong emotions. Chuck says, “it is almost always because something emotional is happening inside them, or because they are worried about someone else’s emotions or emotional reactions.” Most emotion management strategies are learned via trial and error and applied haphazardly, but Chuck advocates instead for emotion-based planning using his Emotion Roadmap.
In January 2025 Gallup reported that U.S. employee engagement fell to 31% in 2024, its lowest level in a decade, and its 2025 State of the Global Workplace put global engagement at 21%, down from 23% the year before. Chuck shares cases demonstrating excellent results in raising engagement levels when organizations focus on emotional intelligence, specifically on how their team members are feeling and how they want them to feel.
Chuck is the CEO of Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC. He is an executive coach, consultant, and speaker based in Connecticut, and the creator of the Emotion Roadmap™, a structured method for turning emotional insight into effective action. The Roadmap, built around four questions, has been used since the late 1990s with Fortune 500 companies, small and mid-sized businesses, the U.S. military, universities, government, education, and the nonprofit sector. What he offers leaders is a way to plan for feelings the way they already plan for budgets. He calls it emotion-based planning, a leadership skill that can be learned, practiced, and applied immediately.
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The Emotional Action Gap
Trial and error, Chuck says, “leads to inconsistent results, avoidant behavior, and a tendency to focus on controlling outward behavior rather than understanding the emotions driving it.”
His starting point is that emotions aren’t the problem. “Emotions are not obstacles to leadership; they are inputs,” he says, part of the evolutionary systems designed to protect us. When leaders ignore those inputs, they create what he calls the Emotional Action Gap, “the space between knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it.” The Roadmap exists to close the gap: a repeatable way to identify what you’re feeling and why, what you’d need to feel to act effectively, and a realistic plan to get from your current feelings to your ideal feelings. He compares it to a power tool for managing your own and others’ emotions “intentionally rather than reactively.”
The method itself fits on a single page.
Four Questions
The Emotion Roadmap™ asks four things:
What am I feeling now, and what are key others feeling?
What would be ideal to feel for this situation?
What can I do to move from my current emotional state to the ideal one?
What am I actually willing and able to do?
“While these questions may seem somewhat simplistic,” Chuck says, “they are powered by underlying theories of change management, problem-solving, appreciative inquiry, and positivity and well-being.” Colleagues know him for bringing every hard conversation back to them, because “these questions move people from describing a problem to developing a plan.”
Many consider emotional intelligence to mean being kind, considerate, and soft. Accountability, he adds, is also a feeling, and there is nothing soft about making people feel accountable. However, holding people accountable does not have to be highly confrontational. Holding people accountable, while maintaining their dignity, offering our support, and being very clear about consequences, is in his experience a key part of generating trust and engagement.
The same questions work on a tactical problem and a strategic one: a high-stakes presentation, a conflict, a large-scale change, unexpected news. “The goal is not to eliminate difficult emotions,” Chuck says. “It is to manage them intentionally so they support effective action and strengthen relationships.”
Three cases where the method was used show its range.
A Leader Asked to Leave, and Two Cases Where Trust Had Gone
The first is a senior leader in aerospace, widely regarded as the most strategic thinker on his team. When a new CEO interviewed the senior group about their colleagues, the feedback on him was unanimous: toxic, difficult to work with, someone no one wanted on their team. He was asked to leave. Coaching with Chuck continued as part of his separation package, and they worked through the Roadmap: what he was feeling and why, how others were experiencing him, and what would need to shift. Once Chuck’s client learned to use his strategic thinking skill to create emotions conducive to collaboration, he joined another organization. Months later he called with news: the CEO of his new company had pulled him aside to say how much he appreciated his ability to relate to the entire leadership team, and how much his presence was improving the culture and performance. “The same leader who had once been labeled ‘toxic’ was now seen as a unifying force leading to increased trust and engagement.” The case is documented in a chapter he was invited to write for the International Coaching Federation, listed at the end of this piece.
The second case is a large IT department that taught its leaders the Roadmap and applied it during a restructuring. Regional centers across the U.S., whose managers had reported to local health-care general managers, were suddenly required to report to a centralized team in California. Local teams, who could no longer purchase independently, or simply say yes when requests came from their local general manager, were resentful. The centralized team ran a series of what Chuck calls safe sessions, where employees were encouraged to say how they felt. Leaders listened, acknowledged the feelings and concerns, made several key accommodations, and explained the rationale and the cost savings behind the change, repeatedly. “Trust and engagement were rebuilt and culture improved almost immediately.” Chuck wrote up the results in 2001, in an article also listed at the end.
The third began with a request Chuck turned down. A large hotel and convention center aiming for world-class status asked him to run a SWOT analysis. Using the Roadmap as a diagnostic, he told the new leadership team it would fail: the previous leadership had punished anyone who disagreed, trust was badly damaged, and no one was going to volunteer a weakness or a threat. He recommended a vision-building process instead, a diagonal slice of influential employees imagining a workplace where customers, employees and the organization all thrived. A three-day SWOT became a six-month initiative.
“The organization ultimately achieved much of what they set out to do by focusing on how they wanted their team members to feel and then creating and implementing the plan which helped them rebuild trust and engagement to get the responses they desired.”
Chuck Wolfe, Creator of the Emotion Roadmap™, Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC
The instinct to ask how people feel before asking what they think was formed inside large companies.
Ten Years at The Hartford
Chuck spent a decade, from 1984 to 1994, as Director of Management Development at The Hartford, building a leadership development process and a management curriculum for every level of leadership. Asked what that taught him that an independent coach might not see, he answers: “I learned that leadership development succeeds best when leaders align business realities with the understanding of the emotional impact of their behavior on the workforce.” Inside a Fortune 500 company, leadership is shaped by context: culture, competing priorities, business pressures, the emotional load managers carry daily. Leaders often know what good leadership looks like and struggle to apply it when the stakes are high.
He also worked at Harvard Business School, as an organization behavior research associate to Professor Anthony (Tony) Athos, “the most brilliant thinker about organizational and individual behavior I have ever known,” and he worked at Exxon as the Director of Leadership Development.
The other strand regarding his work in emotional intelligence is the science. Yale President Emeritus Peter Salovey and Professor John Mayer, both emotional intelligence pioneers, and their colleague David Caruso asked for Chuck’s support in making emotional intelligence practical. “Their work established the field; mine focuses on helping people apply those ideas in real situations.” They also asked Chuck to publish the MEIS, the Multi-factor Emotional Intelligence Scale developed by Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso, which measures emotional abilities. The MEIS preceded the MSCEIT. Chuck co-authored the MSCEIT certification program in 2001, taught the Emotion Roadmap as a guest faculty member of Daniel Goleman’s coaching certification program, and has taught emotional intelligence in organizations including The New York Times, Chevron, the U.S. Army, Yale University, Fidelity, and Kaiser Permanente.
One engagement he singles out is with the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, where he partnered closely with Tribal leadership to use the Roadmap across a portfolio spanning gaming, entertainment, hospitality, healthcare and more: “one of the most interesting and challenging experiences of my career.” He later did volunteer work with the Tribal elders, “one of the most meaningful chapters of my professional life.”
The new initiative he is working on now goes back to his time with Tony Athos.
Do You Feel Respected Here?
The 7 S change management model Athos introduced him to has shared values at its heart. Very recently Chuck has considered a change to that center, from shared values to shared feelings.
Take respect. “If respect is a shared value, we hope people act in ways that honor respect, but this is challenging to measure,” he says. Make it a shared feeling and different questions appear, ones that can be measured: “Do you feel respected in this organization?” and “As a representative of this organization, are you respectful toward coworkers, customers, and vendors?”
“Shared feelings make culture measurable, actionable, and emotionally real. And as we know, what gets measured gets done.”
Chuck, Creator of the Emotion Roadmap™, Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC
He once brought research from the Cornell School of Hospitality to the most emotionally intelligent leader he knows, who managed thousands of employees: their research showed high-paying hotel and convention center customers want to feel welcome, comfortable and important. The leader’s response was that for guests to feel that way, each of his employees, whom he called team members, would first need to feel welcome, comfortable and important. They built a program around the team members’ feelings. His guest satisfaction scores, Chuck says, “were never better.”
Chuck has also had to use emotion-based planning for himself, with no time to prepare.
Minutes Before a Keynote
“Minutes before delivering a keynote, I received a text about a serious health issue affecting someone I love,” Chuck says. His state shifted from inspired and energized to anxious and distracted. “I couldn’t change the news, and I couldn’t pretend I was unaffected. But I could choose how to respond.” He took a moment backstage to acknowledge what he was feeling, breathe, and deliberately set those emotions aside for the time being so he could focus on the audience.
The principle he draws from is that managing emotions doesn’t mean denying them. Most people, he has found, believe whatever they’re feeling must simply be endured. “We can, at times, intentionally change feelings,” he says. Another strategy for managing emotions is to change the self-talk that arrives with an emotion, and also, we can build what he calls an emotional firewall, “the ability to postpone dealing with a challenging feeling until the timing is better.” That is what he used backstage.
Among the people who shaped him he names his family: “Their influence, support, and love have been foundational to who I am and how I show up in the world.” One rule he returns to at home and at work: “we can disagree with people and still treat them with dignity, respect, and care.”
Those are the conversations his work is turning toward now.
Where Chuck Is Now
Speaking has become central. “Speaking to leadership teams and organizations is the best way to introduce awareness of how powerful emotional intelligence can be,” he says. When leaders work through real challenges together, “they see immediately how it improves decision-making, communication, and performance.”
Chuck is an internationally recognized leader in emotional intelligence. He is an Advisory Board member for the International Society of Emotional Intelligence and a member of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.
Two of the hardest emotional landscapes he is working in sit outside the boardroom. One is caregiving, which he calls one of the most emotionally intense challenges people face, and he is currently involved in an initiative to teach people in those circumstances, carers and cared-for both, how to use the Roadmap. The other is the level of distrust, even hate, affecting people worldwide. In some of his volunteer activities he is using the Roadmap to help people feel welcome, feel that they belong, and feel part of the family of humankind. “I believe that if each of us, within our own circles of life, works to make even one person feel more welcome, we can ultimately make the world a happier, safer, more inclusive place.”
His next chapter, in his words, “is about bringing the Emotion Roadmap™ to more leaders, teams, coaches, and organizations,” and expanding his speaking work “so emotion-based planning becomes as common as strategic planning.” The sentence he wants to be remembered by is the title of the volunteer radio show he has hosted since 2009. Individuals and organizations thrive, he says, when they learn to manage their own emotions and influence the emotions of others in ways that benefit all. “The Emotion Roadmap: Take the wheel and control how you feel.”
Five Reflections from Chuck
Ask what you’re feeling before you ask what to do. When a capable person is stuck, the block is almost always emotional, and naming it is the first move.
Decide what it would be ideal to feel. The goal isn’t to remove a difficult emotion but to choose the emotional state most likely to lead to success.
Treat accountability as a feeling. People being held accountable builds trust and engagement, if the conversation is supportive, specific, and clear about consequences.
Measure the feeling, not the value. “Do you feel respected here?” can be measured. “Do we value respect?” mostly can’t.
Build a firewall, not a wall. Postponing a feeling which isn’t appropriate or helpful for your situation until the timing is better is not denying it.
From the Diary of Chuck Wolfe
Chuck Wolfe is a Connecticut-based executive coach, consultant, and speaker and the CEO of Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC.
| Role | CEO, Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC; Creator of the Emotion Roadmap™ |
| Based in | Connecticut, United States |
| Previously with | The Hartford, Director of Management Development, 1984 to 1994Exxon Chemicals and Exxon Office Systems, Director of Leadership Development, 1982 to 1984Harvard Business School, Organization Behavior Research Associate, 1980 to 1982 |
| Also with | Host, The Emotion Roadmap radio show on WPKN and Livestream Emotion Roadmap on YouTube |
“Take the wheel and control how you feel.”
Editor’s Note
Executives Diary features Chuck Wolfe because his method is small enough to repeat and old enough to have a record. Four questions, used since the late 1990s, with cases he can describe in detail: a leader asked to leave who became a unifying presence elsewhere, a restructuring that held because people were allowed to say how they felt, a SWOT he refused to run. What convinces the editors is his insistence that trust, engagement and accountability are feelings, and that feelings can be planned for. He qualifies his claims, and the piece keeps the qualifiers.
Executives Diary, Editorial
