Understanding The Importance Of Emotional Intelligence In Training And Learning With Dr Robin Hills

Let’s start with how you began your training journey and how it led you to set up Ei4Change. 

I started my career in the early 1980s selling pharmaceuticals in London. I did that for a period of about 15 years before moving to the North West of England to take up a leadership and management role. Now, the pharmaceutical industry has been under a degree of transition since I worked in it and will carry on in the future, and my roles changed dramatically over that time. 

Eventually, there were a series of redundancies that I worked through, and I got to a point where I thought, “I’ve been through a number of redundancies, so let’s set myself up in business. What is it that I do, what do I enjoy doing, and where can I develop myself and my career?” 

So I looked at setting up a training consultancy based in the North West. I began networking and the feedback I received from coaches and other trainers is that rather than being a generalist, be a specialist.

At the time, emotional intelligence wasn’t as well known and as well recognised as it is today, and I thought that was interesting because emotional intelligence underpins every aspect of training. So I thought that if I specialised in emotional intelligence, I’m putting a level of specialisation into the mix, but at the same time I’m keeping the broadness around what I need to do, what I want to do, and how I want to operate, because it cuts across everything that people are doing in terms of behaviour, interaction, and development.

Emotional intelligence is definitely a broad subject and I’ve heard emotional quotient (EQ) used to describe the same thing. Do you see EI and EQ as the same or is there a distinction? 

EQ is often used as a shortened version of emotional intelligence, but I prefer to use EI because emotional quotient is really just a measure of the components of emotional intelligence that can be measured. Things like emotional management, self-perception, empathy, relationship building, assertiveness, flexibility. All of those can be quantified. 

EI goes beyond that. EI is about preferences, attitudes, biases, prejudice, understanding those things, and also spirituality. These are the intangibles that can’t be measured. My preference is always to use EI rather than EQ.

Those distinctions are useful. What is the structure of your training programmes and has that structure changed over time? 

The main focus has always been about online learning and I wasn’t interested in physical workshops. There are a lot of training providers out there and there are a lot of companies that want training, but putting the two together is incredibly hard, and I found that a lot of training requirements within the larger organisations were already satisfied within their internal structures, or they had their favourite training provider who would come in and do the work for them. Even though I was specialising in an area that they hadn’t got covered in terms of training provision at the time, there was still a lot of reluctance about bringing somebody new in to do that work.

So I looked at the opportunity about 15 years ago to develop online learning programmes, and I put a number of courses up onto various platforms, and they have taken off incredibly well. Now I’ve got to the point where I don’t need to go out and run any workshops. I do a bit of associate work for a couple of companies that I’ve worked with for years, but the online model works best and I’ve helped people all over the world with learners in America, Dubai, Singapore and so on. 

To be honest I’m cynical about the UK training marketplace. The UK doesn’t buy into online learning at all. 

What specifically frustrates you about the training market in the UK? Is it because people don’t understand the value, is it because the mechanisms are outdated, or is it something else?

It’s a lot of everything. I think a lot of it is that there’s a fair degree of arrogance around the UK training market, in that the UK thinks it’s very good at delivering training and it knows how to do it, yet what happens is that the global market is completely different to what the UK trainers think is being asked for and how they’re approaching it.

What are the differences in the global market, say in somewhere like the US compared to the UK? 

I’d say there is a great hunger for training in the US. They want it delivered in ways that suit the learner rather than what the organisation thinks the learner wants, which is a fundamentally different approach to how things are often done within the UK.

Going back to e-learning for a moment, it’s interesting that you were an early adopter of it. It feels like post-pandemic that the space is becoming oversaturated. What are your thoughts on that and what does good e-learning look like from a learner’s perspective?

It’s interesting you’re using this term e-learning. I haven’t heard that in years. It’s online learning. E-learning went out before the pandemic, so if people are still using the term, then they’re using the wrong terminology. It’s online learning.

Going back to your question, I think there are a lot of people out there that think, “oh, I can make a quick buck with online learning by putting a few videos together and construct a quiz and bingo, I’ve got a course.”

Lots of instructors believe they can create a business from that kind of thinking. Honestly, the market has changed rapidly over the last 18 months with AI and will keep on changing quickly. The online learning market has declined by almost a third in those 18 months. 

So I don’t think it’s necessarily an oversaturation issue. It’s the fact that people are learning in different ways. If they want to find out about something, they can go and ask ChatGPT or Claude or Copilot, and they’ll get an answer immediately, and I think a lot of people have been trying that, testing it, and finding that it works well.

For my part, it’s about recognising that what I’ve got is a range of about 40 to 50 courses which people can tap into whenever they want, but also recognising that people are not necessarily going to find a course, get their credit card out, buy it, and go through it in that traditional way. I think what people are now looking for is something completely different from online learning, and what they’re looking for is a personalised learning journey, so that they can go in, work through the course, and get something from it that is tailored to them.

Because beforehand people would watch a few lectures, they might download a PDF that they might read, they might do an activity, they might take the quizzes, and they think they’ve got some learning. Well, they may have, but it’s not about the learning, it’s about how you apply it.

Whether it’s online learning or in-person learning, why do you think it’s so hard for learning to translate into actual behaviour change?

I think it’s down to the attitude of the person who’s actually taking the training. If somebody goes into a training workshop, whether it’s live or online, they need to go into it because they actually want to learn from it, and they want to effectively change their own behaviour. 

If a manager says to their team, “I want you all to go on this workshop, or I want you to take this online learning programme”, then the approach is all wrong. The person will go and do it, they’ll tick the box, they’ll get the certificate, they’ll go back to the manager, the manager’s happy, the person’s got their certificate, but does it affect behavioural change? Probably not.

It strikes me that cognitive biases can play a role in why it’s hard for learning to translate into behaviour change and that matters to both trainers and learners. How should people approach cognitive biases, especially in learning and training?

First and foremost, I don’t think we can ever eradicate all biases, because there have been over 150 identified, and even working on one or two can be difficult. I think the way to approach it is to bring some of these biases into the conscious arena rather than keeping them unconscious, and helping people to recognise that those biases are going to exist.

One of the critical biases we’ve got is racial bias, and whether we like it or not, we are prejudiced, we are biased. We can do everything we can to not be biased, but fundamentally it’s part of our makeup and our being. So we’ve just got to recognise that.

Another part of sharing your emotional intelligence work is that you’ve written books like The Authority Guide To Emotional Intelligence. What was your motivation for launching a book and how does it help learners?

I’ll take you back to 2016. There were so many trainers out there saying, “Oh, I work in the field of resilience.” Okay, fine, but what distinguishes you from everyone else? I couldn’t answer that question myself but it eventually prompted me to write the book on the topic of resilience to give me a level of authority and differentiation.

Now, a publisher contacted me and said, “Have you ever thought about writing a book?” and we built up a relationship from there, and I published The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience in Business, which was the first book, and that has done well for me. 

Then I published the second book a couple of years later, which is The Authority Guide to Behaviour in Business, and that has also done well for me, but not as a book. I’ve converted both of them into online courses, and the online courses have earned thousands of pounds more than what a published author would normally get through a book.

So again, it comes back to how people get their information and how people want to get their information. I published the second edition of The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience in Business 2025, and the book has really not done a lot, which is fine, because that’s what book publishing is all about. A lot of people think,  “I’m a published author. ka-ching, all the money will come rolling in,” but it doesn’t work like that.

From our conversation, I’m sensing you’re very pro-AI in your work and I do feel that AI has practical uses to help trainers and L&D professionals. 

I believe it’s crucial that people don’t forget to protect their critical thinking when they are learning from tools like Claude and ChatGPT. How do you think learners can protect their critical thinking ability?

I think the big issue is that what we’ve got to do is allow people to work through AI and to understand that it’s good, but it’s not brilliant. There’s a lot of AI slop out there, and one of the areas that I picked up on early in the AI boom was recognising that what distinguishes learning and what distinguishes us as human beings is our ability to be human, and that fundamentally is emotional intelligence.

The core skills that we need to move forward with are what is it that we can do as humans that AI can’t like decision making, critical thinking, ethical judgment, team working, motivation, and also spirituality: why are we here, what are we doing, what is our role on this planet, within the universe currently. All of these big questions are answered through emotional intelligence.

Having developed that focus and built a number of courses around that, I’ve been going out globally, speaking globally, and working at a much higher level, bringing that sort of thinking into the educational sphere.

Could you give a couple of examples of behaviour change you’ve seen, or case studies from your courses?

On the positive front, I think with regards to AI and behaviour change, what we are seeing is that there is this shift in the marketplace where people want more specificity around their own personal needs, rather than just a general online training course. I’ve been over to San Francisco, which is the hub of the AI tech industry, working with companies looking at where online learning and personal learning are going to go in the future, and the thrust of that is moving away from traditional platform-based learning into more community-driven types of learning, where people get their learning from each other.

On the negative side, I still do workshops occasionally with senior doctors within the NHS, and I must say they are the biggest bunch of Luddites that I have ever come across. I go into a room of 20 doctors and maybe two of them have used ChatGPT and the rest have never tried it. They’re waiting for their Trust or the GMC to tell them what to do, and they are five years behind the curve. Most of them only come along to training courses because they want a certificate rather than actually wanting the learning.

So that group is interesting because they are one end of the spectrum that you and I want to engage with. I go along, deal with that group, and then the rest of the time I’m out there generating, adapting, and working around what the market is wanting, cutting a lead and doing it from a specialist point of view where I’m creating the market rather than the market creating what I need to do.

If you could change anything about the training industry, what would it be and why?

I wouldn’t want to change anything about the training industry. Others are free to carry on doing what they’re doing, because what I will do is carve my own path within the industry. 

What I will say is that chasing certificates shouldn’t be the be all and end all. I go along to the UK CIPD exhibition every year if I can. A lot of people there tend to pontificate about whatever hot topic is important to them. When I go and try to speak to them and say there’s a different way of doing things, I might as well talk to the cat next door.

If I take you back 15 or 20 years ago, when I was trying to move into training outside pharmaceuticals, everybody said, “You’ve got to be CIPD qualified.” It didn’t suit what I was doing, and taking that qualification would have taken me away from my work. What I’ve learned is that you don’t have to be CIPD qualified to be successful in the UK. Outside the UK, CIPD means absolutely nothing. 

Everyone has their own practices for learning and developing. How do you keep learning yourself?

Talking to people, finding out what they want, doing research, pushing the paradigm. I get my learning from good quality material online, including YouTube, but always from a critical thinking perspective and asking myself is this correct, is this not correct, can I use this, can I apply it, can I change my behaviour? This comes back to my pharmaceutical background. I’ve been trained to look at evidence and see what needs to improve.