-A conversation with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
I got to meet with the fabulous Maggie Sass, EVP of Content, Research, and Professional Services at TalentSmartEQ, to talk about building on a strong Founder-led foundation, and why EQ is something AI can’t disrupt.
Shannon: Maggie, for folks who might not know TalentSmartEQ—how do you explain what you do?
Maggie: We’re a professional and leadership development firm focused exclusively on emotional intelligence. This very strict focus and specialization is part of what sets us apart. Our tools are practical, measurable, and help people navigate everything from team conflict to psychological safety. We’ve been around since EQ first started gaining traction in the learning space, especially in corporate settings.
Shannon: And you serve a pretty diverse range of clients, right?
Maggie: We work with a wide range of clients across industries—from healthcare systems and law enforcement agencies to tech companies, universities, and financial institutions. Our audience is equally diverse. Sometimes we’re brought in to work with senior leadership teams navigating major change, other times we’re supporting high-potential managers, and in many cases, we’re scaling EQ development for frontline supervisors and individual contributors.
Some of our clients come in with a deep understanding of emotional intelligence and are looking for targeted tools or assessments. Others may know the impact EQ can have on performance and culture but haven’t yet seen how to operationalize it. And many are just beginning their journey—curious about how emotional intelligence can help them address challenges like burnout, communication breakdowns, or disengagement.
Whether we’re guiding experienced leaders or introducing EQ to a new audience, we meet organizations where they are and help them build from there.
I think I am most proud of the work we are doing in criminal justice with police departments, corrections officers, crisis intervention professionals, like dispatch respondents and EMT, and also justice-impacted individuals inside prisons. That work—led by Dr. Greg Campbell—is so powerful because it gives people the tools they need to stay grounded in high-stress moments and build real trust when it matters most. It’s the kind of impact that doesn’t just improve safety, it strengthens relationships and well-being across entire communities.
For all of them, one of the challenging but exciting aspects of what we do is actually helping to translate emotional intelligence into something actionable—something that solves real challenges in those contexts.
Shannon: What does your role look like in all of that?
Maggie: I oversee the whole spectrum from product ideation and development to IP creation and design, to facilitating, coaching and delivering. It’s very cross-functional work that’s also about making sure what we say and do is grounded in research and neuroscience, and making sure it’s all scalable and useful for our clients.
Shannon: Tell me a bit about your product development process. What kind of approach do you take? Is it very market or sales-driven? Do you follow design thinking? Where do ideas come from and how do you guide the team through development, etc?
Maggie: It’s a blended approach, really: we pull from design thinking, market insights, customer stories; an idea could come from a question we get from a client or learner. From a process perspective, we validate new ideas and offerings through iteration and internal pilots, and feedback loops. The goal is always to build practical, scalable solutions, always rooted in EQ. Some other firms start in EQ and then broadened to leadership, etc –but we have made the commitment to stay rooted in EQ.
Shannon: Tell me a bit about those roots. I think one of the reasons this conversation will be inspiring to other ISA-ALP readers is that there are a lot of firms that are still Founder-led or who might be wondering how to scale and build on the initial success of a Founder whose IP and brand is essentially conflated with them as an individual. Talk about the shift from Founder-led IP creation to the process you lead now: what are the challenges, benefits, opportunities?
Maggie: Absolutely, it has indeed been an exciting journey! To provide some background, our founders, Jean Greaves and Travis Bradberry, sold the company to private equity in 2019. This acquisition led us to evolve quickly from a smaller, founder-led organization to one experiencing significant growth, which is both exciting and has its own challenges, too.
Transitioning from that Founder-led model to a collaborative innovation engine has been an ongoing and deliberate process. I’ve deliberately tried to carve out the space for different voices: from our sales team and others who understand the market, our powerful team of facilitators and coaches who contribute to thought leadership, and from our clients themselves. Trainer Certification is a big part of our business model, and so I see it as: we’ve created the tools, but our clients have brought about the brilliance – and they’re helping to shape the next generation of content and tools and thought leadership.
We are incredibly fortunate that our best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, remains a top-ranked book over a decade later. While many people recognize Jean and Travis as the authors, fewer people associate the book directly with TalentSmartEQ. An essential initiative has been reinforcing the association between the book and our organization rather than focusing solely on individual authorship. This strategic shift helps position the company itself as the trusted leader in emotional intelligence.
Shannon: We’ve had a similar thing to overcome, which is that The Coaching Habit is a best-selling book and a huge lead-magnet and source of credibility for us, but we’ve also spent years investing in building up Box of Crayons’ brand as a company—and we’ve thought about this as moving from credibility coming solely from Michael Bungay Stanier (our Founder) and instead coming from Box of Crayons’ work with organizations and the track record of The Coaching Habit learning experiences within those organizations. It’s a similar strategy of trying to distribute expertise and authority across the team and also our clients rather than having that come from a “guru.”
Maggie: Absolutely. I spend quite a lot of time thinking about publishing roadmaps. I want us to write things that fill gaps, that are based on problems we really want to solve.
One of the unique things about Emotional Intelligence 2.0 is that it hit on something uniquely human–it resonates with people regardless of seniority or experience level. Importantly, it doesn’t shame or discourage leaders who might have some real interpersonal blind spots. Even before joining TalentSmartEQ, I coached executives whose behavior could be—let’s call it “difficult”—but they were valued by their boards for delivering results. I’d just hand them the book, and they would come back and share that the book had sparked new awareness for them. Some shared that the book suggested things they had heard in the past from bosses, direct reports, even spouses, but they were able to actually understand and appreciate the messages in a different way.
So the key insight is that that book seems to be a real catalyst for change without triggering defensiveness. It’s simple, but not easy; and it anchors in this universal idea that all brains respond the same way, so you’re not doing anything wrong if you’re not getting this right today. This helps leaders recognize that there’s no inherent fault in struggling with emotional intelligence, rather, it highlights an opportunity for growth.
Of course, the world has changed since 2009 (when EI 2.0 was first published), and there are new things to say; figuring out the best way to advance the conversation meaningfully remains an exciting challenge.
Shannon: There’s new things to say and there’s also massively disrupting technology at play. With AI seemingly reshaping everything, how are you thinking about the future of EQ?
Maggie: I think EQ is the edge you can’t automate. AI will continue to grow, and yes, we need to reskill—but in a world of increasing automation and isolation, the human skills matter more than ever. I was at a conference recently and heard from both executives at BetterUp & ICF that a majority of people––41% of people––want both a human and an AI coach. Workplaces are already lonely, and that’s only going to get worse. Empathy, connection, navigating emotion, those are what make workplaces actually work. AI might crunch the data, but it can’t make people feel heard.
Shannon: Love that. Final thoughts?
Maggie: I’m excited about where we’re headed, we’re building out more research capacity, co-designing studies with clients, working at measuring behavior change, and really proving the power of EQ. We may be a research team of two right now, but we’ve got big ideas.