Despite 94% of leaders calling EQ ‘mission-critical,’ many companies find it challenging to apply these impactful principles. This has resulted in what Lumenalta refers to as an “EQ” crisis that is affecting workplaces across the globe.

What the EQ Crisis Reveals

Despite the increasing evidence that emotional awareness yields results, companies are still prioritizing technical skills over emotional awareness. Lumenalta’s white paper reveals that 58% of teams will abandon EQ development due to pressure from deadlines and project demands. As a result, teams are left unprepared when faced with remote collaboration.

What happens in the absence of an EQ focus can be seen in statistical evidence. Of the companies surveyed, a whopping 88% of IT leaders directly connected EQ to higher problem-solving and innovation. When remote teams scored high on collective emotional intelligence, there were fewer project delays, with work being completed sooner than in the lower EQ groups. Teams that excelled in emotional awareness reported nearly three times lower rates of burnout than industry averages.

How EQ Goes Beyond Technical Skills

Lumenalta’s measurements report an 87% leap in happiness among the clients of emotionally intelligent teams. Under the guidance of high-EQ teams, the adoption of new technology rose 81%, with team members recognizing and addressing client concerns proactively.

The findings of the report strongly suggest that what makes tech projects succeed or fail is emotional intelligence. This was a fact that surprised even Lumenalta researchers.

“Despite our findings, it’s important not to place soft skills on a pedestal and ignore the need for hard skills,” he emphasizes. “However, a mix of the two creates a superpower combination, enabling software developers to create while still listening, hearing, and understanding what’s hidden or not shared,” said the CEO of Lumenalta, Kuty Shavel.

Building Tech Teams with High-EQ

Lumenalta emphasizes the importance of protocols for practical team development. Recently, the company created chatbots that help staff communicate their emotions outside of formal meetings, leading to new ways to understand team dynamics. Coaching sessions can specifically target emotional awareness during high-stress project phases when technical teams tend to shy away from interpersonal concerns.

Google’s 2011 Project Aristotle backs Lumenalta’s findings that psychological safety, such as feeling confident enough to speak up and take risks, is the most important factor for team success. Project Aristotle was a multi-year research project that studied team effectiveness. It identified five key dynamics that lead to high-performing teams, with psychological safety ranking above dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.

Lumenalta’s white paper uses these insights to offer effective methods for tech companies seeking to boost EQ. The research reveals that as AI automates more technical functions, human emotional intelligence will grow to become more valuable. As a result, this could potentially determine the outcomes of over half of the projects within the next five years.

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Early on in “The Substance,” the body horror film starring Demi Moore that has been nominated for five Academy Awards, Dennis Quaid grotesquely consumes an endless amount of peel-and-eat shrimp while firing Ms. Moore’s character for the crime of turning 50. Shells fly and sweat collects on his upper lip while he gesticulates wildly with a crustacean wobbling in his fingertips.

It was this scene that convinced Efe Cakarel, the chief executive of the niche streaming service Mubi, that he had to buy the audacious horror film. The movie had been left for dead by Universal Pictures after the director, Coralie Fargeat, refused to recut it to executives’ tastes.

“This was something incredibly unique,” Mr. Cakarel said. “This was going to be our first global acquisition. I had never been this sure about anything.”

What followed was a $12 million purchase for the global rights to the film, and a rare success story in the middle of the doom-and-gloom times of the Hollywood film business. “The Substance” has now earned over $82 million worldwide and is up for best picture and best director, and Ms. Moore is the heavy favorite to win best actress at this weekend’s Academy Awards. And it has catapulted Mubi, once a company lost in the morass of innocuous four-letter word streaming services, into a real Hollywood player for the first time.

The company has made the leap with an unusual business model. Subscribers to the service, which starts at $14.99, get a curated selection of independent films, from classics to new releases. Subscribers to a higher tier, the $19.99 Mubi Go, also get a weekly ticket to a theater in the United States, Britain or Germany. The company, which is based in London and has 400 employees worldwide, declined to reveal how many people pay for the service but said 16 million people had registered on the site.

“Somehow they have managed to pull off the impossible,” Eric Fellner, producer of “The Substance,” said about Mubi. The company, he said, was able to get “a big audience globally to come out and watch it — which is no small feat these days — and still end up with a premium piece of work for their members.”

For Mr. Cakarel, a 48-year-old Turkish entrepreneur with an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from Stanford, this was the plan all along.

He founded the company in 2007 — the same year that Netflix started streaming movies and television shows — as a service for movie lovers. The goal was to support the theatrical moviegoing experience and curate high-end films on its service. Originally called the Auteurs, the service began by offering subscribers a new film a day, with each movie staying on the service for 30 days. But Mr. Cakarel didn’t want just any film. He was interested in only the best films from the most acclaimed filmmakers.

“Mubi, from Day 1, has always been really opinionated about cinema,” he said.

It took years to get any of the Hollywood studios to buy into his idea.

“I would go to a major studio, and I would say, ‘These are the 32 titles that I would like to get,’” Mr. Cakarel said. “They would say: ‘No, this is not how this business works. If you’re getting those titles, you need to also get these titles.’”

“They would literally throw me out of their offices,” he added.

Then in 2015, both Sony and Paramount agreed to give Mubi films for its subscribers in Britain. In 2017, the company signed its first multiyear, multiterritory streaming deal with Universal Pictures, giving Mubi access internationally to films in its library like “A Serious Man,” by Joel and Ethan Coen; “Being John Malkovich,” by Spike Jonze; “Double Indemnity” from Billy Wilder; and a handful of films from Alfred Hitchcock.

In 2016, the company started distributing movies in theaters in select markets, ramping up in 2022 with films including Charlotte Wells’s “Aftersun,” which it released in Britain, Latin America and Germany, and Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” which it released in the same territories.

In 2022, Mr. Cakarel said he spent an “irrational amount” to acquire the U.S. and British theatrical rights to Park Chan-Wook’s “Decision to Leave,” which became the Korean filmmaker’s highest grossing movie in the United States. Its feature “The Girl With the Needle” is a nominee in the academy’s best international film category.

“It’s been about steady incremental growth over time,” said Jason Ropell, Mubi’s chief content officer. “Hiring the right people. Raising money. All of that has happened incrementally. We were ready when this opportunity arose.”

The opportunity to jump on “The Substance” arose after Universal Pictures told Ms. Fargeat that it would not release the film in its current form, which had been in the works for nearly five years, but she was allowed to shop it elsewhere.

“No one was taking my calls anymore,” she said at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this month. “Everyone thought my movie was dead.”

But she entered the movie in the Cannes Film Festival, which accepted it into its 2024 competition.

Mr. Cakarel had been tracking Ms. Fargeat’s work after her 2017 film, “Revenge,” performed well with Mubi audiences. While vacationing in Vietnam, he saw the announcement of the Cannes lineup; reached out to Working Title, the producers behind the film; and days later was sitting in a screening room in London watching the movie.

“I left the screening room and was punching walls from excitement,” he said. “I hadn’t seen anything like this in a long time.”

Mr. Cakarel outbid the fellow indie distributor Neon and bought the worldwide rights to “The Substance” ahead of its Cannes debut. The film has since reached heights that perhaps only Ms. Fargeat thought possible.

When Ms. Moore won the best actress award at the Screen Actors Guild awards on Sunday, she thanked Mr. Cakarel. “I think as a result of the reception of this film, other bold original films will be made,” Mr. Cakarel said.

This year, the company bought the U.S. rights to the Hollywood satire “Lurker,” one of the few acquisitions at this winter’s Sundance Film Festival. And it recently announced the acquisition of the North American rights to “The History of Sound,” a gay romance film starring Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal.

“The platform itself is a fan favorite with filmmakers,” said the WME Independent agent Will Maxfield, who sold Ira Sachs’s “Passages” to the company in 2023 and negotiated the “Lurker” deal with Mubi at Sundance. “And they have been building their brand as a filmmaker-friendly distributor.”

The streamer is venturing into original productions for the first time this year with three films, Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” a nearly $20 million heist film starring Mr. O’Connor; Jim Jarmusch’s “Father, Mother, Sister, Brother,” starring Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver; and “Rosebush Pruning,” with Riley Keough and Elle Fanning. Mubi is still tiny compared with other streaming services, but it intends to release some 20 films this year theatrically — a welcome addition to the independent film space that has been struggling to connect with moviegoers.

“The past 18 years have been really good,” Mr. Cakarel said. “The next 18 years are going to be incredible. I feel like it’s Day 1. Everything is coming together.”

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To many Chinese, DeepSeek’s success is a victory for China’s education system, proof that it equals that of the United States or has even surpassed it.

The core team of developers and scientists behind DeepSeek, the Chinese start-up that has jolted the A.I. world, all attended university in China, according to the company’s founder. That’s a contrast with many Chinese tech companies, which have often sought talent educated abroad.

As Chinese commenters online basked in Americans’ shocked reactions, some pointed to the high number of science Ph.D.s that China produces annually. “DeepSeek’s success proves that our education is awesome,” read one blog post’s headline.

Acclaim has even poured in from overseas. Pavel Durov, the founder of the messaging platform Telegram, said last month that fierce competition in Chinese schools had fueled the country’s successes in artificial intelligence. “If the U.S. doesn’t reform its education system, it risks ceding tech leadership to China,” he wrote online.

The reality is more complicated. Yes, China has invested heavily in education, especially in science and technology, which has helped nurture a significant pool of talent, key to its ambition of becoming a world leader in A.I. by 2025.

But outside of the classroom, those graduates must also contend with obstacles that include a grinding corporate culture and the political whims of the ruling Communist Party. Under its current top leader, Xi Jinping, the party has emphasized control, rather than economic growth, and has been willing to crack down on tech firms it deems too influential.

DeepSeek has managed to evade many of those pressures, in part because it kept a low profile and its founder declared his commitment to intellectual exploration, rather than quick profits. It remains to be seen, though, how long it can continue doing so.

“There are many young, energetic and talented researchers and engineers inside China. I don’t think there’s a big gap in terms of education between China and the U.S. in that perspective, especially in A.I.,” said Yiran Chen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University. “But the constraint is really from other parts.”

For many in China, the strength of its education system is closely tied to the nation’s global status. The government has invested heavily in higher education, and the number of university graduates each year, once minuscule, has grown more than 14-fold in the past two decades. Several Chinese universities now rank among the world’s best. Still, for decades, China’s best and brightest students have gone abroad, and many have stayed there.

By some metrics, that is starting to change.

China produced more than four times as many STEM graduates in 2020 as the United States. Specifically in A.I., it has added more than 2,300 undergraduate programs since 2018, according to research by MacroPolo, a Chicago-based research group that studies China.

By 2022, nearly half of the world’s top A.I. researchers came from Chinese undergraduate institutions, as opposed to about 18 percent from American ones, MacroPolo found. And while the majority of those top researchers still work in the United States, a growing number are working in China.

“You’re churning out all this talent over the last few years. They’ve got to go somewhere,” said Damien Ma, MacroPolo’s founder.

Washington has also made it harder for Chinese students in certain fields, including A.I., to obtain visas to the United States, citing national security concerns.

“If they’re not going to go abroad, they’re going to start some company” or work for a Chinese one, Mr. Ma said.

Some have criticized China’s educational system as overly exam-oriented and stifling to creativity and innovation. The expansion of China’s A.I. education has been uneven, and not every program is producing top-tier talent, Mr. Ma acknowledged. But China’s top schools, such as Tsinghua University and Peking University, are world-class; many of DeepSeek’s employees studied there.

The Chinese government has also helped foster more robust ties between academia and enterprises than in the West, said Marina Zhang, a professor at the University of Technology Sydney who studies Chinese innovation. It has poured money into research projects and encouraged academics to contribute to national A.I. initiatives.

Yet government involvement is also one of the biggest potential threats to Chinese innovation.

Beijing has blessed the A.I. sector — for now. But in 2020, after deciding that it had too little control over major companies like Alibaba, it launched a sweeping, yearslong crackdown on the Chinese tech industry. (DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, pivoted to A.I. from his previous focus on speculative trading, in part because of a separate government crackdown there.)

The resulting layoffs at tech companies, combined with the uncertainty of the sector’s future, helped diminish the appeal of a sector that once attracted many of China’s top students. Record numbers of young people have opted instead to compete for civil service jobs, which are low-paying but stable.

A.I. has been somewhat shielded from the brain drain so far, in part because of its political imprimatur, said Yanbo Wang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong who studies China’s tech entrepreneurship. He added that he expected more successful Chinese A.I. start-ups to emerge soon, driven by young people. But it is impossible to say what China’s A.I. landscape would have looked like if Beijing had been more tolerant toward big tech companies in recent years, he added.

“China’s long-term A.I. competitiveness hinges not only on its STEM education system, but also on its handling of private investors, entrepreneurs and for-profit companies,” he added.

Even within private companies, employees often must contend with a focus on quick results. That has led to a widely accepted stereotype, including within China, that Chinese engineers are better at improving on other people’s innovations than at coming up with their own.

Mr. Liang, DeepSeek’s founder, has lamented as much, noting last year that “top talents in China are underestimated. Because there’s so little hard-core innovation happening at the societal level, they don’t have the opportunity to be recognized.”

DeepSeek’s success may hinge as much on how it differed from other Chinese tech companies as on how it shared their strengths. It was financed by the profits from its parent hedge fund. And Mr. Liang has described hiring humanities graduates in addition to computer scientists, in the spirit of fostering a freewheeling intellectual atmosphere.

Since DeepSeek’s breakout success, some voices have urged more Chinese firms to emulate its model. An online commentary from the Communist Party committee of Zhejiang Province, where DeepSeek has its headquarters, declared the need to “trust in young talent” and give leading companies “greater control over innovation resources.”

But the best way for China to capitalize on its well-educated, ambitious A.I. work force may be for the government to get out of the way.

“Innovation requires as little intervention and management as possible,” Mr. Liang said in another interview. “Innovation often comes by itself, not as something deliberately planned, let alone taught.”

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

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