Skills in emotional intelligence (EI) help healthcare leaders understand, engage and motivate their team. They are essential for dealing well with conflict and creating workable solutions to complex problems. EI skills are grounded in personal competence, upon which build the skills for social competence, including social awareness and relationship management. The leader’s EI skills strongly impact the culture of the organization. This article lists example strategies for building seventeen key emotional intelligence skills that are the foundations for personal and work success and provides examples of their appropriate use as well as their destructive under-use and over-use. Many examples are those incorporated into our healthcare-related leadership development institutes offered at the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.