For years, emotional intelligence has been framed as a soft skill. Something supportive. Something optional. Something secondary to strategy, analytics, or operational precision. Yet women leaders have been proving for decades that EQ is not a supporting trait.

Mentorship is too often imagined as a one-way street: a more experienced executive gives advice and insights to someone earlier in their career. But the most transformative mentorship relationships — the ones that truly shape leaders — are deeply reciprocal.