The role of Emotional Intelligence for Engineering Managers
“Although IQ and cognitive skills such as big-picture thinking, long-term vision and analytical ability are necessary, they are not sufficient. It’s the EQ that is the sine qua non of leadership. In fact, when comparing a star leader with an average one, nearly 90% of the difference is attributable to EQ rather than IQ.” — What Makes a Leader by Daniel Goleman
If you’re wondering why I’m qualified to give well-meaning advice, aside from being a woman founder (that’s less than 1 in 5 in the UK), tech lead and manager in many startups, I formally studied the topic of team wellbeing in tech and financial services during my dissertation at UCL School of Management.
During my technical career in different companies, I’ve developed a keen interest in the role of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) in workplace wellbeing.
During my Technology Entrepreneurship MSc, I wrote a dissertation titled “Exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence in therapy and coaching for mental health and well-being in high-performance work environments”, which was an academic analysis of challenges involved in starting a digital behavioural therapy start-up, similar to Unmind, Woobot and Wysa.
I studied tech startups and financial services companies in London, where competition and individual differences create a highly pressurised environment, and where dissonance and disagreements happen frequently.
I found that one of the key factors of a team’s wellbeing is good conflict management. Different managerial styles and different levels of EQ impact it greatly. This is a large topic so here are some cherry-picked facts about EQ and conflict management techniques.
In this post, I’m breaking down what it means to have EQ as a manager and why it’s important for building diverse and inclusive teams. In the next post, I’ll write about techniques for conflict management that I’ve learnt as a founder and technical manager.
As managers, we are the gatekeepers of our employees’ exposure to stress.
We need to be able to identify and tackle our own behaviours and competencies which could lead to stressful conditions for our teams. Conflict is one of the most stressful situations and being emotionally intelligent makes a difference.
As Daniel Goleman describes it, EQ is the manifestation of five traits: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy and social skill.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness means knowing our emotions, strengths, weaknesses, drives, values, goals and their impact on others. The hallmarks are self-confidence, realistic self-assessment, self-deprecating sense of humour and a thirst for constructive criticism.
For example, I know that tight deadlines bring the worst in me, so I try to get my work done well in advance. This is how I finished my student assignments at reasonable hours, rather than being an all-nighter and why I’m cautious with deadlines and estimates.
I find it helpful to write down my own strengths and weaknesses so I can track them and see if there’s any improvement over time. When I was choosing a potential co-founder, we first exchanged a version of a similar document to check our EQ compatibility.
At Touco, we created User Manuals, to understand what makes our team tick. Among other questions, we asked the team:
- Are you a morning person or an afternoon person? Think about when you get work done best or when you prefer to have meetings.
- What kind of learner are you? Think about how you best process and remember information, e.g. by talking or writing.
- When answering a question, do you prefer to think things through beforehand or think as you talk?
- What are some things that people might misunderstand about you? Think about any misunderstandings you’ve had in the past.
- Is there anything that you’d want the team to bear in mind when working with you? This could be anything, e.g. disabilities or mental health needs if you feel comfortable disclosing them.
- What, if anything, do you want people to feel free to talk to you about? This could be anything from your speciality at work, to any hobbies/interests you have outside of work.
We collected the answers in a shared document that anyone could refer to anytime. It worked well and next time I build or join a new team I’ll start with that.
I’m also a fan of keeping a light mood when things don’t go as planned and that happens often in a small tech startup.
Self-regulation
Self-regulation is the ability to control or redirect disruptive emotions and impulses. It manifests as trustworthiness, integrity and comfort with ambiguity and change.
Shortly after joining a previous company, I made a mistake misplacing the signing key of another team’s app. It was quite a serious issue that could’ve generated a lot of disruption to our users and a lot of cost to my company. My team and I managed to recover the deleted key at the last moment. I knew what improvements had to be made so this wouldn’t happen again, so I wrote a Post-Mortem and shared it the next day on our Facebook Workplace. I wasn’t sure how the senior leaders would react when they found out but luckily for me and my team, we didn’t get fired and instead received a lot of Likes and encouragements from everyone, including the CTO, for owning it. Not long after, other teams adopted the use of team vaults for sharing keys, rather than unversioned S3 buckets.
Motivation
Motivation is often described as being driven to achieve for the sake of achievement. It shows as a passion for the work itself and for new challenges, unflagging energy to improve and optimism in the face of failure.
I left a well-paid job, in a company I liked, shortly after being promoted, to pursue the long-time dream of starting my own company. I can only describe the last three years of this journey as a rollercoaster of emotions. I couldn’t have learnt so much and met so many inspiring people anywhere else.
One of the hardest things I had to learn was how to pull myself up from a down, on my own. Having co-founders helps, especially if they’re different and they don’t (hopefully) experience the downs at the same time. We had to learn to take turns at motivating ourselves and others.
When faced with tough problems, what helped me was breaking things down and asking for the support of my team.
At Touco, we did this by splitting our daily stand-ups in three Ps: Progress-Problems-Plan. We also used an app to automate the process and have a feed to look back at.
Empathy
Having empathy means considering others’ feelings, especially when making decisions. The hallmarks of it are expertise in attracting and retaining talent, ability to develop others and being sensitive to cross-cultural differences.
Empathy is the foundation of diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Despite nowadays having a plethora of mental health and well-being support on offer, many companies are still plagued by a lack of training and empathy from the
management. During my dissertation research, I found that only a few, exceptional companies in London invested in this kind of programmes.
We are proud of the diverse and inclusive team we built at Touco and the values we chose.
Social skill
Social skill is perhaps the hardest to describe. It means managing relationships to move people in the desired direction. It manifests as effectiveness in leading change, persuasiveness, having an extensive network and expertise in building and leading teams.
Entrepreneurs need social skills. These are not necessarily related to psychological traits, like openness and extroversion. I met excellent founders who are introverts.
The best formula to quantify an entrepreneur that I’ve heard of is Intelligence x Energy² (courtesy of the Programme Director at School of Management). Of course, a lot of that intelligence is actually EQ.
I had a very unique experience during the 3-month Techstars accelerator programme at the beginning of 2020. The highlight was the now-famous Mentor Madness. It was an intense social skill training programme, through 100 twenty-minute conversations with a diverse range of mentors from the industry, who offered their feedback on our company and ideas. It forced us to clarify our ideas, rally supporters and create valuable connections with mentors, advisors, investors.
I botched one of the very first conversations with an angel investor, whom I was extremely keen to get on board. I was eager to prove that we were doing something worthy, not just financially but with a meaningful social impact, so I became defensive of our ideas. Looking back, I should’ve listened more and talked less. The important bit at that moment was to absorb the feedback, especially the negative one, then filter through only the actionable parts of it.
Similar skills are needed to have good 1:1s, disarm conflict before it explodes and get buy-in from all sorts of internal and external stakeholders in the workplace.
As a final thought on managerial EQ, I found it explained in an interesting way in the book Radical Candor. In a nutshell, it classifies managerial behaviours into four buckets, by looking at how much managers care vs how much they challenge.
- Obnoxious Aggression is when you challenge but don’t care.
- Ruinous Empathy is when you care but don’t challenge.
- Manipulative Insincerity is when you neither care nor challenge.
- Radical Candor is when you have a good balance of the two.
What I think it says is that having empathy is essential, but misusing it leads to praise that isn’t specific enough to help the person understand what they did good or criticism that is sugar-coated and unclear.
Having empathy also doesn’t mean you can always be your team’s best friend. Sometimes you have to ask them to do personal sacrifices or have to terminate a project they’re excited about and sometimes you have to just let them go.
In the next post, I’ll write about techniques to better manage conflict that I’ve learnt as a founder and technical manager.
