Continuing with my explanation of how Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is of value to IT people and organizations I need to provide at least a quick definition of EQ.  The dictionary defines Emotional Intelligence as, “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and with empathy.”  There are instruments which measure this, one of which is EQi-2.0 from MHS.  This instrument identifies five aspects of EQ, each of which has 3 EQ Skills; the five aspects are:

  1. Self-perception (how you see yourself including emotional self-awareness)
  2. Self-expression (behaviors you choose to express yourself, including emotions)
  3. Interpersonal (relationship skills, empathy, social responsibility)
  4. Decision-making (problem solving, reality testing,impulse control)
  5. Stress management (flexibility, stress tolerance, optimism)

Sometimes people compress all of these and talk about “people skills” or “soft skills.”  So if IT people are supposed to provide technology services to their broader organization, why do “people skills” even matter?  Wouldn’t only technical skills be involved in their work?

To answer that we need to look deeper into Info Tech Research Group’s findings.  Remember they said only 23% of organizations have end-users who are highly satisfied with IT. They researched  what makes up end-users’ overall satisfaction with IT and were surprised to find that nearly 80% of satisfaction rested roughly equally on two areas of performance:

  • Relationships (between IT and Stakeholders)
  • Project Delivery and Capacity

(Source: The Moneyball CIO presentation, Info Tech Research Group)

For this blog let’s focus on Relationships.  Understanding the substantial impact of relationships on user satisfaction with IT, it is now relevant to ask, “How good are IT people at relationships and people skills?” To contribute data relevant to answering that question Leadership Call, LLC ran a group report of professionals they have administered the EQ instrument to who have titles indicating IT, telecommunications, engineering and program/project management roles. This included several industries: oil and energy, telecom manufacturing, communication systems, medical manufacturing and process control systems.  The client companies had 4000 to 75,000 employees. This group report contained 359 people who had titles in the IT/engineering area and they found a distinct pattern among these people.

Overall Leadership Call found the entire group of 359 people tended to score at the mid-point or below on all scales of Emotional Intelligence.  Think of the bell curve – results for all of these people fall at the midpoint of the bell or below. 

Leadership Call found that this group had 3 most used (strongest) EQ skills which were:

  • Problem solving (EQ skill within Decision Making)
  • Impulse control (EQ skill within Decision Making)
  • Independence (EQ skill within Self-Perception)

This makes sense.  IT and engineering people tend to be analytical as a group; much of their work requires problem solving and decision making.  They tend to gather data and look at it, requiring impulse control not to jump to conclusions with too little data.  And my experience has been that IT people overall tend to be self-reliant and independent.

The report also found this group had 3 least used (weakest) EQ skills which were: 

  • Emotional self-awareness (EQ skill within Self-Perception)
  • Emotional expression (EQ skill within Self-Expression)
  • Empathy (EQ skill within Interpersonal)

Unfortunately, this also makes sense.  As a group IT/engineering people (including me in earlier years) tend to be unaware of offending people and not terribly concerned even when they are made aware.  The attitude is, “If they are offended, that is their problem.”

Let me give some examples of what I have heard IT people say or have seen them do (and to be honest I probably said or did myself in the distant past) that are red flags indicating emotional intelligence needs improving.  I will list things that are specific to the weakest areas identified above.

Self-Perception

  • Everyone is just like me – Facts plus Logic equals The Answer; therefore since I use facts and logic to make decisions, anyone disagreeing with me is WRONG.
  • People with no technical knowledge should keep quiet and let me make technical decisions for them.
  • Nothing I say or do should offend others because it would not offend me.

Self-Expression

  • I don’t need to listen to the User because I already know what the problem is better than they do.  (IT people talk more than they listen and interrupt others.)
  • I am busy and don’t have time for small talk (e.g., how is your mother; is your kid picking a college etc.) because that personal stuff is not relevant to the technical problem and I have other things to do.
  • Failing to return calls promptly is explained with, “Hey, we told you we were busy.  Get in line.”
  • Dodging users in the hallway is excused with, “I don’t have an update for him, so no point in wasting time talking to him.”

Interpersonal

  • Users are inferior to us – they don’t know much technical stuff and what they think they know is usually wrong.
  • Even those other IT people are not bright – they don’t like <same operating system I do, same database I do, same software tools I do etc.>
  • I really like that department that doesn’t bother us except when they have a severe outage.  I don’t like talking to people.
  • Why do users complain so much?  Don’t they see how hard we work and how smart we are?
  • We would rather defend our approach at length than listen to you and work out a compromise that solves the technical problem in a different way that doesn’t severely impact your ability to work. Our way is “best.”

If any of these comments sound a lot like some people you know in IT (not you, of course), your IT organization may need to work on improving EQ.

At this point we can see how improving EQ would improve IT’s relationship with stakeholders.  What specifically should IT professionals and organizations do, learn and practice to improve EQ?  That will be the topic of the next installment.

Jana is an experienced IT management consultant and organization development (OD) professional.  She founded The Collective Mind after a 15 year career as a systems engineer at IBM.  Clients include NASA, Sears, Hilton Hotels and the US Army Corps of Engineers.  She is the co-author of, Shifting Sands: The People Side of Project Management.  Jana holds a BS in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University and a MS in Organizational Psychology from the University of Memphis.  She is certified in Emotional Intelligence.