The importance of emotional intelligence for IT professionals

The influence of emotional intelligence on popular culture and the academic community has been rapid and widespread. While this has stimulated a great amount of research in domains such as psychology, neuroscience, biology, sociology and management, the swiftness with which the concept of emotional intelligence has caught on, inevitably created a gap between what we know and what we need to know. In March, 2015, in San Francisco, a group of emotional intelligence experts gathered during the fourth vitality emotional intelligence conference to discuss the importance of emotional intelligence in building teams and effective organizations, increasing employee loyalty and retention, and improving overall success.

The novelty of this conference was the amount of representatives from the tech area—Cisco, Google, Facebook, Zappo, Hewlett-Packard, and so on. Though tech companies still hire based on technical and intrapersonal skills in an attempt to find the most tech-savvy employee to come up with the next big thing, they have started to acknowledge that being tech savvy doesn't always mean good people skills. Evidence supports the belief that real success is achieved when people can play and work well with others on top of being smart and creative with technology. Knowing this new reality, these tech companies teamed up with emotional intelligence experts to train and coach their employees, their leaders, and adapt their corporate culture. The takeaway from the gathering of brilliant minds discussing the importance of emotional intelligence in the tech area was that tech companies are already using Emotional Intelligence skills to:

• Build collaborative leaderships that create impact through people (Cisco)
• Increase global sales (Hewlett-Packard)
• Enable a manager with a skill set to help them to connect with people and lead with success (Zappo)
• Develop tools to help social media users be more empathetic in their online communications, and combat cyber-bullying (Facebook)

Despite the good news, the majority of the tech companies around the world dismiss soft skills as a fringe benefit, preferring to hire based on technical skills. Maybe this is one of the reasons that so many tech leaders are increasingly being diagnosed as narcissists and bullies. They are highly valued, very good at what they do, and often highly paid, but the worst nightmare in a leadership position as they lack self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, social skills, and so on. A workplace is like any other social system - if you don't feel safe, secure, free to voice your view point or your ideas, cared about, or appreciated you will leave to another workplace or burn out. It is time to end the bias that emotions and technical sills cannot work in tandem. You are a human being, therefore, you have emotions and feelings, even if you are not aware of them. Your business is run by emotions—your own emotions, the emotions of your employees, co-workers, stakeholders, shareholders, and customers. The next big thing in the IT area is connected with Artificial Intelligence. And AI is the perfect symbiosis between data and emotions. Don't you think it is time to start learning and enhance the latter, before your smartphone knows more about emotional intelligence than you?