You're a system architect who wants to excel in your role. How can emotional intelligence help you get there?

As a system architect, effective communication is essential in interacting with developers, testers, managers, users, and vendors. It involves explaining ideas, listening to feedback, negotiating requirements, resolving conflicts, and reporting progress. Emotional intelligence plays a crucial role in this by allowing adaptation of style, tone, and language to different audiences and situations. It enables empathy, understanding of perspectives, and addressing concerns, enhancing overall communication effectiveness.

In order to be a excellent system architect, one needs to use his/her own expertise with the perspectives of all SMEs included. Not all SMEs communicate effectively. In order to include all SME perspectives, actually you need to be emotionally strong and leverage their thoughts, whether expressed or not! Given this, the system architect needs to be emotional strong to understand SME perspectives. Once the System Architect arrives at the right Visualizations, he in fact, needs to get it approved from the SMEs also. Hence a architect needs both logical and emotional intelligence. Soft skills, verbal, visual, and written skills are the tools essential for my fave System Architects in this world! Kudos and true salud to their contributions.

Communication in software development is paramount. That's why I advocate to written communication over face to face. With face to face communication you need to respond instantaneously and listen what other people has to say and wait for your turn. This limits the quality of communication. Having time to form your thoughts can lead to more comprehensive and multimodal communication while having everything archived and easily recallable. So the communication issues can be tracked. This also takes out some of the emotion out of conversation too which helps keeping things productive. Face to face communication is on the other hand good for building relationships and handling emotional interpersonal issues.

Effective collaboration is vital in system architecture, requiring cooperation with architects, engineers, and experts to deliver cohesive solutions. Sharing knowledge, learning from others, and leveraging team strengths are crucial aspects. Emotional intelligence facilitates productive collaboration by fostering trust, respect, and rapport among colleagues. It aids in managing stress, overcoming challenges, and celebrating successes, enhancing overall teamwork and project outcomes.

As a systems architect you have to build and maintain the "full picture" which is usually not the case for people who gives you feedback. Everybody has their angle and motivations. Having a full big picture is very important for every level of decision making so I use the opportunity to share information with other people to help them form the better picture of entire development so they can give me better answers and vice versa. I remember as a professional in game development there is a common misunderstanding between creative professions and programming teams which really stems from misunderstanding and lack of communication or empathy. As a architect I am in a good position to reduce this gap especially as somebody who understands both.

This is going to be controversial, but I believe confidence is not possible without being benevolently ignorant. Let me explain. There are always reasons to be doubtful even with the high level of skill or expertise. However without confidence you cannot build trust and nobody will ever listen to you. It's something that has developed during hundreds of thousand years of evolution and human as a social creature reacts to confidence very strongly. Confidence is also crucial for performance, you cannot do you best if you are full of doubt. We can see this often times in high level athletes. The trick is having the skill to turn the ignorance on/off. Sometimes we need to see the truth in it's full nakedness other times we need to perform.