Yet Another DevOps Ticket: Increase EQ through Emotional Agility - Introducing PNT’s EQ Booster Play

The New Ticket

Ok team, here’s more bad news, not only is IT having to save the organisation as we were saying last week, but we need to talk about a major task. This is no news and we’ve waited long enough thinking maybe someone else -some other department or function- would pick it up but no one stepped up. For all our collective talk of soft skills, empathy, emotional resilience and permission to be human, nothing in practice changed. So, I hereby declare it a DevOps ticket next to the other major one which is “Help your team do the people work to better their dynamic habitually”.?

This new ticket has to read “Increase EQ”. It’s long overdue and its absence from anyone’s serious agenda only signals ample amounts of The HumanDebt?.?There are but a handful of companies we have encountered who are working intently on this topic and therefore leaping ahead of their competition by even acknowledging this task.?

It is undoubtedly a dauntingly uncomfortable and major task but one we have to start tackling, because in the tech community we know, better than anyone else, that if we don’t, we’ll be in trouble. That, if we want speed and performance out of our teams we don’t need more instances, more storage or even more ping-pong tables, we need more than that. We need new leadership; we need to give them tools and autonomy; we need to teach and support them to do the human work and better their dynamics; we *have* to find ways to foster Psychological Safety; and how all of these are predicated on them being able to be empathetic and intelligent with their feelings and those of others.?

Let’s be honest, we’ve been repressing our feelings and pretending we are not human and do not have emotions at work in order to appear “professional” for as long as we can remember.?We wrote about this being a pervasive other type of impression management before - the need to “look professional” and how it keeps us from being open and inquisitive about either our emotions or the emotions of others and it makes most employees feel like they are doing what is expected of them by not opening up and not asking that their colleagues are able to either.?

This is, of course, a harmful and antiquated view, but its prevalence as an attitude in the business world makes it a difficult one to shift.?

You may have read about our journey at PeopleNotTech before - we took a super-experimental path to make the product we make today and took many “wrong turns that turned right”. We first designed software to create perfect teams and then designed a de-facto leadership development tool back in the day when we still thought the team lead had to do it all. When we understood that was erroneous, we’ve gone from addressing and helping the team leader to the whole team - because yes, ultimately and after we’ve learned client-led lessons, we chose to focus on the entire team and create what is now our CBT for teams tool in the shape of our Psychological Safety Dashboard.?

That said, what really happens when we offer the supporting data and hold the space to invite these open conversations and actions we lump under the “people work” concept, is that the team is really just increasing their EQ together. They grow their emotional agility or really anything we want to call the ability to probe, listen, understand and care to their own selves and their teammates and they change their behaviours accordingly.?

How Do We Get a Higher EQ?

There is a lot that can help. Emotions 101 isn’t a hard course to teach really, it is only made harder by the mental blocks we have constructed including but not reduced to our collective belief that it is “none of our business” or that it is “better left to the professionals”.?

And believe me, I completely empathise with the reluctance and I’ve spent many years hiding behind my neurodiverse label and thinking it could protect me from the discomfort of having to deal with emotions. I even once admitted to this in one of my Forbes articles:

“Over my career, before I had to concede and build PeopleNotTech, I’ve never wanted to “end up being about the fluffy stuff”. Armed with my “I’m autistic, leave me out of the social stuff” permission slip, I gravitated towards technology, I built products, I ran teams and developed a fetish for Agile methods, all to avoid having to focus too deeply and delve too seriously into “the feels”. But of course, to accomplish anything of value I couldn’t escape it.?If all the answers to becoming truly agile and winning as a modern company lay in the technology we employ or in the new processes we create it would be *so* much easier! So believe me, I get it. Examining the intangible is unsettling, the road to making the conclusions useful is treacherous and human emotions whether we experience or witness them are complex. Not for the faint of heart that’s for sure. Not for the security seekers either. Unless you’re willing to take risks, learn, change, be flexible, etc you can’t do an honest open exploration of anything. But ever so worth it and ever so needed if we want performance.”

And we can and should all do it. This learning that we need to do the uncomfortable examination.?

Part of that journey we mentioned above, has been how for a long while we spent time and effort at PeopleNotTech researching and designing an “EQ Trainer” feature where leaders could start being fluent in the vocabulary of emotions and become better equipped to comprehend the connection between feelings and resulting behaviours. It all started with the labelling.

How hard is it to label emotions? - Nothing is taught in school - well it didn’t use to be but these days the most prestigious business schools have introduced a lot on the topic. Aside from how Harvard teaches it in most of their positive psychology courses including this one teaching execs how to “create and maintain happiness at work”, there are even more specific programs that focus on exactly the desiderata of increasing soft skills such as this one from Stanford commonly known as “Touchy-Feely”.?

From starting small and understanding basic terminology such as by using this simple exercise from Susan David the author of Emotional Agility a book detailing the Harvard concept to plunging into the more advanced studies that will see you able of as much nuance as this fascinating Sagacity: The Periodic Table of Emotions piece of data-art, it will all help and none of it is unattainable to anyone.?

Image credit: Sagacityprint - Adam Moesby

What About Emotional Resilience?

Is understanding, labelling and analysing emotions enough? It isn’t, as it happens. The truth is, that once we open that Pandora’s box of human emotion, a lot comes through after we have spent our lives minimising it all and it’s terribly important that we find ways that we don’t let those emotions overcome us or that we are pushed backwards into closing up once more. Harvard’s Emotional Agility concept practically contains the idea of building resistance and a lot of their suggestions are as ever very pertinent but they do seem to stop short of managing to normalise and prioritise the regular people work.?

Of course, learning how to name things isn’t sufficient but what we instead need, is to ensure we always interrogate any data that offers true feedback and that we hold the space for that examination to happen over and again even if it starts off as hard.?

This is because the key to developing is overexposure. As with everything else that’s daunting and even causing us fear, the fastest way to get over it, is to be exposed to it so we confront our limiting inner dialogue. When we stop being afraid of “the fluffy stuff”; when we can name the economic advantages at the drop of a hat so we know why we do it out of more than simply a moral imperative; when we realise that understanding the labels of emotions and practising how we communicate them and how we let them inform our reactions both as individual and as teams makes us more performant; when we realise we know enough and we admit we care enough - then we can truly affect change and see real progress and joy.?

PNT’s New EQ Booster Play

This is where it’s imperative to have the space to hold these thinking, connecting and verbalising team moments and it’s what our Dashboard is. Accountability and support for doing this EQ work. This brings us -at long and windingly-but-hopefully-useful last- to a good piece of news to announce to the teams that are already using our Dashboard - a new play is being worked and you should see it soon appear in your team’s Playbook called The EQ Booster. You'll find it under "Engagement", "Learning" and "Courage".

It draws on all the research we had previously done for building our EQ Trainer feature and we are expanding that with the golden nuggets of knowledge we get from crowdsourcing that worked for all our other users. It consists of a set of exercises to get everyone on the same page and able to name, recognise and frame emotions.?

We believe it should be a regular play just like the “Impression Management Counter” is for most teams and it should be used as a refresher habitually because the work to name, understand and explore how we feel needs the regular effort.

Don’t let the ticket rot on the Backlog team, move it to “Doing” today and we’ll be a day closer to the empathic, highly EQed, psychologically safe, happy and high performing teams we all deserve.?

—————————————————————————

At?PeopleNotTech?we make?software?that measures and improves Psychological Safety in teams. If you care about it- talk to us?about a demo?at?[email protected]??

To order the "People Before Tech: The Importance of Psychological Safety and Teamwork in the Digital Age" book go to this Amazon?link