The Skill Nobody Taught You
If you read my recent post on psychological safety in development teams and recognised some of the warning signs in your own team, the natural next question is “what do I do about it?” The answer starts with a skill that most tech leaders were never formally taught: emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence isn’t specific to software development. It matters for nurses, football coaches, restaurant managers, and anyone else who leads a group of people through complex, pressured work. But this post is written for the tech leaders in the room, because our industry has a particular habit of promoting people into leadership based on technical ability and then wondering why the team dynamics fall apart.
The good news is that emotional intelligence is a professional skill, not a personality trait. It can be learned, practised, and improved. The uncomfortable news is that it requires looking inward first; and what you find there might not match the story you’ve been telling yourself about how you lead.
Emotional Intelligence Is Not Being Nice
The same misconception that follows psychological safety follows emotional intelligence. People hear “EI” and think it means being soft, avoiding conflict, or wrapping every piece of feedback in three layers of positive reinforcement. It doesn’t.
Emotional intelligence is about understanding your own emotional responses, recognising the emotional state of others, and using that awareness to make better decisions. Sometimes that means having a difficult conversation. Sometimes it means delivering feedback that the other person doesn’t want to hear. The difference between a leader with high EI and one without isn’t whether they have the conversation; it’s how they have it and what happens afterwards.
Travis Bradberry puts the foundation plainly in Emotional Intelligence Habits:
Emotions come from within. It’s tempting to attribute how you feel to the actions of others, but you must take responsibility for your emotions.
If you’ve ever thought “my team makes me frustrated” or “this project is stressing me out,” Bradberry’s point is that the frustration and the stress originate with you, not with the team or the project. That’s not a comfortable idea, but it’s the starting point for everything that follows. You can find more of my reflections on Bradberry’s work in my CPD review of Emotional Intelligence Habits.
What Emotional Intelligence Actually Looks Like
Rather than presenting a formal model, I find it more useful to think about EI as four interconnected practices:
Self-awareness is knowing your triggers. Recognising when your emotions are driving your decisions rather than the evidence in front of you. It’s the difference between “I’m frustrated because this code review is poor” and “I’m frustrated because I’m tired and this is the third code review I’ve looked at today, and that’s colouring how I’m reading it.”
Self-regulation is choosing how to respond rather than simply reacting. The pause between the stimulus and the response is where leadership lives. Self-regulation isn’t about suppressing your emotions; it’s about choosing which emotions to express and how.
Empathy is understanding what others are experiencing without needing them to spell it out, and without projecting your own experience onto theirs.
Communication is translating all of the above into how you speak, listen, and lead. It’s the outward expression of the inward work.
These aren’t separate skills you practise in isolation. They build on each other. Self-awareness is the foundation; without it, the rest doesn’t work.
The Gap Between How You See Yourself and How Your Team Sees You
As I wrote in the psychological safety post: “You might think you handle pressure well. Most leaders do. But the question isn’t how you see your own behaviour; it’s how your team experiences it.”
This gap between intent and impact is one of the most common patterns I see in consulting. A senior decision maker commits to delivering an extensive set of features within a month, then brings it to the development team only after the deadline is already set. When the features ship late, the development team catches the blame. Two developers leave shortly afterwards.
The leader’s intent was probably ambition. They wanted to impress a client or push the organisation forward. But the impact was a team that felt set up to fail by someone who never consulted them about what was realistic. The leader may never connect those two departures to their own decision. That’s the self-awareness gap in action.
Closing that gap doesn’t mean becoming paralysed by self-doubt. It means building the habit of asking: “I know what I intended. What did the other person actually experience?”
Your Reaction Is Their Data Point
Brene Brown describes “chandeliering” in Rising Strong as the sudden, disproportionate emotional eruptions that catch everyone around you off guard:
Uncontrolled eruptions of emotion (aka chandeliering) sabotage the safety that most of us are trying to create, whether in our families or our organisations. If it happens often enough, chandeliering leads to eggshell environments – fear-based settings where everyone is on edge.
I’ve worked with teams where a manager’s visible frustration when things went wrong had exactly this effect. Developers learned that surfacing problems led to uncomfortable reactions, so they stopped surfacing problems. Issues that could have been caught early grew silently until they became incidents. This is precisely what both Amy Edmondson and Brown describe when they talk about sweeping problems under the carpet; not out of laziness, but out of self-preservation.
Bradberry reinforces the point:
Exploding at anyone, regardless of how much they ‘deserve it,’ turns a huge amount of negative attention your way. You’ll be labelled unstable, unapproachable, and intimidating. Controlling your emotions keeps you in the driver’s seat.
Every time you react to bad news, your team takes a data point. Over weeks and months, those data points form a pattern that determines whether the next problem gets reported or hidden. Self-regulation isn’t about suppressing your emotions; it’s about choosing which emotions to express and how. The frustration you feel when a deployment fails is real. Expressing it by sighing loudly, closing your laptop, or asking “how did this happen?” in a tone that implies “who did this?” teaches your team something specific about the cost of honesty. You can read more about these dynamics in my CPD reviews of Rising Strong and Emotional Intelligence Habits.
Empathy Is Not Jumping into the Hole
Brown’s metaphor from Dare to Lead is one of the most useful framings of empathy I’ve encountered:
If struggle is being down in a hole, empathy is not jumping into the hole with someone who is struggling and taking on their emotions, or owning their struggle as yours to fix. If their issues become yours, now you have two people stuck in a hole. Not helpful. Boundaries are important here.
In tech leadership, the instinct to jump into the hole is strong. A developer is struggling with a production issue at 11pm, and the temptation is to take over. To fix it yourself, because you can, because it’s faster, because the discomfort of watching someone struggle is harder than just doing the work. But taking over isn’t empathy. It’s rescuing. And it teaches the developer that struggling means someone else will do it for them.
An empathetic response sounds more like: “What do you need from me right now?” Sometimes the answer is technical help. Sometimes it’s a second pair of eyes. Sometimes it’s just knowing that someone is available and paying attention. The empathetic leader asks the question rather than assuming the answer.
Simon Sinek captures the organisational version of this in Leaders Eat Last:
Exceptional organisations all have cultures in which the leaders provide cover from the above and the people on the ground look out for each other. This is the reason they are willing to push hard and take the kinds of risks they do. And the way any organisation can achieve this is empathy.
Providing cover from the above is empathy in action. It means absorbing pressure from stakeholders so your team can focus on the work. It means pushing back on unrealistic deadlines before they become your developers’ problem, not after. My CPD reviews of Dare to Lead and Leaders Eat Last explore these ideas further.
Listening Is Not Waiting to Speak
Bradberry makes an observation about confident people that applies directly to leadership:
Confident people know that by actively listening and paying attention to others, they are much more likely to learn and grow. Instead of seeing interactions as opportunities to prove themselves to others, confident people focus on the interaction itself.
In one-to-ones, the most common failure mode isn’t asking the wrong questions. It’s asking the right questions and then not actually listening to the answers. Jumping to problem-solving before the person has finished speaking. Formulating your response while they’re still mid-sentence. Mentally categorising what they’re saying as “valid concern” or “they’ll get over it” before they’ve had a chance to fully explain.
The psychological safety post included the prompt: “What’s something you’ve been hesitant to raise?” That question only works if you sit with the silence that follows. If you rush to fill it, or if your body language signals impatience while you wait, you’ve just confirmed that their hesitation was warranted. Active listening is the simplest component of emotional intelligence to describe and one of the hardest to practise consistently.
What High EI Looks Like in Practice
I once worked alongside a software engineering team within a globally recognised motorsports organisation. The pressure in that environment is difficult to overstate. Results are measured in fractions of seconds. The consequences of mistakes are public and immediate. And yet the emotional intelligence within that team was higher than almost any other team I’ve encountered.
They didn’t call bugs “bugs.” They called them “learning opportunities,” and before you dismiss that as corporate language, they meant it. When something went wrong, the conversation started with “so there was a problem with this application. Let’s figure out what led to that problem happening and, more importantly, figure out what to put in place to stop it happening again in the future.” No names. No blame. Just systems and solutions.
The team spent time together outside of work, building genuine friendships and connections. That’s not something you can mandate; it’s a byproduct of a team that trusts each other. I’ve worked with dozens of teams. A lot of them talk about not having a blame culture. This team lived it. The difference was visible in everything from how they reviewed code to how they responded to incidents.
The lesson isn’t that you need to work in motorsports to have high EI. It’s that EI doesn’t correlate with comfort. This team worked in one of the most high-pressure environments imaginable, and their emotional intelligence was higher than teams I’ve worked with in far less stressful settings. The difference was leadership. The leaders of that team chose to create the conditions for trust. In other organisations, leaders inadvertently created conditions for fear. Same dynamics; different choices.
EI Is a Skill, Not a Personality Trait
Brown writes in Dare to Lead:
Daring leaders must care for and be connected to the people they lead.
The comforting truth about emotional intelligence is that you don’t have to be born with it. Bradberry’s entire book is built on the premise that EI is a set of habits, and habits can be developed. If you’ve read this far and recognised patterns in your own behaviour, that recognition is itself an act of self-awareness. The first step is already behind you.
Where to Start
Three things you can try this week:
Notice your triggers. The next time you feel frustration rising in a meeting or a code review, pause. Name the emotion to yourself before responding. “I’m feeling frustrated because…” is not a sentence you need to say out loud; it’s an internal checkpoint. The pause between stimulus and response is where self-regulation lives.
Ask, then wait. In your next one-to-one, ask an open question (“What’s been on your mind?”) and count to ten silently after they finish speaking. Resist the urge to solve, fix, or respond immediately. The silence is where trust is built.
Review your last difficult conversation. What was your intent? What was the impact? If you’re not sure what the impact was, consider asking the other person. That conversation might be uncomfortable, but it will teach you more about your EI than any book will.
ℹ️ Note
This post is part of a series on leadership and team culture. If you haven’t read it yet, start with Your Team’s Silence Is Telling You Something for the warning signs of low psychological safety. In a follow-up, I’ll explore specific strategies for building and rebuilding psychological safety in your development team. The EI skills in this post are the foundation for that work.
If you’re recognising that your team’s challenges might start with leadership rather than process, that’s a conversation worth having. Let’s talk.