Why CTOs Should Add Emotional Intelligence to Their Skill Set

Great CTOs debug emotions, not just code

👋🏻 Welcome to Lead and Scale, the newsletter for CTOs and leaders navigating the complexities of scale-ups.

If you’re not a subscriber yet, here’s what you missed this month:

• From resume to retention: engineering hiring as a strategic advantage.

• How I failed my first investor presentation (and how to master yours)

• Your first 60 days as a CTO.

Here's a little-known secret: high-performing teams run as much on emotional intelligence as they do on technical skills.

But first, let me tell you a story.

8 years ago, I had to fire someone for the first time.

Letting that person go was heartbreaking. They were in a dire personal situation, one I could easily relate to, and their personal issues had a significant impact on their work performance. The team was under pressure, and this employee was jeopardizing everything we were delivering.

Firing this person was the hardest thing I had ever done. Despite preparing for the meeting, the words came out painfully, my mouth was dry, and I felt like I was about to throw up.

Then, the HR took over. I will never forget what happened next.

I was the bad guy, delivering the bad news. She found the words to soften the blow, knowing how desperate his situation was. She emphasized that working in a scale-up environment is challenging, and that he wasn't the problem. We were simply not a place where he could work comfortably, considering our hypergrowth and the intense pressure.

He left the room with his head held high.

This was the day I discovered Emotional Intelligence, and how it was one of the pillars of a CTO's role, along with technical expertise and strategic vision.

Emotional intelligence (EI), also known as emotional quotient (EQ), is the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions.

Why Train Your Emotional Intelligence?

As a CTO, emotional intelligence is a tool that allows you to enhance team communication, enforce empathy and trust, and improve decision-making under stress. Like technical excellence, it's a skill one can learn and develop over time, and finding a coach can improve your EQ tremendously.

I started improving my EQ through self-awareness when my coach introduced me to the concepts of rational and emotional brains.

When facing a stressful situation, our emotional brain short-circuits our ability to make rational, well-thought-out decisions. Instead, it triggers our automatisms to take reactive decisions or, worse still, paralyzes us into making no decision at all.

After Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he worked on developing his emotional intelligence, especially self awareness, which helped him switch from Ballmer's combative mindset to one of empathy and growth. This led to the culture that Microsoft has embraced since then.

💡 After learning about the rational and emotional brains, I started to keep a "trigger journal" where I documented situations that triggered stress and strong reactions. I noted my physical responses, thoughts, and subsequent actions (usually a complete mental blank). It taught me to recognize my emotional states and avoid reactive decision-making.

If self-awareness helps improve our decision-making under stress, it's only one of the skills involved in emotional intelligence. You can't make thoughtful decisions if you don't listen first. That's where Active Listening comes in.

In Active Listening, you don't listen to give a solution, but to fully understand a situation.

To fully understand his team's issues before they become problems, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke implemented "trust battery" conversations, where he regularly checks in with team members about their energy levels and concerns without jumping to conclusions.

💡 To practice active listening, you can institute a "no solution for 2 minutes" rule during 1:1s. When an engineer or manager brings up an issue, refrain from providing a solution for at least 2 minutes, asking clarifying questions instead. (That's the part I'm the worst at... not gonna lie)

Active Listening helps team members feel truly heard while providing you with better information about operational challenges. You can then add empathy to active listening to create psychological safety.

It's easy to confuse Emotional Intelligence and Empathy. Both are closely related concepts, but they have distinct differences, with empathy being one component of Emotional Intelligence.

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, allowing you to connect with their emotional experience and perspective.

Or, to quote the famous 20th Century philosopher Dave Gahan, empathy is walking in someone else's shoes.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield demonstrated strong empathy that helped his team navigate the challenges of global lockdown while maintaining productivity and innovation. He provided his employees emotional support, granted them an extra week of paid time off, and ensured job security despite the underlying uncertainty.

By walking in his employees' shoes, Butterfield allowed them to focus on delivery instead of dreading the future and lockdown-induced isolation.

There are more skills to Emotional Intelligence than self-awareness, active listening, and empathy. I decided to focus on these ones first, as they have the biggest, most direct impact: impact on yourself as a leader first, and impact on the team's morale and ability to deliver second.

What about you? Have you made emotional intelligence your leadership priority? I'd love to hear about your challenges and successes, especially in distributed teams where perception has an even bigger impact.

Thank you for reading. See you next Tuesday when we'll talk about the different types of CTO (and the one you might not know you are).