Chapter 1, What is Emotional Intelligence?,covers why emotional intelligence is important for IT professionals, Salovey and Mayor's emotional intelligence model, the main difference between emotions and feelings, and the five universal emotions common to all cultures. You will learn that tech companies are already using emotional intelligence skills to build collaborative leadership that creates impact through people, increases global sales, enables managers with a skill set to help managers to connect with people and lead with success, and even develop tools to help social media users be more empathetic in their online communications and combat cyber bullying.
Chapter 2, The Neuroscience Behind Emotional Intelligence, covers how the three most important layers of the brain work together to manage your rational and emotional data to help you master the basics of neuroscience. You will learn that the consistent practice of mindfulness meditation helps you enhance your attention, self-awareness, and self-regulation due to the neuroplastic changes in the structure and functioning of brain regions that regulate emotional responses.
Chapter 3, Core Emotional Intelligence Skills IT Professionals Need, speaks about core emotional intelligence competencies and the skills you as an IT professional need to master and the strategies to improve each one. You will learn self-awareness, which helps you to be more confident, less stressed, less overwhelmed, accept feedback and stop micromanaging and self-expression which helps you to build quality relationships, improve your employee engagement, decrease turnover, and be liked and appreciated. You will also learn self-regulation, which helps you to cultivate pleasant emotions, prevent conflicts, influence others, and build trustful, successful, and collaborative partnerships. You will also learn social awareness, which helps you to be more empathic, have a greater understanding of the emotional drivers of others, be a motivator and a successful negotiator, and learn social skills, which helps you to be a great leader and inspire and develop others to achieve their best, increase productivity and employee engagement, and build a healthy and happy workplace.
Chapter 4, How to Build an Emotionally Intelligent IT Organization, explains that an organization also has emotional intelligence, how to assess the organization's emotional intelligence, and strategies to enhance the level of emotional intelligence, such as how to improve the environment of the office, how to have an office policy of gratitude and kindness, how to raise the levels of emotional intelligence in the customer support team and also in the sales team. Emotional intelligence in an organization needs to be driven by the leaders, whether they are situational leaders or the top-of-the-ladder leaders.
Chapter 5, How to Be an Emotionally Intelligent IT Manager, in this chapter, you will learnt how important it is for a IT Manager to have a good level of emotional intelligence that enables him to know himself and to know and manage their people, the emotional intelligence of the five most challenging MBTI personality types—ESTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ, INFJ, INTP, found with more incidence in positions of managers, leaders and high achiever employees in the IT area. The strengths and weakness of these five personality types, how they are seen in the workplace as employees, subordinates and managers, how they can improve their emotional intelligence skills to be easier to work with them. And how to manager extroverts and introverts at work, to have a great workplace environment and increase productivity.
Chapter 6, How to Be an Emotionally Intelligent IT Leader, explains that the leader of the future in the IT domain needs to have a global mindset of the business, needs to be technologically savvy, needs to know how to build alliances and partnerships and that a successful and powerful leadership of the future is a shared leadership in this vulnerable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. You will learn that the leadership of the future is developed in a human ecosystem that taps into the intrinsic motivation of people, develops others, and influences them by anticipating and creating change and building a collaborative network to construct the vision of the future.
Chapter 7, How to Hire Emotionally Intelligent IT Professionals, covers the best practices to attract the best fit to an open position, the best hiring practices for IT talent, the rules to follow before and during an interview to have the best outcome, preparing the interview and maintaining a legal hire process, and mastering the behavioral and situational interview processes to screen for emotional intelligence in all the candidates, especially in leadership roles, management, sales teams and customer service.
Chapter 8, Preventing Stressful Situations with Emotional Resilience, covers the five pillars of emotional resilience: stay calm, cool, and collected (first pillar); calm down when strong emotions arise (second pillar); create positive emotions daily (third pillar); develop self-compassion (fourth pillar); be grateful (fifth pillar) to show how to build emotional resilience and cope with the stress, anxiety, shame, guilt, depression, lack of support from family, friends, employers, the feeling of being overwhelmed, stressed out, depressed and burnedout. Emotional resilience is the skill to adjust to change and move on, from negative or traumatic experiences, in a positive way. To keep a healthy balance between a tough head and a warm heart. As you build your emotional intelligence competencies and skills you are also building your emotional resilience. And that compassion, tolerance, forgiveness and a sense of self-discipline are qualities that help us lead our daily lives with a calm mind.
