Songkick's Ability: Emotional Intelligence

• Empathy
• Avoiding blame
• Awareness of team morale
• Taking active steps to improve morale

Displays empathy towards colleagues.

Example behaviours:

• Gave unprompted positive feedback to a colleague
• Checked in with a colleague who is struggling

Displays empathy towards colleagues, and users of our products.

Example behaviours:

• Voiced a concern about an existing bug that affects a large amount of users
• Able to not panic during a user-facing fire and identify the failing part of the stack, working with others to fix it
• Put themselves in the shoes of a user when creating a test model for a feature
• Improved or implemented an internal tool to help the team (save development or testing time when using it)

Nurtures empathy and no-blame culture in their product team.

Identifies morale issues in product team, and works with team members to address or seeks support in doing so.

Example behaviours:

• Progress, not blame
  • Suggested how we can improve a process in the aftermath of a fire instead of identifying whose fault it was
  • Worked to find a solution to a bug instead of apportioning blame
  • Linked a piece of tech debt to a particular context instead of apportioning blame when refactoring
• Delivered a presentation on how to deliver empathetic code reviews
• Diffused tension between two participants in a retrospective
• Connected tedious A/B testing project or a tedious regression testing project with overall company goals
• Championed fixing an issue or bug that affects the wider team

Detects and responds to the needs of the Technology team.

Able to read the morale of their product team and respond to their needs.

Works to actively improve morale in the product teams.

Required if formally have reports

Detects and responds to the needs of their team and reports. Ensures the reports have a good work-life balance, and are taking enough holiday.

Example behaviours:

• Identified tension between two team members and took proactive steps to improve it
• Identified a morale issue in their team and took proactive steps to improve it
• Got the engineers and/or testers in the team excited about a potentially boring piece of work

• Turned a problematic situation into an opportunity to learn and improve

• Prevented a team member (especially a report) from burning out

Proactively improves the morale of the Technology team.

Example behaviours:

• Organised a celebration of completion of a large piece of work