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Techie EQ?

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by fluxit

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Many experts are professing that EQ is far more important than IQ. Many people complain about techies as being unfeeling and uncaring. Many techies focus on cognitive abilities since technology requires a high degree of continual learning and strong abilities to identify technical issues and resolve them.

Should techies be more feeling and forego strengthening cognitive abilities?

13 replies

by guruofdos

I used to work for a retail organisation as a technician. Others in the department wouldn't communicate with the public by more than a terse word or two or a series of shrugs and grunts. I would always spend time looking at a problem from the customers point of view and not treating it simply as a technical issue. Sometimes problems are more to do with a users perception ('this doesn't quite do what I hoped or expected') than a hard and fast ('this software doesn't work!').

By using more than sheer knowledge and technical ability and by introducing empathy to a situation, many more problems may be resolved and often in a shorter timescale.

Needless to say, when I left said retail organisation, a lot of 'my customers' left too!

by fluxit

Do you feel that empathy is the only EQ quality? Did your customers follow you to the next job? How did empathy compress time-to-solve problems?

by admin

Hemispheres of the brain, exercising them and the connection between.... herein lie the answers...

:)

by generalist

Reading helps, especially if you DON'T limit yourself to technical stuff.

Writing and doing art oriented activities helps too. In fact, lots of things that help the creative process also help the EQ side of things.

Of course I may be coming from an odd angle when it comes to EQ and IQ. I have strong links to both sides, though I consider myself to be more IQ oriented.

But then I often use the analytical side of the IQ to look at EQ related activities. That may be a side effect from the psychology, sociology and salesmanship study I've done over the years.

by admin

seem to get you the gains whilst high reps with lower weights get you the definition. If you need IQ weights.... Mensa for one has tons o exercices freely available. Check out their website. For EQ there are tons of books and programs... Covey isone that pops in mind that I use. Also, Franklin Planners, "Getting the Love You Want, Keeping the Love You Find" series, anything by Sark, Plato's Republic.... I could write forever here. If you want to develop the connecting bit o tissue, try reconciling tech skills with accounting, HR and management, first on your own, then move into helping others with this in a CTO position :)
Of course you nearly hit one of my favorite authors in the world. "Hop on Pop" is about building relationships (EQ) but I really love "The Star Bellied Sneetches" by the same author (Seuss) for advanced social commentary and the problem of stuffy folk :)

by fluxit

They surgically reviewed his brain to discover that he had voer 600% the neural pathways of normal people. Was he any different in personality? He was not born this way but develeoped this during life. Did he sit around exercising his brain? He wasknown for image streaming and mind mapping.

by dbgirl

"Should techies be more feeling and forego strengthening cognitive abilities?"

Absolutely not. Techies should be more feeling AND should strengthen cognitive abilities. The two are not mutually exclusive, but they can be mutually beneficial.

by fluxit

"they can be mutually beneficial..." How?

There are very definitive personalities associated with a emotional person and a cognitive person. Emotional personalities are frustrated by cognitive personalities. Likewise, cognitive personalities are annoyed by emotional people.

When should one be emotional and when should one be cognitive?

by generalist

Empaths and thinkers, or NFs (Intuitive Feelers) and NTs (Intuitive Thinkers) on the Briggs-Meyer
'scale' can get along with each other if they know of the biases. Better still, they can also learn from each other, the NFs slowly gaining additional NT attributes and the NTs gaining additional NF attributes.

Now according to Briggs-Meyer, the NTs and NFs only make up about a quarter of the population. But they tend to be the thinkers and the empaths, which is what this discussion is about.

And very few of the NTs and NFs are 'pure' NTs and NFs. The 'thinkers' usually have emotional attributes and the 'empaths' usually have thought oriented attributes. But both have that 'intuitive' core that allow them to be creative in a wide variety of ways. The 'core' also allows them to jump from 'A' to 'Z' when coming up with ideas or solving problems.

As far as when people should be emotional and when they should be cognitive, it is often a learned process.

by dbgirl

People that are 100% emotional, or 100% cognitive are few and far between. The vast majority of all people combine the emotional with the cognitive. Those that get farthest in their career, and in their personal life, manage a combination of the two. It takes life experience to determine which is appropriate in any situation, or if a situation will take a combination of the two skills.

by fluxit

The EQ is supposedly a measure of one's ability to manage his/her emotional state. By doing this one is able to accomplish several feats that include:

Conflict Management
Team Building
Controlling Impulses
Preventing psychological disoders such as depression and anxiety.
Improve personal relationships.

In short, the EQ is from the heart and IQ is from the head. EQ has been addressed in other ways such as Dale Carnegie and 7 Habits.

Knowing this how does impact your work?

by admin

Not the "WinAMp" kind (ok, maybe that too, I don't know...) but rather the type of inward journeying that many do not take enough time to grow and enjoy with can create wonderful new realities in the physical world as well :)

Einstein was also known as an incredible, probably lucid, daydreamer. Hey, you've gotta be thinking about something interesting while you're not paying attention in math class, right? :>

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