Not just feelings — it’s how people behave in incidents, meetings, code reviews, and cross-team chaos.
Use this as a quick lens: who stabilizes the system, and who DDoS’s the vibe?
Level 1: Spot the humans who make IT work better.
Level 2: Promote, platform, and protect them.
Level 3: Coach the rest or reroute them.
🔥 High EI Signals
STABILIZERS
These are your culture carriers. Put them in front of incidents, projects, and people.
They translate complexity without ego.
Clarity over flexing.
They can take a messy architecture, migration, or outage narrative and explain it so
the VP, PM, and junior analyst all get it. No jargon for sport, no condescension —
just “here’s what’s happening, here’s why it matters, here’s what’s next.”
They regulate during chaos.
Human incident commander.
Sev-1 hits, Slack is melting, leadership is pinging every 6 minutes — and they
slow the room down. They ask grounding questions, define owners,
and keep people focused on actions, not blame. Their presence drops the collective anxiety.
They can read the room — even remote.
Vibe-aware decision-making.
They notice when a meeting is cooked and calls for a 15-min huddle instead of a 50-message thread.
They know when to push for a decision and when people need time to think. Cameras off, low energy?
They adjust pace and ask more questions instead of steamrolling.
They manage stakeholders, not enemies.
Cross-functional diplomacy.
Security, Finance, Legal, “The Business” — they don’t turn these groups into villains.
They assume constraints are real and work to find a path that respects risk, budget,
and timelines. They still hold boundaries, but they don’t torch relationships to win an argument.
Their feedback feels like a pull request, not a punch.
Specific, actionable, kind.
Instead of “this is wrong,” they say, “Here’s what broke, here’s the impact,
here’s how we can do it differently next time.” They separate the person from the behavior
and help people level up without feeling humiliated on a call.
They can disagree without going thermonuclear.
Data, not drama.
They’ll push hard on architecture, design, or scope — but they don’t attack people.
They use evidence, tradeoffs, and options instead of sarcasm and volume.
After the meeting, relationships are intact even if decisions were tough.
They see the feelings under the technical noise.
Emotional debugging.
They can tell when “SQL vs. NoSQL” is actually “I don’t feel heard,”
or when resistance to change is really fear of becoming obsolete.
They name the human part gently and address it, instead of endlessly arguing surface details.
They don’t create heroes or villains.
Team over mythology.
They recognize that systems fail, processes fail, and teams learn.
They share credit widely and don’t let post-mortems turn into witch hunts.
They care more about improving the system than protecting their image.
They pull quiet people into the conversation.
Signal amplifiers.
They know the loudest voice isn’t always the smartest.
They invite input from the person who never unmutes but always DMs great ideas.
They create space for different communication styles so important signals don’t get lost.
They own mistakes publicly and solve them privately.
Accountability that builds trust.
You’ll hear, “That one’s on me — here’s what we’re doing about it,” not
complex narratives shifting blame. They protect their team in public, then work
through root causes and expectations in 1:1s with respect and clarity.
They fix root causes, not just symptoms.
Big-picture thinking under pressure.
When something breaks, they don’t just patch the immediate error;
they zoom out and ask, “Why did this get here? What upstream decision or
process made this inevitable?” They combine technical debugging with organizational awareness.
They understand the human cost of work.
Sustainable performance.
They know that 9 PM pings, weekend “quick favors,” and constant context switching
eventually wreck quality. They push for realistic timelines, defend focus time,
and are intentional about when “all hands on deck” is truly necessary.
🚨 Low EI Signals
DESTABILIZERS
These patterns quietly (or loudly) DDoS your culture. Coach fast or reroute their impact.
They weaponize technical knowledge.
Gatekeeping as a personality trait.
They explain things to prove they’re the smartest in the room, not to help others understand.
Questions are treated as incompetence, not curiosity. Over time, people stop asking —
and the org gets dumber and more fragile.
They escalate tension instead of reducing it.
Drama during downtime.
During incidents, they vent, blame, and throw spicy comments into group chats.
Instead of calming things down, they amplify fear and urgency.
The focus shifts from “how do we fix this?” to “who’s going to get roasted for this?”
They try to “win” meetings, not solve problems.
Debate club energy.
Every discussion turns into a performance.
They care more about being right on the call than shipping something that works.
They re-litigate decisions instead of aligning on execution, burning time and goodwill.
They can’t read the room.
Wrong conversation at the wrong time.
They deep-dive into low-level details when leadership needs a yes/no and a plan.
They push hard when the team is clearly fried, or crack jokes when the moment calls for focus.
The timing is always just… off.
Their feedback is blunt, vague, and cold.
“This is bad.” Full stop.
Comments like “Why would you do that?” or “This makes no sense” show up often.
There’s no coaching, no path forward, just judgment.
People walk away feeling smaller, not smarter — and start avoiding them entirely.
They never admit mistakes.
Infinite loop of blame.
If something goes wrong, it was the vendor, the process, the intern, the timeline,
Mercury in retrograde — anything but them. Ownership is always external,
so nothing meaningful ever changes in how they work.
They dominate airtime and talk over people.
Monologue mode.
They interrupt, answer their own questions, and speak three times more than anyone else.
Quieter folks get steamrolled. Over time, teams become passive and stop contributing
because “it doesn’t matter, they’ll just decide anyway.”
They panic and overcorrect.
High drama, low signal.
Small issue? They push for major rewrites. Minor incident? They blow up processes
without understanding the real cause. Their response is loud, fast, and poorly targeted —
leaving more chaos than the original problem.
They hoard information.
Job security by opacity.
They keep docs in their head, not in Confluence. They resist documenting systems
or teaching others, because being the only one who “knows how it works”
makes them feel powerful. The bus factor goes to 1, and everyone quietly worries.
They treat partners like obstacles.
Us vs. them mindset.
Security is “annoying,” Finance are “blockers,” business stakeholders “don’t get it.”
Instead of collaborating around real constraints, they build resentment,
making cross-team work heavier and slower than it needs to be.
They create fake urgency.
Perma-crisis mode.
Everything is “ASAP,” “critical,” “need now,” even when it’s clearly not.
They burn trust with constant alarms, so when something truly is on fire,
nobody can tell which ping actually matters anymore.
They confuse motion with impact.
Very busy, very mid results.
They’re always on calls, always typing, always “slammed” —
but projects stall, incidents repeat, and outcomes stay weak.
High noise, low signal. Emotional intelligence would help them prioritize what actually matters.