Jiri’s Notepad

When it comes to training & development, I have a standard stock recommendation for people I manage or mentor: Apart from learning about technology and architecture methods, take some soft skills courses or read relevant books. Strangely, many people do not see too much of a point in this: “You are an architect; you do architecture (SAP, BI, software development, security or any other specialty). Why would you want to waste time on this salesy/consulting nonsense?�

I believe soft skills are extremely important:

At the moment organisations are more and more off-shoring transactional activities (that can be done at a distance). This means that the work that remains on-shore is more of the tacit type, involving richer and more frequent interactions, which in turn mean require much higher levels of non-technical skills to support them. And even if the increasing costs of the large providers together with growing rupee conspire against this trend, the focus on tacit/interactive work is likely to grow because it makes plain business sense.

Regardless management consultants’ theories on the relative value of various types of work, getting things done in large organisations, (which is what many of us do) requires constant communication. Some of the people you have to deal with will have similar world view to you, others will disagree, some will want to undermine what you do; some will appear like, well if they have fallen from Mars. Convincing such a varying crowd about your proposal, enthusing them about the vision and then getting the proposal delivered in face of numerous obstacles is where soft skills become priceless.

Moving on from the subject of why they matter, I would say there are two groups of skills that are useful for a technical professional:

• The first one consists of presentation, co-ordination, people management and I perhaps I would also add facilitation. These are IMHO easier to learn, because they are mostly a matter of knowledge. For instance, I may not be the best presenter in the world, but if I am interested in this subject, I read on principles of good visual presentations, look at few examples and then try them out few times, I am going to get a decent presentation skills.
• Into the second group I would put consulting, influencing, resolution of inter-team conflict and change management. These are in my experience less easy to learn because they require learning to manage own emotions and behaviour. Yet they are the key to leadership, and to having a real impact in dealing with the widest range of people.

Practice and feedback are very important for learning these, and so you can learn them better in courses than through books. On the other hand, it may be difficult to find decent courses and if you find one, it may be beyond your price range. So you probably do not want to shun books.

When I explored this area for the first time, my starting point was the Bredemeyer’s architect competency profile. Unfortunately I found their recommended books a bit of a hit-and-miss. My preference is for books with high signal to noise ratio, jargon-free not too academic, and that do not dumb things down and I found out that a ready-made list of books that would meet these criteria probably does not exist. I decided to explore this area more and the result is a short list of a half dozen or so of best books on soft skills useful for technical professionals that I am going to profile, one by one, in my following posts.

What about you? What are your favourite books on communication, dealing with people, handling organisational politics or leading change?