Soft skills are associated with a narrow number of skills. This is not true
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Of course, the context is very broad. Who to develop what skills depends on the place of work, the activity you are engaged in, on its scale, on colleagues and the environment in the team - on a huge number of points. It also depends on non-work, personal life - we all somehow carry work home, and we carry home to work. By the way, the skill not to mix these two spheres is also a soft skill.
It also depends on the level of the position: the management team needs certain skills, and the rest may need them, but not so much. A business analyst, a systems analyst is doomed to communicate with people, by the nature of his activity he is supposed to pull out other people's incoherent thoughts and make coherent thoughts out of them. Therefore, to develop soft skills, you need to understand what you need at the moment, and not rush to all skills at once. Downloading them all at once is like learning all programming languages in parallel, it's useless. You need to understand what is more needed in the current context, and either pump it over, or solve the problem in other ways, replace the software component with the hard one.
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In my opinion, what is most lacking is not communication as such, but the ability to clearly express one's thoughts. Roughly speaking, it is literate oral and written speech. Many suffer from the fact that each team has its own atmosphere, slang - people find themselves in a different environment and get lost, it is impossible to express their thoughts correctly.
The second thing I always pay attention to: conflicts. That is, at the interview, I propose to discuss: what to do if you are drowning one for some idea, and everyone else is against it. But you are sure of your innocence. This often happens: I read something or saw somewhere a solution that no one else saw. There is no escape from such situations, even in the most well-coordinated teams there are still conflicts, so this part is very important.
There are problems with self-determination - this can hardly be called a software skill. People do not always understand what they want, and they have to be tortured to find out what a person really wants. And then it turns out that he wants one thing, and you propose to him to do something completely different - as a result, he may get confused, upset, unfulfilled dreams and unjustified expectations will arise.
But in general, and without communication itself, nowhere. There are no analysts on my team, and many of their functions are performed by the team. Therefore, she must be able to talk with people, formulate thoughts, be able to generate something reasonable from a scattered set of information. An analytical mind is also needed - this is also a soft skill. We try to see from all the guys, starting with the middle, whether a person is able to find explanations, assumptions, think about what he is doing, and not just stupidly perform.
Context is very important: different teams need different skills. Somewhere - there is more analytics, somewhere - the team is calmer, but the candidate is quite cheerful, and you, as an interviewer, observe and think if he can adjust to this mode of work.
With the help of questions, you can evaluate communication, analytics, conflict resolution, skills related to mentoring, education of young employees. Time management - what to do when there are more tasks than opportunities? In general, ordinary employees look mainly at the domestic side. They delve deeply into the leaders: there you can talk to a greater extent. Both organizational skills and decision making are, by the way, a very important skill for engineers. Many suffer from his absence, both teams and people - when there is no internal ability to make decisions and a person is forced to constantly turn to someone for confirmation of his innocence.
It turns out that the minimum necessary for working as an engineer in a medium or large company, in an effective team, is: analytics, the ability to resolve conflict situations and communication, the ability to make decisions and take responsibility. This is especially important in today's flexible world, where everything is agile and you need to make a decision about technology at the moment, and there is no time to engage in deep analysis.
Non-linear questions are the surest way to understand how a person will behave in a given situation.
How does decision-making skills look at interviews? “Something went wrong, for example, the server crashes. The boss is not available. What do we do? Suppose you are the most important and must make a decision, restart it, run to write letters to the authorities that we will all die, wait 30 seconds to check that we will not die ... ". That is, I outline an understandable but synthetic situation, and I am interested in what we will do next. Different options are named.
The first answer: try to reach out to the deputy chief, if he exists, some suggest collecting a consultation from colleagues. So they say to protect themselves from mistakes, because the team is more powerful. It's also an attempt to offer group responsibility instead of personal responsibility. In chats, it usually sounds like: "Well, what are we going to do, colleagues?" But such things show that a person has at least a set of tools: he understands that such situations are possible, is not at a loss and knows purely theoretically where to run, who to call, who to pull.
You continue on: what to do if there is no one to ask, and the situation has gone downhill? Many people answer: "I will slowly try to do something." This is my favorite answer: no fuss, no running around, I will try to solve this question myself. It can be assumed that if the answer did not sound the very last of the options, this is normal.
Then I ask if the person is afraid of what he can mow. Because the ability to mow may not be a soft skill, but a definite skill. We all make mistakes, and I myself have repeatedly - the question is, how do you feel about this and how quickly you are ready to correct mistakes.
With the help of such non-linear questions, when it is not clear which one is next, one can understand whether the candidate realizes that it is impossible to simply reboot the servers with the product database, because there customer transactions for ten billion dollars hung.
I am greatly exaggerating now, but this is the surest way to understand how he will behave in a given situation. To do this, you need to remember your last mowing situation and offer to consider it. Thank God, we are all the same, and we screw up about the same, there is hardly a unique one. I had it so that none of the three phones answered, and in the end I wrote a letter where I said that I had not reached them and I would do like this. Then I was already an experienced adult, I was ready to receive a star for my decision. Living Stories is the coolest way to conduct a soft skill interview. This does not need to be studied separately, it is necessary to carefully memorize life situations in the course of activity, return to them, analyze. And based on this analysis, you will interview for any position.
At first, I delved into myself. Then you try to figure out what you want
By default, it is better to assume that any skill is worth pumping. But soft skills are crazy, so you need to focus on where you have your biggest problems.
What skills you should develop is a very individual question. There is one general recommendation: understand what skills are required and, depending on the situation, understand where to go next.
Usually, there is enough inner feeling: you analyze the whole past week, you look where there were difficulties. For instance:
- spent a long time at the meeting;
- it took a long time to explain to a colleague that something went wrong;
- suffered for three days, then went, asked and solved the problem in five minutes;
- at the interview he was confused and could not ask any question;
- the boss thinks that I am an armless devil, does not want to cooperate with me, because he does not understand what I am doing and how;
- I don't remember anything;
- : 35 20 .
The tool is both simple and complex, and at the same time effective, only you need to do the analysis regularly.
At first I dig deeper into myself, then you try to understand what you want. For example, you want to become a leader. Obviously, there is a certain set of skills, without which there is nowhere to go. You cannot become a good leader without having the skill of managing conflicts: your subordinates will have conflicts, you will have conflicts with neighboring units - this is a constant support of activities. It is impossible without organizational skills, we must look for ways to pump them.
If you have basic self-reflection, it is clear in which direction to move, the main thing is to be honest with yourself. If you are an introvert and want to go beyond that, that is, if you want to interact with other people, obviously you are doomed to change.
You can ask for feedback from colleagues or a manager if you have a moderately good relationship with him. You can talk to your family, they can be cunning, but they will tell you all the same. Describe those controversial situations to them, and then ask: do you think that I did something wrong? They may respond, which is similar to giving feedback. The most powerful tool for collecting feedback is hr-techniques, not to be confused with recruiters. Specially trained people - coaches or mentors will talk to you, listen, ask leading questions, tell you what problems they see and try to promote it, offer solutions.
If your goal is to develop presentation skills, then the measure of success in this case is the performance itself. Leads are usually interested in this: they understand that they lack the ability to go out and say something in front of strangers. At the same time, the whole trick of the presentation skill is not so much to speak, but not to get confused when the audience starts bombarding them with questions that you may not be ready for. At conferences you come across people who stand up and say: “But the king is not real! All this is bullshit! "
If guys come up to me and ask if they can try to perform somewhere, I look for opportunities to register a person for a meetup or a private event. Within the team, we arrange tech-talk, where any engineer can talk about a topic of interest. Prepares, makes a presentation, gets airtime, answers questions that are pouring in from the audience.
To develop skills, there must be a system and regular training
To choose a goal, you need to determine the direction - with the help of self-contemplation, external sources of information. And for the development of skills, orderliness is important, you can't a little here, a little there - there must be a system. Basic rule: there should be a goal and regular systematic training.
Not a very difficult thing related to skill leveling, from the classics - never go to lunch alone. This is about communication: you have to force yourself to go eat with someone, or not sit in a corner at corporate parties and joint parties, conferences.
In general, the development methods are as follows: you can read books and articles, watch videos on the Internet, go to trainings. Now all large training companies have courses in soft skills. If you have never done much with them, the choice is not very difficult: take what is cheaper. For a start and boost, in order to get a general understanding, it is enough to navigate through the book.
I have heard good reviews about theater circles many times. Some of the soft skills that relate to social skills, they raise to unprecedented heights in a short time: the ability to speak, memorize, react to situations when he forgot words.
If you need to pump memory - there are a bunch of techniques for this, to resolve conflicts - study literature, listen to specialists.
It is difficult to understand whether a specialist is in front of you. Unfortunately, there is a lot of information on the Internet that non-experts tell about - you can hear enough of the wrong garbage. Therefore, here you also need to analyze, look at the market, follow, be interested in what is happening, do not rush to headlines in the spirit of "5 most useful books for pumping ...". There are classics, and if you dig around on the Internet, you can find quality literature that will definitely not harm. It is not known whether it will be beneficial or not, it is subjective, the main thing is that it does not cause harm. For example, if “experts” declare that combat techniques must be used in conflicts, opponents must be destroyed, and a person, after talking with you, must drain under the table and walk for three days with a migraine - this is something wrong, you don’t need to do that.
Public performance
Presentation skill, public speaking - the order is: set a goal - I want to speak at TeamLeadConf, look for a topic, look for opportunities to speak, go to those who can help with this, follow conferences and meetups. Fortunately, there are a lot of them and the level is very different: somewhere they take only cool specialists, somewhere they are ready to take not cool specialists, there are open microphones, you can gather friends and speak to them. Regular workouts: for example, set aside time on Friday at 18.00. You say something, you record yourself on video, and then you look at yourself and follow your progress. You have to constantly review videos, look for junk words, talk to a mirror and analyze. The most important thing is to practice and take yourself out of your comfort zone more often.
Conflict resolution
If the goal is more specific, for example, you want to improve your conflict resolution skills, agree with yourself: from all conflicts for a certain period of time, I emerge victorious. Only not from the series “who left the room last won,” but “I am satisfied with the results of the conflict, I know the reason, I know the consequences, I understand what I did and how,” and so on. This is again about mandatory analysis.
Time management
If you have problems with time management, understanding that the reasons lie in you as well is half the solution. This is very important: many people believe that if there are more tasks than time for them, managers are to blame.
There is a nuance here: does the manager know that there is not enough time for tasks? You tense and diligently do what they ask, but you realize that there is less time than necessary? First of all, you need to ask the manager why this is happening: I see the situation like this, I can't keep up with what I'm doing, because there are too many tasks. It may turn out that there are really a lot of tasks, or that qualifications do not allow solving problems at the speed with which they are received.
If it is clear that there are enough qualifications, the speed is normal, but for some reason you feel that you can do more, although you don’t do - there is an enchanting technique that was told to me, among other things, by Lyosha Kataev @deosdeorum, technical director from SkyEng.
When he realized that he was in such a situation, then for a week he wrote down what he did during the day. For a long time, this exercise freezes, but at a short distance you can be patient and with an effort of will fix everything that you are doing. Conversations, reading mail, distraction for building a farm, Facebook, other people's chats - after a week you see a list of 1,500 tasks and ask the question: why did I do this or that? Tasks in the case - 40%, and the remaining 60% are time killers.
I do not mean that you should not be distracted from work - but if timekillers become a problem, you need to do something about it. If you press for each popup that the chicken has become a mother of chickens and you need to send them to a neighboring village, time will be wasted. Or another example: you came to a meeting, it was dedicated to something interesting and instead of 15 minutes spent there 1.5 hours. I came out with a clear understanding that I had been chattering for an hour and a half. Unfortunately, such meetings are a wagon and a small cart, so analytics is needed: what is really happening? Then it will become clear what to do with it. This is important if you feel a problem - start researching it. Because most often the research begins and ends with the search for the guilty in order to justify it or make it regret, it turns out that this is a shift of responsibility, and not a solution to the problem.
If you understand that you have enough qualifications, and the problem is only in the number of work tasks, you need to talk about this with the manager, say that you are not in time. In working days of productive hours, conditionally, 6, and tasks are obtained at 9. In real life, processing from 3 hours turns into 5: you have to think about where to put unnecessary tasks. At a short distance, this can be a temporary fluctuation, if the problem persists, it must be solved. In the spring we had such a story when the epic with the virus began. But we knew what we were doing, why and why, and that recycling was a local phenomenon.
The development of soft skills is patience, work and system
What can you do now to get cooler next week? I would start by trying to figure out what is not "cooler" now. This is necessary to build a training plan. You understand that the problem is with time management - fix this fact and look for a tool: books, courses. If you do not understand what is happening in life at all, then you need to try to understand what is stopping this, and why I decided to attend to the development of soft skills at all.
Then - look through the links from my list, remember well-known experts (for example, in time management: Arkhangelsky , Dorofeev , David Allen ), delve into the conference programs - at the same TeamLeadConfthere are softskill tracks, look in the direction of humanitarian publications like Mrs. Ivanova: she actively writes about hr-activities, there you can look for key points. Then identify the problem - if you did, the tools will help you find it.
If you don't understand what the problem is, you can come to the person you trust more than others, talk to him or in chats like the Pain of Team Lead . In the chat itself, most likely, they will mix with poop, but there you can see who is active, and you can knock on his PM.
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- FYI For Your Improvement, Michael M. Lombardo & Robert W. Eichinger
- soft skills. (VC.ru)
- 70 soft skills (VC.ru)
- Soft Skills for Hard Times (Skillbox)
- , , — Soft skills ()
- TeamLeadConf (Youtube)
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