Senior engineer soft skills

Why senior engineer? To get attention, but also because this is the title used a lot in recruitment. Why soft skills? Technical skills are hardcoded in the word “engineer”, and I wanted to write my reflections on the non-obvious side.

In traditional companies or smaller startups, management is the only way to grow. Individual contributors generally have tons of technical knowledge but don’t get much opportunity to learn the soft skills. In those companies, managers prioritize project success, and might gain these soft skills instead. In most silicon valley like companies senior ICs are expected to have these soft skills.

My point is, soft skills are critical to be a successful engineering leader. This might come as a surprise and understandably frustrating for those who just want to be technically focussed. I have divided the soft skills I assume are important into four categories. While each bullet point deserves it’s own note, I have summarized to capture my learnings.

Cross-functional relationships

1. Ownership — If you are blocked on the delivery of your project due to another stakeholder, you assume responsibility instead of waiting it out and blaming them for project failure. You can do this through constructive feedback, mentorship, forming alternative plans, or in the extreme case doing the work yourself.
2. Alignment — In meetings, not accepting the outcome because someone is influential, but asking enough questions to make sure you understand the reasoning behind the decision and can convey it to your team and other stakeholders. You understand when to escalate and when to resolve differences yourself.
3. Trust — You can build trust with your stakeholders over time that they share “trade secrets” with you. These include why certain decisions were made in the past, how their work is prioritized, what their leadership is thinking, and how to work with them better.
4. Reliability — Setting meeting agenda, sharing follow ups, responding to emails / chats / going through documents and giving your input etc. This might sound simple to do, but when workload is very high with multiple stakeholders to manage, reliable people shine.
5. Empathy — You can help others understand your actions and understand the pressure / stress your stakeholders might be under. You can give people enough notice so they have time to adjust. You apologize when you realize someone may have been hurt by your words or actions, and work with them to build trust.

Feedback

1. Assuming better intentions — This applies when we are ruminating. We might want to connect the pieces of facts together into stories, to understand. It might be hard to understand how and why someone might be helping if you cannot see the story. You stick to the facts, and seek the story directly. Though if overdone, you might conversely stop sharing opinions.
2. Helping others grow — You can give actionable feedback to your peers, stakeholders and your managers that helps them in their growth. You can help them see and understand why that feedback is important. Feedback should always be coming from a place of care. Our delivery changes significantly when we keep our intention of trying to help the other person while delivering.
3. Being open and aware of feedback — You don’t blindly accept feedback. You can ask questions equally for positive and constructive feedback, to ensure feedback is actionable. If you are easily agreeable to your positive feedback and only dive into the constructive feedback, then you might be tipping not as open balance. On the other hand, if you keep doubting your strengths, you might have the imposter syndrome.
4. Encourage sharing and authenticity — For new hires and new teams, it takes time to build culture of sharing feedback. It leads to growth, does not prevent it. You are an enabler of this culture within your team.

Initiative

1. Call out unreasonable direction — If you find that the current direction is missing out on key impactful problems, you present your concerns backed by evidence. If your concerns are not addressed, you escalate. Post that, you should disagree and commit.
2. Use data to build consensus — You can not only lay out a timeline for a project for a half, but also justify with data why that is a good timeline. You can define the end goal clearly and ensure that your progress is in line with that goal. You are smart about how much time you allocate to each of your tasks.
3. Find new problems to solve — You can identify new areas to tackle by talking to stakeholders. You can come up with multiple new streams of projects spinning off from the original and justify which one they would choose because of the circumstances and the information available at the time. You can take over existing projects and identify how you can contribute.
4. Build team cohesion — You lead or support participation in diverse team activities and improve team bonding. You help team members during times of low mood or frustrations. You can find gaps in team dynamics and influence your peers to address those gaps.

Communication

1. Lead discussions — When you drive discussions, you choose topics and questions based on their impact. You can communicate the agenda in advance, manage the time, and make sure the meeting stays on topic. You can ensure the meetings are fair to everyone in the room, with diversity of opinions being represented. You can identify clear follow-up action items with owners.
2. Make no assumptions — You gather facts about your audience to understand the context. When you are in discussion, if you are giving suggestions based on assumptions, they might not make sense to others. You can clarify with clear, direct questions. You can help catch assumptions which may not be true or well known to everyone.
3. Manage expectations — You know how and when to say no. You understand which meetings to attend and manage expectations of those you can’t. You understand which projects to take and which projects to defer for later, and you can explain clearly to your stakeholders the reasoning and your priorities.
4. Written communication — You can describe the problems you are solving or blockers you are facing clearly over a written medium. You can manage a group and communicate asynchronously with stakeholders around project updates. You can relay your project progress, milestones and technical decisions to leadership using documents.