Soft Skills

Or, "How I learned to stop hating office politics and started caring about people".

Read a post a while back saying the one thing most people dislike in their work lives is office politics. Understandable, to say the least. Alan Greenspan said his greatest mistake was to think banks will behave in their own best interest. Organizations sometimes do a poor job of communicating their collective best interest. Too, it often it seems that we lose track of our own personal interest, at least in the short term.

Those of us who instinctively rebel against all things political and aspire to some measure of intelligence find we can hide from it. We dive deep into whatever technical discipline gets us farthest from others and nearest to our one true love: ourselves. But ultimately technical prowess is worthless without technical peers. Of late I have caught myself fostering peer relationships with the earnest desire to see if other people regard "best practice" the same way I do. And not just to prove I am smarter (I know, it's heresy).

In my work as a business process analyst, this means helping folks align and enlighten their self interest to the collective interest of the enterprise. Of course we use cool tools like balanced scorecards and KPIs and dimensional data warehouses and such, but the point is always to connect people to strategy in a way that makes work life a little less daunting.

As I rotate the hat ninety degrees into the project manager role, it is no leap to connect the communication strategies to this same continuum of self interest. Project management must transcend boilerplate deliverables and take into account the main issue: To help people who are doing what they were made to do understand people who were made to do something else.

In the dev space, the connection can be more easily obfuscated by our natural bent toward details, working alone, late nights, and caffeine. Nonetheless true development (like Bertrand Russel's true mathmatics) has an evangelical component that can even transcends it's actual usefulness. Where usefulness and coolness collide we find the excitement and passion that, properly conveyed, can span the gap between an uber-geek and a marketing manager. By way of example, I submit the Sharepoint (MOSS) Business Data Catalog. Look it up.

So my thesis is that beyond all that is technically cool and wizardly, the relationships are where real value is added. And if this is my confession of defection from my engineering heritage, then so be it. Engineering and ingenuity have been too often seperated, especially when we consider "social ingenuity" as more than an oxymoron. I for one purpose to allow office politics to be the reminder that I need to use the gifts at my disposal to help people align their interests with those of the enterprise. It's fun, and the relationships formed are the only thing on this earth of real value.

At least, that's how I see it.