LTYM - The Soft Stuff

Letters to a Young Manager

The Soft Stuff, #146
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Please note that this letter is in-process; the following are my notes

Dear Adam,

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Why are your senior managers looking for people with more soft skills? The short answer is that business turns on the conversation and relationship.

I have often wondered why the humanity of technology and relationship side of technology management is such a foreign concept to many. These are soft concepts in an otherwise field of bits and bytes and the hard logic of programming. At a recent symposium one of the CIOs noted that almost all of his people were introverts. Another CIO observed that we all came out of a background of coding-- writing the programs that make the technology run. This is not the background of relationship builders. Yet it is building relationships with our teams and our business colleagues that deliver our success.

My father was on the F 14 Tomcat design team. And if any of you have seen the old movie Top Gun, the plane that was featured in that movie is the 14. And we had models of this and pictures of it at home after the top secret of the assignment ended. And he told me about the young engineers who would come in fresh from school, and they were gung-ho to apply the latest technology in the building of this new plane. And his advice to them was don't worry about it. The plane will get built. What's important is learning to work together.

How do we teach that to the next management "class" of CIOs?

***

Best regards,
Ed

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References...

Takeaways:

Building relationships delivers our success.

Discussion Questions:

For Further Reading: