Leadership for Engineers and Scientists

What are soft skills anyway?

Image by Pavlofox from Pixabay

When it comes to career growth, I’ve found it reasonably easy to spot the technical skills gaps in my knowledge and come up with a plan to address them. I can sense that something is missing and it’ll make my life easier if I had some extra knowledge or experience. The kind of technical skills I’m imagining might include things like gaining more experience with PyTorch, getting a deeper understanding of the maths behind neural networks, or improving the way my code is tested.

However, I’ve found that articulating the corresponding leadership skills (or ‘soft skills’) is a lot harder to do. Especially early in my career, I didn’t have a good grasp of what leadership skills are important, beyond a few buzzwords like ‘communication’ and ‘teamwork’. Since then, I’ve worked with many teams of Engineers and Scientists, and have accumulated ways to talk about these softer skills. I’ve found it beneficial to be precise in identifying strengths and areas where I want to improve, just as I do with technical skills. This post is about some of those skills.

Personal Motivation

The first set of skills are all about the things that make someone, as an individual, effective at doing their job. Some of these include:

• Organisation and time management

• Able to overcome obstacles along the way to get work done

• Keeping composure & staying (mostly) positive

• Keeping high standards of work, while not insisting on perfection (As Voltaire said, “Perfect is the enemy of good”)

• Understanding what product the company are building and how customers use it

• Taking responsibility and having ownership of projects or pieces of work

• Identifying and acting on feedback about how I’m doing my job

• Being adaptable and flexible

Interpersonal skills

It’s rare to work alone, no matter what lone-genius stereotypes exist. Getting on with other people is really important in any company, and this has different aspects:

• Working effectively as part of a team, and with other teams in the company

• Contributing to discussions

• Having emotional intelligence and empathy

• Diplomacy

• Raising concerns and issues appropriately with the right people

• Creating an environment where everyone feels welcome

• Managing conflict between you and someone else, or between others that you work with

Project management

Unless you always work on very small pieces of work, at some point you’ll work on or lead a larger project. Then it’s useful to be able to know how to manage the work of a group of people, which needs a range of skills:

• Gathering project requirements

• Dealing with ambiguity from different places and bringing clarity

• Setting project goals and outcomes/deliverables

• Identifying and mitigating risks

• Breaking goals down into smaller pieces of work that can be shared around

• Estimating how long work will take

• Prioritisation of different pieces of work

• Running meetings

• Reporting the status of projects to stakeholders

• Reporting and managing issues and problems

Communication

The term ‘Communication’ is thrown about a lot, but it can be broken down in different ways:

• Writing

• Giving presentations

• Negotiation

• Listening

• Communicating technical concepts to different audiences

• Public Speaking (some might say this is the same as giving presentations, but talking to and entertaining a large audience is a different thing IMHO!)

Develop other people

The more you work with other people, the more you’ll be actively involved in their career growth. Some of them will even want to learn to do the things that you can do! This manifests in skills such as:

• Giving feedback to the people you work with, on an informal basis or in a more formal setting like a performance review

• Coaching

• Mentoring

• Teaching

• Hiring and interviewing

Having a wider impact beyond what you can do alone

As careers grow, you’ll be looking to have a wider impact by influencing beyond your immediate team. A few of the skills that become important here are:

• Delegation

• Business knowledge

• Understanding how other business functions work in your company

• Having a compelling long term vision

• Strategic thinking

• Building consensus amongst people or teams with differing opinions

• Earning the trust of people you may not work with regularly

• Being able to grasp key issues without having to know all the details

• Asking the right questions and getting the right input for making decisions

• Decision making in areas where you are not an expert

• Relationship building & the dreaded networking

This is by no means a comprehensive list of everything it means to be a leader! I hope it’s helpful to anyone else struggling to articulate the soft skills they have, or identifying where they want to improve. I’d love to hear your comments if you have other things you’d add to this list.