It's good advice. Ten years ago, I had some opportunity to improve some soft skills by taking some courses. I took some courses related to selling your ideas and coaching.
Turns out that this is something lots of engineers could benefit from as this is simply not part of their bag of tools when they leave university and something that can frustrate them enormously when they need to engage with others whether it is colleagues, customers, or superiors.
I've been in more than a few meetings where people were yelling at each other, or worse, where I ended up doing a fair bit of yelling myself. These days, I tend to be a bit more conscious about it than I used to be. Usually it indicates something is wrong that needs fixing and quite often it is beyond whatever is being discussed. Fixing that is often the more important thing.
A few tricks I apply:
1) If you think something is good, make a point of communicating that. It buys you good will and people are more likely to listen to you when you say otherwise. Also it keeps people motivated.
2) Talk in terms of improvements/fixes/changes instead of simply stating, "this sucks". It's much harder to argue against that by others because why wouldn't you want to improve things.
3) Pick your fights carefully. Having opinions is cheap but owning the consequences is not. I often give people room to do things their way even when I don't fully agree it's the right way. Basically I need them to do it for me without my involvement. And there's always the chance you are wrong after all. In any case, the whole point of a team is being able to trust others to get shit done without you. If you need to micromanage everything, something is wrong. That something might be you.
Turns out that this is something lots of engineers could benefit from as this is simply not part of their bag of tools when they leave university and something that can frustrate them enormously when they need to engage with others whether it is colleagues, customers, or superiors.
I've been in more than a few meetings where people were yelling at each other, or worse, where I ended up doing a fair bit of yelling myself. These days, I tend to be a bit more conscious about it than I used to be. Usually it indicates something is wrong that needs fixing and quite often it is beyond whatever is being discussed. Fixing that is often the more important thing.
A few tricks I apply: 1) If you think something is good, make a point of communicating that. It buys you good will and people are more likely to listen to you when you say otherwise. Also it keeps people motivated. 2) Talk in terms of improvements/fixes/changes instead of simply stating, "this sucks". It's much harder to argue against that by others because why wouldn't you want to improve things. 3) Pick your fights carefully. Having opinions is cheap but owning the consequences is not. I often give people room to do things their way even when I don't fully agree it's the right way. Basically I need them to do it for me without my involvement. And there's always the chance you are wrong after all. In any case, the whole point of a team is being able to trust others to get shit done without you. If you need to micromanage everything, something is wrong. That something might be you.