I just finished writing new job descriptions for the software engineers and quality engineers in my organization as part of a new titling and leveling system we’re rolling out.
Job descriptions are an important part of knowing what skills and experience are expected of you in your role and level, and at levels above you so you can work toward promotion. But they are not meant to be, not able to be, a hard-and-fast roadmap to promotion.
That’s because the higher up the ladder you go, whether as an engineer or a manager, the more you need soft skills that job descriptions aren’t designed to capture.
By soft skills I mean things like:
- Straight up social skills – being able to build connections with others, to collaborate successfully, even simply to have a human conversation with people (especially leaders) outside your immediate sphere.
- Communication – being able to clearly and crisply explain technical concepts and implementations so that others can follow you, especially if they’re not engineers; being able to put together a good slide deck and write a good position paper; knowing when and how to escalate things up the chain.
- Leadership – seeing what needs to be done and getting others to follow you in doing it, taking calculated risks, being comfortable with failure.
- Power – being able to identify the key people you need in your corner, build reciprocal relationships with them, and use this as your power base.
- Maturity – managing your time and energy, your emotions, your decorum.
Somewhere along the way I saw a model that describes how hard and soft skills relate as you move up the ladder. Here’s a rough diagram of it:
Notice that on this model some people at the Senior Principal level may not have technical skills better than a Staff Engineer. They just have outstanding soft skills that let them have a much bigger impact on the organization. Heck, my technical skills are, at best, on par with a mid-level engineer. It’s been a long time since I coded! Yet here I am, the Director of Engineering. It’s because I’m technical enough, and I’ve learned the soft skills I need. As a result, I can have the impact expected of a Director.
The farther up the ladder you go, whether on the technical or managerial track, the bigger the impact you are expected to make. You can’t make the bigger impacts without those soft skills. It’s because you increasingly need to work with and influence others, and even build a power base, the more you rise.
Learning soft skills has not come easy for me. At all. I have had to learn them all by watching others who are good at them and straight up mimicking them until I could do them easily enough. At my core I’m deeply introverted, probably mildly autistic, reticent and anxious. I’ve had to push myself to take some big (to me) risks, over and over again, to become truly good at leading, and gain confidence.
You can’t quantify soft skills. The people who hold the keys to saying Yes to your next promotion have little choice but to judge your soft skills to the best of their abilities, and compare them to what they see the needs are at the next level.
Ten years ago I was a QA Manager at another company. I badly wanted to be Director of QA. A new executive from outside the company was hired and became my boss. We fit together really well, and after a little while she told me she wanted to promote me. Woot!
But then she was abruptly reassigned to turn around a troubled part of the company, and in time I got yet another new executive as my boss. He soon decided that he wanted a Director of QA, but it was clear that I wasn’t his automatic choice. Rather, he posted it externally. I interviewed for it, but he hired a fellow from outside the company instead.
This fellow didn’t have nearly the QA chops that I did, which pissed me off. Yet within his first 30 days on the job he had built rapport and trust with a whole bunch of key leaders in the organization. I had not managed to do that in four years with that company. Compared to me, he was a master of soft skills.
This is judgment at play. I was the same person under both executives.
This felt unfair to me at the time, but eventually I came to see that this wasn’t a matter of fairness. Rather, given the new executive’s vision he wanted something different from his Director of QA than the previous executive did. He didn’t see that I had it.
I had to leave that company to finally get the Director title. There I found I needed to work on some soft skills pronto, as it didn’t take long before I struggled to move ideas forward. I just didn’t know how to build that power base I needed.
Where I work now, the CTO gave me a terrific development plan in January that is helping me build the soft skills I still need to succeed at a higher level here, should one ever become available. To be a viable candidate for promotion, I need to gain certain soft skills at the next level — not technical skills, at all. The higher up the ladder you go the less often promotions come around, so who knows if it will ever happen for me here. Fortunately, I really, really like being Director and can keep doing this job indefinitely. And I’m enjoying the growth my development plan is driving.
The moral of this story for you is that if you want more out of your career, lean into soft skills at least as much as you lean into technical skills.