Session: Not by code standards alone: why do tech specialists should be trained to use soft-skills. How to educate a team.
In the IT community, the meaning of “soft-skills” acquired many extra details, quite often with negative meaning. People fully focused on the tech side of some system\product, can simply give up raising it, especially without formal “rules of the game” and with the permanent workload. As a team lead, facing both with the code and management tasks, the speaker found, how many failures can make developers, not ready and not properly prepared for justification their ideas in front of different level management.
The topic, I want to present, is covered with the next parts:
WHY tech leaders should educate developers
1. Innovations flow in big companies and the cost of advance improvements
2. Internal investments
3. Training successors for leading\mentoring roles
The content of the training
1. Explanation of behavioral patterns in cross-office teams
2. Map of expectations (company goals -> project goals -> how each team may see it -> how it should be communicated)
3. Introduction to DISC
4. Role play - how to give feedback, moderate Q&A, present tech improvement
The way for effective education
1. Proving 1:1 mentorship
2. Recurrent delegation of tasks, related to communication rather than coding
3. Public speaking
Bio
As a Tech Lead in an EU's leading digital entertainment company, Olha is owning and leading game server components development. She is a senior engineer with more than 7 years of hands-on experience at client-server enterprise projects. Her current development path includes high-level software architecture in the scope of data-related tasks solving.