Beyond Technical Skills: Communication Skills Drive Career Growth

In his book, Five Stars : The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great, Carmine Gallo refers to a study of 400 HR and recruitment professionals, 94% said an employee with stronger communication skills has a better chance of being promoted to leadership position than an employee with more years of experience but weaker verbal skills.

As a software engineer, have you ever thought why a particular engineer was promoted or moved into a leadership role, despite not having the strongest technical skills compared to others? I see this frequently. In my opinion, usually it is because they can articulate their thoughts to audiences with different backgrounds, have the skill to persuade others with their ideas and think big.

Let’s assume your manager asked you to add a new feature to a legacy system to send out email notifications to your customers based on a specific event. You consider single responsibility, fault tolerance and scalability, therefore, you come up with the below design, in addition to monitoring and alerts in case anything goes wrong.

Your manager is not technically strong as you are, therefore, she is looking for the quickest solution that works. She disagrees with you, she thinks you’re overengineering by building multiple new components that require double the effort to implement and to maintain.

In similar discussions, I’ve heard software engineers defending their solutions using arguments such as:

• Everyone is moving towards the cloud and serveless, it is the new era, we should use it too.
• We shouldn’t add new features to the current system, as it will make it a bigger monolith.
• Building a standalone notifications system will ensure scalability to 1M notifications/day.

If you only work backwards from technology and don’t correlate it with the business value it achieves, your manager could easily end the discussion — we don’t care what others are using, our monolith works just fine, and we won’t reach 1M notifications/day in 5 years. You could do a better job persuading your manager (and peers) by structuring your ideas through adding context, articulate the challenges and how your solution solves better for the new feature. Which you can do by applying McKinsey’s SCR (Situation-Complication-Resolution) framework. Let’s put some structure on the engineer’s solution as below:

(S) as we are adding a new feature to send out emails based on a particular event, and the product manager will ask to send out emails based on other events soon, (C) the synchronous calls to the email service might impact the current system performance, we will need to build a retry mechanism to recall the email service on failure, and modify our legacy system whenever we need to send out emails based on different events. (R) I think building a standalone notifications system will achieve all the mentioned. Although, it will require 3 additional weeks to implement, it will save us time during this year once we configure additional email triggers without modifying our legacy system, we won’t worry about performance degrades or missed notifications as we will leverage a tested technology that is called asynchronously and have a retry mechanism out of the box, and we can deploy it separately without impacting our customers experience.

By providing context, emphasizing the challenges you have and their impact on the business, and showing how your solution will address them, you should have a higher chance of persuading your audience, thereby boost your influence on your team and impact on the business.

To conclude, I think the best engineers from an employer’s perspective are not necessarily the smartest ones, they are the ones with the higher impact and influence on the team, which is less likely to happen without verbal skills and persuasiveness.