> Everyone feels uncomfortable when a conversation goes off-script, but we as a society expect the 'abnormal' people to be the ones who bear the consequences of that discomfort whenever it arises. It doesn't seem fair, especially since the 'abnormal' people are expected to bear their discomfort in silence, but that's life for you.
Reminds me of something I say a lot.
There are some people that will point to geeky developers (as an example stereotype) and say they have poor social skills while believing they have good social skills.
When in truth it's always easy to get along with people you have things in common with. Good social skills is getting along with people you don't have a lot in common with. Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either.
It doesn’t matter what should happen. Your manager controls your ability to get promoted, raises, etc. If your desire is to get ahead by whatever definition of “getting ahead” appeals to you, you have to learn how to communicate on your manager's level.
Not only is it important to manage up, you also need to learn how to communicate with your peers to get things done.
I completely take responsibility for my 8 year career stagnation from my late 20s to mid 30s because I completely ignored trying to improve my social skills. I’m still slower on the uptake at 45, but I improved well enough to get to where I want to be.
I also realize that it’s going to take a lot of improvements and learning how to talk the talk and learning how to maneuver in large bureaucratic organizations to get to the next step - consulting (not staff augmentation). I’ve only worked in one large company for three out of 20+ years and hated every minute of it.
Yes, your manager should ask follow-up questions, your manager shouldn't escalate, your manager etc, etc.
However, you can't control how your manager acts. You can only control how you act and react. Sure, it's "fair" for your manager to do those things but that's not in your control. Saying the situation is unfair isn't going to get you promoted or even ensure your continuing employment. As an employee, you need to take this on for yourself because you can't count on anyone else to do it for you. If you're not good at it, get good at it. Find someone at the company who is, and watch what they do, get in their orbit, and learn. Otherwise the only person who is going to hear about how unfair the situation was, is the HRBP doing your exit interview.
tl;dr: What is in your control is to learn how to work with your manager, to ensure your manager moves on to a different project or company, or to move on to a different manager or company yourself. To succeed you must control your local environment -- and eventually your broader environment. Be proactive and own your career development ASAP.
You can choose your manager and try to be under someone who acts as you expect though.
I’m all for the old saying “change your environment or change your environment”, but that doesn’t work either.
If your manager happen to get to his position because of his technical skills more than his interpersonal skills and relates to you, more than likely he won’t be as effective at managing up and will be outmaneuvered by his peers when it comes to getting his people resources, promotions, raises, recognition, etc
I’ve only once had a manager who was both solid technically and solid politically. When I cared about learning and a mentor, having a manager who was strong technically and not politically was great. But, you have to realize that you probably won’t get the raises or promotions. Use the opportunity to do Resume Driven Development and move on to a company to make more money.
If you have a manager who is strong politically but not technically, the goal is to get him to trust you, make him look good and make it in his best interest to help you achieve your goals whether technical or financial to keep you.
Is it a Machiavellian mindset? Yes and I’m okay with that. I’ve been at this way too long to be idealistic.
I see the role of a manager to guide and help people, someone with just good technical skills should be an architect , an expert or technical lead. I know a lot or organizations don’t make that distinction, but I also made a conscious choices to avoid these companies.
Then anyone managing a team with objectives should understand pretty fast that to reach them and get credits among their peers each person on the team needs to know the metrics, how they work, and what they should do to make them happen.
That’s great if like you each member puts itself in the manager’s shoes, but I personally think anyone who doesn’t understand they should be transparent with their team on their needs shouldn’t be manager in the first place.
That’s still an issue. The person you report to every day - whether it be on a true organizational level or a dotted line report has influence on your raises, promotions, etc but doesn’t have the political skill to communicate your accomplishments or value to the organization and your work gets filtered before it gets to the person who has some say over the purse strings.
It’s a careful political balancing act to both be respectful of your direct manager/team lead and be noticed by your manager’s manager, but it is often necessary.
The more senior you get the more your performance is going to be impacted by things outside your control -- or the corollary, that the more senior you are the more things are within your control. Luck still matters, though in time, I think you get better at identifying what constitutes a good situation and getting yourself into it; the same goes for getting out of a bad one.
I'd say one aspect of having good social skills is getting along with people you have nothing in common with, but the bulk of what it means to have good social skills is still just having good social skills. Being able to communicate, being able to listen, being able to put your thoughts into words that convey your meaning to other people with minimal misunderstanding while remaining concise. Being socially self-aware and having some minimal ability to read the people that you're interacting with, regardless of whether or not those people like the same TV shows or video games or whatever.
Personally, I think it's easier to get along with people I have a lot in common with, but that's the extent of it. It's a teensy bit easier because at least we have things to make small talk about. Us having stuff in common doesn't have anything to do with how we approach problems or how rational we are or how we work together in a group though. It doesn't have anything to do with our respective social and emotional hangups, which are bound to be different despite us having the same tastes in some form of entertainment. It doesn't have anything to do with how well I can articulate the problem I'm having to that other person, or how well that person can draw meaning from what I told them, come up with a solution, communicate it back to me, and then iterate with me on that solution during a conversation.
I think that for a lot of people in the tech world, especially those still in their teens and 20s, the biggest social impediment that they perceive in themselves is that they have no idea how to interact with someone who's not like them. They think that if they can somehow overcome that, that they'll be golden, because they assume that they do great with the people who are like them. But that's rarely the case IME. It's just less obvious to them that they do just as poorly dealing with their own peer group, because things get papered over with fun small talk that they misinterpret as succeeding at socializing and communicating.
I'm glad the conversation of social skills is finally coming to the fore -- software as with any other human endeavour is a social exercise and to pretend social skills are somehow less valuable or necessary than technical skills is fallacious, you can't really have one without the other
It's totally possible to get along with people that you would describe as 'having poor social skills'. It sounds like you're conflating "getting along with" with "thinking highly of their social skills".
I don't think so. You're implying that people who say "they have poor social skills" are in fact giving away their own poor social skills. I am saying that is not true.
> Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either.
Identifying their poor social skills does not give away their own. Being unable to get along with them does.
Essentially I read this as "if you have good social skills, you can diagnose what's going wrong in the current setting and if the other person is unlikely to change their actions, you can adjust your social interactions to fix the communication issue".
In this case, that means not freaking out when a subordinate says no and calmly asking "Why not?", which would then lead to this information and an opportunity to explain that X is more important, and everyone moves on happily with their day. The manager's failure to go through that highlights the issues in their own social skills.
Moreso that OP was noting that people can believe they have good social skills, whilst belittling others for their apparent lack of, whilst not catching on to the irony of the whole shebang.
Reminds me of something I say a lot.
There are some people that will point to geeky developers (as an example stereotype) and say they have poor social skills while believing they have good social skills.
When in truth it's always easy to get along with people you have things in common with. Good social skills is getting along with people you don't have a lot in common with. Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either.