Soft skills that get IT promoted
You’ve taken courses, answered questions on stack overflow, coded until you ran out of Red Bull, and now you’ve proven your chops by landing your dream job. Congrats on making it through the maze of interviews.
Now that you’re in the role you always wanted, you may be finding some points of friction that you’d like to avoid. Not only that, but you have ambitions beyond your current desk. You mastered the hard skills, but now you have to work on your soft skills. What are they and how do you do it?
“
Previously, similar LinkedIn data showed that technology pros with soft skills received faster promotions. Today’s new data affirms that this holds true across all members, not just tech workers.”– Greg Lewis on LinkedIn
To get promoted quickly, LinkedIn recommends working on organizational skills, teamwork, problem-solving, communication, and leadership. Hive recommends visibility, self-confidence, interpersonal skills, and emotional intelligence. Hays agrees with Hive and LinkedIn and adds adaptability and work ethic. We’d argue that these are subsets of one core skill: empathy.
Empathy is the origin root of soft skills
Empathy is the root of all of the soft skills we admire. When you care about people, you’ll work on being a good listener. You’ll understand how hard it is to be the new person in the staff meeting and say hi. You’ll know that your peers and managers also have priorities that don’t revolve around your goals. Empathy changes the tonality of your communications. Empathy makes people care enough about what you say to make a change.
Soft skills are the social glue of the workplace. You know, being a good listener, asking how your weekend was, that kind of thing. So many of us worked remotely during the pandemic and our empathy muscles have atrophied. We’re more self-focused, impatient, even disassociated.
Hard skills get you hired but to thrive in the workplace, soft skills are vital. Simple things like active listening and engaging in small talk help make the workday go by quickly. As a bonus, it helps with your visibility. Visibility within an organization is the number one way to get promoted. They have to know who you are, right?
Visibility also includes posting and promoting the skills you’re learning. It means attending off-site events. It means volunteering for workplace committees. People don’t know you – yet – but when they do, they’ll know you’re invaluable to the team.
If you’ve studied active listening, you may recognize the phrase, “what I heard you saying is.” Active listening is more than just hearing. It comes to your body language. How are you showing that you’re hearing and understanding? You’ll ask questions and adapt statements to include those new truths.
“
Then the person trying to get me on board can understand that I’m willing, and I’m trying to work with them, but also that I actually understand what they want. Too often, my allies are working against me out of ignorance. I don’t want to be that guy.”– Beard of Valor on Reddit
If active listening feels awkward to you – or you don’t believe in it like Gregor Jeffrey – then work on being authentic in your conversations. Avoid the auditory scan. You know, like listening for keywords without actually taking in the sentences.
“
Listening – connecting through listening – has depth.” – Gregor Jeffrey
If you’re introverted or task-oriented, you may not see the value in small talk. It seems small because it’s the protocol of civility — the only purpose is to get to the ask. So, why not just get to the point and be efficient? The short answer is that people aren’t computers. Queries need to be preceded by social graces.
Think of small talk like a secured credit card. Someone asks how your day is and you answer it and ask them. Simple enough. You have $500 to spend on your secured credit card. Charge it up. Pay it off. You’re demonstrating to the borrower that you can be trusted.
It is the same with small talk. People want to know if they can have peaceful interactions with you. They want to feel psychologically safe to discuss ideas. They want a frictionless workplace. They want to feel like people.
After all, we spend ⅓ of our adult lives at work. That changes how you view your co-workers. You can disagree with a manager’s decisions yet have productive conversations. How? This comes from mutual respect. Which is given out of trust and charged with small talk. To be even more effective is to actually care about that coworker as a human. This is where your empathy comes in.
How do you work on these skills?
Working on these soft skills can be done through counseling, coaching, and mentorship. This is a good time to ask your manager for tips on how to promote your ideas better. Maybe you meet with a group of your non-IT friends who give you another perspective. You could join a marketing-focused Meetup, volunteer, or join a team sport.
If it seems like a lot of work, it is. You devoted yourself to acquiring and mastering the hard skills to get to where you are, so why not make the same investment in soft skills?
BetterCloud is so much more than just a fancy SaaS dashboard. The platform automates employee onboarding & offboarding, license reclamation, spend management, application access, and entitlement.
Eliminate thousands of hours of manual IT work and thousands of dollars in wasted software expenses with BetterCloud.
What are you waiting for?
