Intangible skills and where to find them

The goal of servant leadership is in the success of the people and teams whom you serve as a leader. One of the biggest hurdles to organizational and team success is in helping or finding people. The easiest part of that is in measuring things that have a tangible measure, like technical experience and problem-solving ability.

In the service of managing software development, there is a growing need for a difficult-to-measure and intangible set of competencies. Companies diverge from one another in the way they value these competencies, especially when it comes to engineers. Different organizations value these competencies differently based upon their company culture and speed of delivering products and services.

The major competencies include astuteness with autodidacticism, ownership, professional maturity, and social intelligence. In many ways, a company imposes these competencies on employees as a part of the cultural expectations.

When a company reorganizes to approach processes and solutions differently, people and teams change visibly while the value placed on competencies shift quietly. It is easy to plan for the tangible changes in an organization, but considerably more difficult to do so for the intangible.

Before proceeding further, a definition of each competency can help this discourse.

Astuteness is the ability to reach conclusions rapidly, and it pairs directly with autodidacticism, which is the cultural demand and need for people to self-learn. Together these two concepts impose a need for an individual to learn independently and do so quickly.

Ownership is particularly abstract concept. It is for an individual to understand the definition of success is in the success of the organization, delivery of great products and services, and in internalizing, finding, and possessing a personal responsibility to play a part in every aspect of it.

Professional maturity is easy to describe, but seems difficult to understand for those who do not possess it. Maturity in all aspects of life is a competency. It lies in how we collaborate and communicate with one another. It is deeply engrained in our body language, attitude, and how we listen to one another. Professional maturity is when we remain courteous, curious, humble, and open minded in our interactions with people within and as a representative of our place of work.

Social intelligence is not empathy. Social intelligence is the ability to perceive the emotional state of other people by looking at the physical reaction that manifests in their eyes. When people can read this information from other people, they relate better to other people. This is the primary argument for collocation and having team members working together in the same physical location. The performance of the problem solving ability of a team links directly to the social intelligence of the members.

Few organizations can plan adequately around the intangible changes that occur after a reorganization, but they can consider how a reorganization will change culture, and how that culture will demand a change in the value of these competencies. Regardless of planning for change, every organization must react, shift, grow, and lead.

The greatest difficulties in finding, retaining, and classifying these competencies is that measuring them takes a great deal of subjective observation. It is incredibly difficult to get a sense of someone’s ownership without seeing team interactions and work quality and output. It is simpler to test learning speed for complex ideas, the ability to adapt to change, and even social intelligence.

A decent length of time having lunch with someone can readily determine professional maturity. The way people behave and interact with an interviewer is different with strangers or wait staff, and those interactions as observed an experienced interviewer are telling.

When an organization determines the value for each competency, a great deal of time and effort must go into aligning the people within the organization to accommodate the cultural shift, and begin making decisions about how to react to people who do not or refuse to change with the rest of the organization. With limited options and with every decision particularly pivotal to morale, every action has an impact, and every impact, a result. The decisions at this point are deliberately trying to make the results be the positioning of people to align in a specific direction.

The hardest part of this alignment is always going to be the new value set for the intangible competencies mentioned earlier. People have a very difficult time with change. We love rhythm and patterns, especially engineers. Hiring for these competencies is difficult, changing people to come around to a new value set around these competencies can be more so. There is no silver bullet to solve this complicated situation easily. Every person is unique, and each situation requires a different, customized approach.

I can only end with a few suggestions.

If you are leading, lead with an open mind and an optimistic view, and assume the best of people. Only good things can come from clear communication, and be ready to listen and learn, but stand fast to your values and keep others accountable. If people know you trust them, they will tend to trust you.

If you are not leading, then be ready to lead. It is not about pushing others down, but instead lifting them up. A member of a team succeeds when the team succeeds. Assume the best of others, and position and protect the team for success, but remember the team is often a member in another team. It takes courage to succeed, and it takes savvy to know there are many paths to get there.

Thanks.