Category: Soft Skills

With this short post, I want to celebrate a completion of the first step towards my MBA degree. I have passed IELTS Academic exam with overall band score 8.0 out of 9.0.

As per official IELTS score system:

This means you’re a “Very Good User”. The test taker has fully operational command of the language with only occasional unsystematic inaccuracies and inappropriate usage. They may misunderstand some things in unfamiliar situations. They handle complex and detailed argumentation well.

I have used the official IELTS 18 exam guide and the practice tests included with it. Overall, the exam for me was more about learning the expectations of the exam itself rather than about knowledge of the English language.

The next step is the GMAT exam.

Social atomism is a theory that refers to “the tendency for society to be made up of a collection of self-interested and largely self-sufficient individuals, operating as separate atoms.” I witness and have an empirical experience of this theory in practice – people become more isolated from each other, fulfilling emotions of belonging to a “tribe” has moved online and companies have hybrid or fully virtual employment contracts today.

As I reflected in one of the posts, loneliness is one of the backlashes of increasing atomization of the society. One of the consequences of an exposure to prolonged periods loneliness is a degradation of social skills. Our “social muscles”, ability to read others and create social connections degrade as our physical muscles, if we do not use them. And we need our “social muscles” to advance our careers.

Last month, the Nature magazine has published an article where authors analyzed data on competition outcomes from 6363 ballet students affiliated with 1603 schools in the United States and came to a conclusion: “In both scientific and artistic careers, where performance is subjectively appreciated, career success is strongly influenced by social prestige and visibility. This suggests that artists’ career success is highly dependent on their social networks and prestige.” The best parameter to predict ballet students success was not physical performance or artistic talent but the size and complexity of their social networks.

The same is true for any other profession. You have to be good at networking to progress further. Hence, you have to train your social skills. And in our virtual, post-COVID work environments it becomes more and more difficult to do. I see a solution to this challenge in setting networking goals and push yourself to socialize and approach people.

I have my personal goal to meet at least one new person every week who I never met before and have a meaningful conversation with them. It could be just an introductory call, a coffee or an afterwork. So, I have a rule – “Never Eat Alone”. If I am at the office, I try to find somebody to have a lunch with. If I cannot find anybody, I will try to approach somebody in a queue in a restaurant or join a group of people in a canteen. By doing this, I met different kinds of people and faced multiple reactions from them – very often a pleasantly surprised ones and very rarely negative ones. Because I know, that is equally difficult for others build new social connections as it is for me but they equally want to do it as myself.

It is very uncomfortable to approach strangers, but as with any skill, the more you do it, the easier it become. The benefit is – this is a great practice of social skills which are invaluable. Give it a try and don’t eat alone next time.

Every year, January and February is the time when companies organize Sales Kick Off (SKO) events. The name of such event may varies but the idea is always the same. Bring together people from different regions and different functions and deliver key messages of the year to them. Typically, it is 2-3 days packed with PowerPoints during a day and socializing during a night.

Two years of limited travels and COVID pandemic forced to make those events fully virtual. And it does look like that many companies are going to continue with hybrid format for SKOs. First of all, when you saved all this travel budget during the last couple of years, it is very uncomfortable to start spending the money again.

So, how can we make SKOs in a post-pandemic world more efficient? Below are my some ideas and examples from successful and that much events.

Pre-recording of keynote sessions

Keynote sessions are designed in a way where information flows only in one direction. Hence, the key messages for the year may not be live streamed. They can be pre-recorded and then streamed in different timezones. Ideally, every keynote session should come with a transcript distributed to an audience before or after the session.

Watching parties

If some sessions should be live streamed it makes sense to organize watching parties with pizzas and drink. Especially, it works well for EMEA region people for whom US-West or US-East based events are outside of business hours. It is also simply more fun.

Top priorities 30 seconds pitches

Every team or organization has 30 seconds to present their top priorities for the year. In my experience, this does not work well. It is difficult to maintain timing and people will not be able to remember anything anyway. Online collaboration board, like Miro, where everybody can add their pitches would work better.

TED Talk-sized demos and presentations

For a fully virtual event, reduce demo and presentations length to 15-20 minutes maximum. Increase number of demos and presentations instead. Limited attention span is real. So, if you want the audience not only just listen through but actually pay attention, then SKO sessions should be short. Another advantage is that there is a higher probability that people will watch a short content after it is published.

Gamification

Let the audience acquire virtual coins for an every video they watched or a quiz they passed. Make companies swag purchasable for these SKO virtual coins. Any element of a game will make a virtual event easier to consume and help people to keep concentrated.

Capstone project for regional teams

Create an assignment that every regional team of sales reps should deliver in the end of SKO. For example, produce an essay about how they understood the strategy or how they are going to implement new ways of working introduce during the Sales Kick Off. If you need to produce some output, then you will pay more attention.

So, these are my thoughts what can be improved for virtual SKOs. Post in the comment section your ideas!

The post from May 2021 had created a lot of traction, so I decided to convert it to a short article and translate to English.

Bad relationship with manager may be not a first reason why people quit their jobs, but it is definitely in top 5. And is in any human-to-human interactions, if communication is broken, most probably relationship are in bad state either. Let’s try to figure out what are the key mistakes in communication with management and how to avoid them.

Everyone has a management. A person or group of people with whom we discuss results of our work and who interested in positive outcomes of our efforts. A Software Engineer has a Product Owner, a Sales Rep has a regional VP and a CEO has Board of Directors and shareholders.

And (surprise!), they are all humans. Humans are biased, they have limited amount of memory, their physical and emotional capacity is not infinite and they have ingrained or adopted beliefs and preferences. What is more important – they have own challenges and goals because they have management as well. There is no ideal manager, like there is no ideal human. But it does not mean that you cannot build a successful communication.

Here is my definition of a good manager (if we will not take functional skills into consideration):

• They listen and not only talk themselves
• They delegate and inspect results
• They give freedom of actions, but they give guidance and set expectations

Now, let’s move on to a first mistake.