To create a successful career you need to go beyond technical skills. Growth comes from being perceived as reliable, trustworth, and a great team player. So in order to build this kind of credibility you have to work on your soft skills. Founder of Napice, Vitor Oliveira, shared his ideas on the communication abilities tech companies need from their workforce. And why he thinks developing soft skills is a great career investment.
Vitor Oliveira is a former VanHackers who went on to start his own successful business. As an entrepreneur, he has interviewed 500+ software developers and hired over 100. He was one of the speakers at VanHackCON, the largest online conference for senior tech talent who want to get a job in Canada, the US, or Europe. The 2022 edition took place on the 18th and 19th of November. Keep an eye out for more free events and sign up for our platform to access international job opportunities and unique preparation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSPfXL7DeE
Communication Is The Most Important Soft Skill
Vitor starts off with a question: have you ever felt like you over explained or under explained something? When interacting with colleagues can you be sure you are getting your message across?
If you need help communicating clearly you are not alone. Being very knowledgeable in a subject sometimes means you don’t know how much the person you are talking to understands what you are saying. Try offering a position with reasons as much as you can. This means offering explanations for your decisions. Every tool helps, using imagens, diagrams, numbers. Just make sure you don’t just say things, but back them up.
Vitor believes communication is not only a skill to be learned, but rather a mindset to be adopted. So let’s take a look at some of the values behind developing soft skills.
Communication can be very non verbal
Soft skills aren’t always obvious. Non verbal communication is a great example. It’s subtle but powerful. Vitor believes that the best kind of non verbal communication is being the embodiment of the message you want to convey. That means walking the walk.
He says leadership by example comes in three parts: authenticity, observable actions, and routine. Those don’t seem like “communication” at first, but they go a long way into showing people who you are (rather than “telling” them).
Have you thought about what your values are and what is important to you? That’s where your authenticity is. And what about the actions you can take to let others observe your authenticity in action? Can you routinely put your values to action?
Mastering three key soft skills: delivering feedback, praises and apologies
Vitor offers examples of observable actions that can also be divided in three parts: delivering feedback, praises and apologies. Improving how you have these three important conversations at work will strengthen your soft skills. Especially if you’re able to do it in an observable way.
- Delivering feedback – state the situation clearly and explain what’s the next step.
- Delivering praises – implicit, explicit, sincere act
- Delivering apologies – immediate willingness to apologize, acknowledge the harm,
Building credibility through soft skills
Credibility is the cornerstone of effective communication. Trusting one another makes interactions a lot easier. Vitor thinks credibility comes with hard work and its ingredients are resilience, humility, flexibility and other elements. It’s something we will spend our whole lives crafting, keeping and improving. He shares some of the qualities dependable professionals develop to build a solid reputation:
- Engagement – Comes with understanding your audience. Be humble, listen, take notes, ask questions. You’ll become a better communicator when you learn about other people’s perspectives on important matters.
- Optimism – Happiness is contagious! Sure you don’t want to smile all the time and look fake. But make sure your energy comes out in the way you communicate.
- Humility – Arrogance ruins a good conversation. And doesn’t help your credibility either. Practice active listening. That means truly paying attention and recognizing coworkers abilities and achievements. “Just think of everyone you meet as being on their way to greatness”, Vitor says.
- Growth mindset – Acknowledging your mistakes doesn’t hurt your credibility, it makes it stronger. Let people know about your missteps, share what you learned from them, and talk about what you are doing to improve.
- Extreme ownership – Being true to who you really are gives you immense strength. Be prepared to own your responsibility in every project, do the “homework” for every debrief meeting, take up the space meant for you and behave accordingly.
Are you ready?
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