Hello guys,
Today I am going to post something interesting that I learned through time with my work experience. This time I’m not talking about technical skills, I’m talking about the soft skills and how you can be a better person every day by learning from the constructive critics and ditching the destructive ones that don’t give you any benefit.
I am also sharing what some successful companies are already doing in the Silicon Valley which Jacqueline Yumi Asano explained in her article (it is in Portuguese, but you can check it bellow in the Resources part).
Inspire people
Say sorry, you are not a machine and you are going to fail at some point
If you want to be a trustworthy person at your workplace, you need to show that you are fair and you recognise when you fail. Saying sorry will show that you are humble enough to have the trust of anyone.
Strength the individual
Nothing is more empowering than supporting people to learn something and improve themselves. Everybody wins when this happens. Ask yourself if 20% of your time is about learning or you just do the same task over and over again. Do you have challenges in your company ? Are you growing in this company ?
You might be asking how can you identify if a company will improve you or not before even starting there? Check how they write their specs and roles. Are they asking for specific technologies or are they looking for generalist professionals ? A good company will look for someone that is a machine learning person and not someone that has a fixed technology in their skillset. That means the company will follow the latest technologies and you will be learning most of the time.
We don’t’ assign the work for our developers. They assign up for work LiveRamp
Don’t under estimate the power of the vision and direction
Do you have a clear version of your goal ? Does your company is taking you to this goal ? This is extremely important for your future and you don’t have time to lose. So, double check if your company helps you to achieve this goal and if you have a clear vision and direction to follow.
If not, there is not too much you can do apart from start looking for a place where you can clearly see it leading you to your goals in, let’s say, a years time.
Get away from tyrant bosses, look for a strong bond of trust on both sides
If you ever worked in a place where your manager use his lead position to decide something rather than arguments, what are you even doing in a place like this? It is definitely a toxic environment and with this lack of trust it is better to look for something new because discussions and arguments would be pointless. Your opinion will mean nothing, even if you have arguments, analysis and your own carrier experience. Your manager will always ignore what you are saying.
Free choices matter and you should work in a place where your opinion is not invalidated.
Our product is great because we show why we are recommending an specific insight. This way we build trust. François Lopitaux, Director of Product, Salesforce
Surround yourself with passionate, but not blind people
Passionate is different from blindness. I just want to highlight that I have found many people that come across as passionate people but in reality they were completely blind and never accepted to have failures on their ideas/projects/implementation. This is quite common among developers, for that reason there is this assumption that a QA will always be a developer enemy, since it is part of our job to show bugs on their implementations.
A smart person knows how beneficial is to have a constructive critic and feel glad to have them. So, surround yourself with passionate and smart people. Be smart, take responsibility, accept the failures and improve them.
Get others opinions to empower people
I can only see advantages on doing that. Share knowledge as soon as possible with everybody in your team. Is this a new feature ? So, get everybody together and expose your idea, get others opinions. Don’t ignore them, every idea has a value. You can find bugs in the early stages and also this builds an ownership feeling.
Does the company take your opinion into account ? Do you feel that you have autonomy ? There is nothing more empowering than showing that you care about everybody opinions. Everybody feels valued and this will increase the trust on your work since they know that they can be honest with you.
We don’t need as PMs to tell UX Designer what they need to look at Pinterest
Resources:
Rafaela Azevedo 