After a 40 year career plus an MBA, I know much about business models and theories. As an Asian man, I have built my career on technical expertise, and thrown myself 100% into advancing that skill set. Part of me always scoffed when reading articles about Emotional Intelligence at work.
A new Director joined our firm last year. He isn’t as qualified or as experienced in IT as I am, and I was frustrated that he could end up senior to me. Yet somehow, watching someone with advanced soft skills in communication, it is beginning to make sense to me. The world grows more complex every day, expertise is everywhere (including increasing AI) but people are stressed. Office Politics are everything when recession looms and colleagues can turn on each other like rats in a sack. Sometimes it is important to hold back on new developments if colleagues or stakeholders aren’t ready to join in with that path. I have to admit that I sometimes paid lip service to the importance of team skills and listening, but this is changing. Yesterday I had a 1:1 meeting with this new Director – with an impossibly long list of urgent matters – and yet I felt satisfied when he had to end the meeting after only 24 minutes because I felt that he had truly listened to each point I was making (without trying to solve each matter there and then).
I realise that my future career path must acknowledge the growing datasets affecting all of us in the world, and instead double my efforts to work with colleagues to grapple with all the information, change and complexity facing us each day.
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