Using communication frameworks to become a better engineering leader

Markus Tacker

Senior R&D Engineer, Nordic Semiconductor, Trondheim

Software crafter. Code donor. Mentor. Speaker. Conference & Community builder. Camper.

@coderbyheart

Stop becoming a full stack developer

your efforts are futile

Your skills?

“Fullstack”

Your skills are domain specific

Technical skills have a limited lifetime

You will never truly be

a principal full stack developer.

Don’t frame your function in isolation

It’s impossible to achieve greatness solely on your own.

You will always lack important skills

to realize the best work you have ever done.

You will always depend on others

to work with you

Writing software is a team effort

We want people to be like our code

Just explain, really slowly, what’s wrong with them
for the problem to go away.

I’d love to have more software problems

but I really only have people problems.

Software has unlimited capacity for mistakes

People do not.

Where to start?

at being better than that.

Communication frameworks

Algorithms for human interaction.

Nonviolent communication

Observations
Feelings (that’s the hard one!)
Needs
Requests

Separate emotions from the message,
and create mutual understanding.

Four-sides model

Every message encodes multiple aspects.

The five love languages

words of affirmation (compliments)
quality time
receiving gifts
acts of service
physical touch

What motivates them and you?

The core protocols

For people who love structure.

My tip: read it!

Structured RFC process

How to make decisions,
when everybody has a say.

Ladder of Leadership

Be intentional about rules, decisions and hierarchies.

The real power skill

effective communication

The way you communicate and handle conflict influences your personal and your team’s wellbeing tremendously.

This is key to creating workplaces where people feel valued, heard, and understood, and where they feel safe to voice concerns, criticism, and can propose radical ideas.

I hope I inspired you to invest more time in your real power skills: the way you communicate and handle conflict influences your personal and your team’s wellbeing tremendously. This is key to creating workplaces where people feel valued, heard, and understood, and where they feel safe to voice concerns, criticism, and can propose radical ideas.

I am just beginning to explore this space and I already have enough material for many years to come. I also invite you to run a session at an open-space you attend, like I did at the JSCraftCamp 2019, this is a great way to spread awareness about this topic and also collect input from others on the resources they use to improve their collaboration skills. One outcome of this session was a list of book recommendations: Crucial Conversations, Adversaries into Allies, and The Coaching Habit.

Overly focusing on tech is how you end up with the skills of a senior engineer and the experience of a junior human being.

– Kelsey Hightower

Thank you!

Please share your feedback!

m@coderbyheart.com
@coderbyheart

Blog post with all the links:
bit.ly/codecomm