I have mentioned the book Seeing
Yourself as Others Do to a number of people over the last several weeks.
We have been talking a lot about soft skills over the past couple of months at our ArcReady program
and I have mentioned it each time I have presented the session. I also attended
a professional development training session last week where skills like listening,
negotiation, body language and strategic thinking came up quite a bit. I have
mentioned it enough that I thought that I would go ahead and write up a proper review
of it.
Disclaimer
Before I jump into the review, I have to disclose that I know the two authors of this
book personally. Carol Keers was my coach a few years ago and I also got to
know Tom Mungavan while I was going through the coaching experience with Carol; they
both work for Change Masters. I
also got an advanced copy of the book to review, and as part of the review I gave
them a quote to include in the book. While I consider them my friends, I have
tried to not let that affect this review. The fantastic experience that I had
with Carol as my coach probably did have an impact on the review. 
Quick Review
There a probably 1000+ books that cover soft skills from a variety of perspectives
and I am sure that many of them are quite good. Seeing Yourself As Others Do
has a few advantages that make it a great book to read if you are interested in exploring
soft skills. The book is very easy to read, written in conversational that that
is easy to consume and uses “real world” stories as examples to communicate the techniques
presented. It is so easy to read that if you take it along on a business trip,
you will probably have it finished by the time you get back. One of the best
things about the book is that within a couple of chapters, you will already be able
to start applying the techniques that are presented to you. Finally you will
learn about yourself, not some program or theories that the author is presenting.
The Decade Shift
One of my favorite parts of the book and the coaching that I got from Carol years
ago is the concept of the decade shift. To summarize the concept: As you
move from decade to decade (from your 20s to your 30s to your 40s – not from the 1980s
to the 1990s) the expectations of you and how people expect you to behave changes.
Your job or your role may not change as your age does, but how other people treat
you will change and you will need to evolve your behavior in accordance with the change
in your age. At first glance it may seem “unfair” for the expectations to change,
but that is human nature. If you get nothing else out of this book, this section
will give you wonderful insight. One of the reasons this book has been on my
mind is that I re-read it over the past couple of weeks just as I turned 40, I figure
that would be a good time for a refresher course on the decade shift.
The importance of soft skills to an architect or developer
As I mentioned, we have been talking about soft skills in the latest ArcReady programs.
The “dirty secret” of the ArcReady content is that 95% of the content was not targeted
at architects in particular. Virtually all of the conversation would apply equally
well to any technical audience and most of it would apply to any
profession, even outside of technology altogether. We gave the content an architecture
slant simply by sighting examples from our own experience as software architects.
Since the content is really job agnostic, you might be asking yourself “Why did Microsoft
devote an entire series of their architecture program to soft skills”. The answer
to this question is two-fold, first Soft Skills are just as important as technology
skills to architects and developers. Secondly most architects and developers
could use some improvement in their soft skills and will make great leaps in their
career by making a small investment in soft skills.
