CEO and Co-Founder at Trinetix.
Finding the right talent is half the battle amid the high demand for software engineers and the 34% voluntary turnover rate across tech companies. Only after identifying skilled tech experts, organizing them into a well-performing team and securing its synergy with other departments can leaders tap into the full potential of digital transformation. However, each of these stages comes with many roadblocks that can send you back to square one.
While building centers of excellence for my company and our clients, I’ve learned that most of these roadblocks stem from skill priorities. In the pursuit of building a strong engineering team, recruiters often put hard skills first and soft skills second. As a result, they find candidates who fit the bill. However, after a couple of months working on an in-house product, the newly hired experts leave without delivering the expected value—and the cycle begins anew while enterprise transformation is put on hold.
Indeed, technical skills and expertise are the foundation blocks that enable transformation strategies, but they need something to hold them together, helping them interact and work as one. Soft skills fulfill that role, creating a synergy between different roles within the team and securing a single view of the development roadmap.
Overlooking such skills limits the team’s potential for driving innovation and problem solving. As stated in a McKinsey survey, a mismatch between soft skills and hard skills is particularly evident when recruiting teams for business process automation. Due to this, business leaders interested in building a strong engineering team need to reimagine their recruiting strategy, making it more flexible and inclusive regarding soft skills.
Below are four must-have soft skills that make a difference between troubleshooters and game-changers:
Opportunism
The best engineering team is one that doesn’t wait until you come to them with improvement plans. Instead, it dives into opportunities headfirst, exploring patterns and workflows that could benefit from digital transformation and bringing them to you. Such a team is always looking for disruptions to harness, best practices to implement and approaches to try out, communicating the outcome and expectations in great detail.
It’s also worth noting that opportunism must go hand in hand with leadership—it’s the team leaders who engage with team members, gather their insights and deliver them to decision makers. They explain the future value, keep promises realistic and evangelize innovation. Identifying and nurturing such leaders through communication and monitoring takes some time, but it gives back tenfold.
Flexibility
In my experience, flexibility is a soft skill that tops many hard skills. An agile mindset makes it possible to master new tech stacks and organizational patterns, but a rigid skill set leaves no room for fresh insights and growth, not to mention the resilience needed to overcome sudden bumps along the development journey.
For instance, what if a development strategy changes but deadlines don’t? Engineering teams that can take such turnabouts in stride and adapt become life-savers. Experts who are open to learning and trying new practices and aren’t afraid of a challenge must be at the core of your engineering team.
Another valuable point of flexible teams is that they always let you know what they need for their work on a project. They don’t hesitate to admit they lack data—they are more focused on finding the solution, so they will do or master whatever it takes to complete their goal. Such readiness allows for healthy, back-and-forth communication, which accelerates the development cycle.
Proactivity
When investing in digital transformation, decision makers need to minimize organizational resistance by evangelizing the change to their employees. Such a task can be tricky, as it requires a detailed understanding of the features as well as their synergy with the brand’s business vision and the department’s key duties.
To make matters easier, you want your engineering team to be on your side from the get-go. You want proactive team members who engage with other departments, gather their feedback and educate them on the future solution, hyping them up for the transition. Building a team of engineering talent involves building an engineering culture where your business vision and your department’s needs are explored, analyzed and used for adding the capabilities your enterprise needs.
Diversity
While not technically a skill, diversity is a component that enriches all the soft skills mentioned above. Compared to more traditional team setups, diverse teams have been documented to generate more long-term value for enterprises, outperforming peers and increasing profitability. Speaking from personal experience, rejecting stiff candidate search criteria and embracing the diversity of backgrounds, skill sets and experiences was the decision that delivered the biggest impact on our performance.
We started expanding our talent pool by creating several candidate profiles for each role on the engineering team. Every profile featured a detailed set of backgrounds, soft skills and hard skills we found beneficial for our company. After using the updated and expanded search qualifiers, we discovered many new talents that would have been overlooked otherwise.
As a result, we enriched our team dynamic with fresh perspectives and approaches, which let us optimize our development cycles and brave into new territories.
What’s the most important part of leading an engineering team?
Building a team of engineering professionals is about more than just finding the right people; it’s about acknowledging and respecting their contribution by meeting their expectations and supporting their emotional and mental well-being. Even the most proactive and passionate teams aren’t immune to burnout and stress. So, if you want your engineering teams’ soft and hard skills to generate long-term value, create an accommodating environment by enabling a healthy work-life balance, ensuring regular breaks and being attentive to your team’s feedback.
Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Read the full article here