More Effective Interactions (Teams)

While every team can improve if individuals improve their software development capabilities, many teams struggle because of poor interactions. Agile development requires face-to-face collaboration, so frictionless interactions are more important in Agile development than they were in Sequential development. After working with leaders at many companies over the past 20 years, I believe the following interaction soft skills are most helpful to Agile team members.

Emotional intelligence

If you’ve ever seen two developers engage in an email flame war over technical minutia, you’ve seen evidence of the need for greater emotional intelligence on software teams.

For leaders, the value of emotional intelligence has been well-documented. Daniel Goleman reported in the Harvard Business Review that 90% of the difference between star performers and average performers can be attributed to emotional intelligence (abbreviated as EQ) (Goleman, 2004). A study of 500 executive search candidates found that EQ was a significantly better predictor of placement success than intelligence or experience (Cherniss, 1999).

Technical contributors can benefit from increasing awareness of their own emotional states and the emotional states in others, improving emotional self-regulation, and managing relationships with others.

I find the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s RULER Model to be a useful resource in this area (Yale, 2019). RULER stands for:

• Recognizing emotions in self and others

• Understanding the causes and consequences of emotions

• Labeling emotions accurately

• Expressing emotions appropriately

• Regulating emotions effectively

The RULER model was originally developed for work with adolescents and was subsequently adapted for use with adults, especially adults working in groups.

Communicating with different personality types

Sales staff intuitively understand that people communicate in different ways and adapt their communications appropriately.

Technical staff often need explicit instruction and encouragement to adapt their communication style to suit their audience.

A study of personality types helps technical staff understand that different people emphasize different kinds of factors in their decision-making (e.g., data vs. people’s feelings). They express themselves differently, and they react differently under stress. Labeling the variations, seeing how the variations apply to others, and self-assessing is often an eye-opening experience for technical staff members.

I find the Social Styles model to be an intuitive tool for understanding personality types (Mulqueen, 2014). Social Styles are based on observable behaviors; you don’t need to know someone’s test results to understand how to interact with them. DISC, Myers Briggs, and Color Codes are similarly useful.

The value of appreciating differences in social styles is most obvious in improving interactions among different types of staff. As illustrated below, according to the Social Styles model, technical staff tend to be on the Analytical side, sales staff tend to be Expressive, and management tends to be the Drivers. (These are all generalizations with numerous exceptions, of course.)