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Monday, 28 February 2011 14:49

No One Wants to Work With a Jerk

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Kupe_March1The debate rages on about technical skills versus the other skills. You know the one about the hard skills of our profession vs. the soft skills of our profession. Which is more important and why. This never gets old for me. As I thought of this title and topic, I realized I wrote about this once before in my post, Will the Real BA Foundational Skills Please Stand Up. Today's conversation extends that idea.

In the business environment we are always looking for ways to stand out from the crowd and get that desired promotion or additional responsibility or in some cases stay off the chopping block. How do you do that? Do you fine tune your Use Case writing ability or draw better looking workflow diagrams? Yes, if communicating the requirements improves. No, if your goal is to say I can use more symbols than the next guy. Having experience and knowledge of accepted practices is an entry point for most mid level BA jobs and definitely for senior positions. You have to have these skills, be proficient with them, and you have to stay up to date with new techniques that arise. But you hone these skills enough for parity. You need to be able to meet expectations here, but over achieving is not necessary.

Where you do need to over achieve is in your communication skills, your interaction skills, your leadership skills, mentoring skills, etc. Why, because people do not want to work with jerks. Plain and simple, people want to work with those they like and connect with. Think about who you like to work with? Who do you not like to work with? I bet you the ones you don't like to work with have some jerk quality to them. Are the smartest most technically qualified people the ones you want to work with all the time? Last week I was speaking with a manager that said if an employee is a jerk they are useless to his team regardless of their technical ability. In our environment we rarely have positions that do not require collaboration and teamwork. If someone is a jerk they kill collaboration and teamwork. Their technical skills usually can not compensate for the overall impact they have on the team. If you follow US football you know Terrell Owens, wide receiver, fits the bill of the jerk with great technical ability. In his prime he was the best receiver out there. But he bounced around teams because he was a detriment to the team. His number of catches and touchdowns was just not enough for teams to keep him around.

The next question that comes to mind for me is the timing of developing your hard and soft skills. In the early stages of your career you need to work on the technical aspects to get to the parity level with your peers. But, don't just focus on the technical aspect. For every technique you learn you should be learning best ways to elicit the information to use the technique, you should learn how to best communicate the results to different stakeholders. Once you feel you hit parity with the necessary techniques go hard for the softer skills. Work to be viewed as the best communicator, the one everyone comes to for advice, the leader of your team or group.

I want to hear your thoughts. Let's debate and learn from each other. Just don't be jerks about it!

To your success,

Kupe

Don't forget to leave your comments below.

Read 6185 times Last modified on Tuesday, 27 March 2012 13:46
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Kupe Kupersmith

Kupe Kupersmith, President, B2T Training, possesses over 14 years of experience in the business analysis profession. He has served as the lead Business Analyst and Project Manager on projects in the utility, television and sports management and marketing industries. Kupe is a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) through the IIBA. Kupe is a trained improvisational actor and performed for years in clubs around Atlanta.  He is a big believer that we can work and learn while having fun. Kupe is a connector and has a goal in life to meet everyone!

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Comments  

 
0 # Andrew Attard 2011-03-01 04:58
As a soon-to-be graduate I'm speaking from experience mainly working in academic projects, but I find that in most cases with group work there is always "that guy". I'm not talking about the one that does nothing all term, but the one that loves to point fingers and loves to get everyone worked up. They feel that once their assigned work is done, they can just sit back and relax, with the mindset being "Well I did what I was supposed to do, why should I have to work harder to make up for someone else's slacking?". In a sense I understand where they are coming from, but honestly that sort of mindset does not help the project and I consider it to be a jerk quality. Unless the individual is some sort of programming god, I would often prefer to have someone that is ready and willing to contribute to all parts of the project so the entire team can finish quicker. At least in an academic environment, this is a pretty common issue. So, I tend to agree that your hard skills can only take you so far, after which your ability to support your co-workers and collaborate becomes significantly more important.
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0 # Bill Howard 2011-03-01 05:07
Teh Harvard Business Review had an article that grew into a book titled "The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't" (apologize if the wordng offends anyone, but that is the actual title of the book). If you are serious about this topic, it is worth a read.
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0 # Cathy Brunsting 2011-03-01 05:19
I totally agree with you Kupe. I know that when I am hiring, the technical skills are necessary to get you in the door, but the soft skills are what get you the job. This is especially true in working in a consulting role. Each project is unique, with different drivers. The ability to collaborate and communicate effectively is critical to enable the team to successfully deliver a solution that meets the client's needs. Another critical soft skill is the ability to be able to determine which of the hard skills to apply to a given situation. No requirements technique is going to solve the problem in all cases. A recent project that I was on had extremely tight deadlines. Rather than focusing on formal requirements, I took the approach of simple report mockups, with bullet points for the business rules. The client was able to easily understand what they would be receiving and the development team was able to clearly understand what they needed to deliver. Everything else we handled as ongoing questions, open communication and close collaboration. The team was able to successfully deliver what the client needed. They also earned the trust of the client and more business, without ever having a signed off requirements document. So, the project was successful in many ways, just not by traditional standards.
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0 # Deb Furlong 2011-03-01 07:13
Cathy- I was gratified to read your comment because, as a Project Manager/Busines s Analyst/Develop ment Team Lead/etc/etc/et c, one of the biggest problems I have is with those who insist on following the PMI model to the letter. I think the key key phrase in your comment is : "... skills to apply to a given situation." Flexibility is ever so much more rewarding and successful!
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0 # Ron Blanco 2011-03-01 07:42
In the interest of considering all perspectives, I will state this is sound advice. However, too much of a "good thing" can also be detrimental to a project's success. Soft skills are absolutely necessary to take both you and your project to the next level. But I have had the unfortunate experience of working with those who are very proficient at their soft skills but don’t bring any real value to the team. I’m talking about the “other guy/gal” we all have worked with in the past. You know the one… They are a great person to be around and appear to be competent, but we just cannot seem to get what we need from them to keep the project moving along. Sure, they get along well with everyone on the team but after awhile, they become a bit of a burden to the team because they aren't producing. Kup e, you make a great point about ensuring parity is achieved. However, I am not sure I would totally agree with the statement; “Once you feel you hit parity with the necessary techniques go hard for the softer skills.”! This could be misinterpreted as focussing primarily on the soft skills and neglecting the technical skills once parity is achieved. The truth is both are equally important to bring real value to the table. The person I want on my team is the person who is very technical AND very easy to work with!
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0 # Govinda Alahari 2011-03-01 15:45
I Govinda Alahari, have been working as a Business Analyst for the past 2 years and currently working on U.S Healthcare domain, as you have indicated in the above disclaimer I guess my lack of technical knowledge (as I am from a non technical background, life sciences to be precise) will not be a hinderance for me in my future endeavours, and that actually provided me a lot of comfort. thank you.
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0 # Stuart Gomersall 2011-03-01 17:19
Fully support the main message in this article. Some background: I work for the London office of our consulting firm and am involved in the recruitment of new staff (graduates and experienced hires). In our first interviews, we focus mainly on behavioural responses to a set of scenarios - e.g. poorly performing team member, how do you (as team lead) respond? We leave the technical skills to the new session, if there is one! Those skills you can teach, but the scenario responses tell us so much more that a use case model example can about whether some one will fit into our team and a project team. Some additional reading on the topic is Patrick Lencioni's "The five dysfunctions of a team" where he talks about a similar topic as mentioned in the article regarding Terrell Owens - great individual performers aren't necessarily best fit for the team. Thanks - great article.
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0 # vergis thomas 2011-03-01 18:57
I fully agree Soft skills is number one for a BA (why BA this applies to any profession in any industry). However soft skills alone is not enough you need the hard skills inside you to do your work. A great combination of hard skills and soft skills means a great professional.
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0 # Beresford Davidson 2011-03-01 22:28
I communicate and try to work with all stakeholders on a systems development team; I can never figure out who is a jerk. Never can find time to figure-out who is the jerk; the Mother Teresa; the pope; the cleaning person or the slacker; for there is so much to do with very little time to spare for a smile or LOL.
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0 # Jen 2011-03-02 07:21
I work in an organisation that values technical skills WAY above soft skills. This makes for a real challenge, not only internally but externally as we are a consulting firm. Trying to communicate information and bad news when your team have a lack of soft skills makes for a challenging time and puts a huge amount of pressure of the Project Managers and Account Managers, as these people usually have to clean up after the team ... Soft skills are something that are not, IMHO, valued highly enough in our education systems, which puts pressure on businesses to teach these skills to their graduates. Is this a bad thing??
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+1 # Cathy Brunsting 2011-03-03 06:24
Jen - I think that the reason that "soft" skills are valued as highly in our education system is that they are harder to teach and evaluate test scores for. So, schools focus on the more measurable "hard" skills. There may be some factor of students valuing the soft skills less too - what does is mean to say i have an "A" in collaboration. I would recommend to individuals who want to succeed and grow in their careers, though, to seek out ways to learn the softer skills. If not through formal education, then by getting a mentor who can help them grow. Even if a company doesn't openly value the softer skills, I believe that people who master these skills will advance farther (or find more fulfilling employment elsewhere!) than the individuals who do not. Ron - I would content that the "friendly, but ineffective guy/gal" is really just another form of "jerk". It just takes people longer to figure out that they are jerks :-) The soft skills that I find valuable are things like "collaborating well with others", "making and meeting committments", "productive communication", "flexibility in applying skills", etc. Ones that are productive to the team and help the team be able to deliver quality in a consistent way.
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0 # Kupe 2011-03-10 19:48
Hi everyone, Sorr y for the late replies to your great comments. I was on vacation. @Bil l Howard and Stuart Gomersall- Thanks for the book suggestion. I'll get those on my list! @Ron Blanco - My feeling is you need to have both technical and soft skills. Focusing only on soft wont get you far and focusing only on the technical wont get you far. It is the combination. But, at some point how do you differentiate yourself? Like @Cathy Brunsting and @Stuart Gomersall pointed out, the technical skills are the entry point. You have to have them, but they are not differentiators . My next blog touches on being multi-lingual! I hope you enjoy it!
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0 # Kupe 2011-03-10 23:27
Just saw this quote. It applies to this conversation! "The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people." -- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th U.S. president
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+1 # Angie 2011-03-12 06:21
Loved Cathy's comments. This blog hit my buttons. I agree with you. Kupe! Put another way- if a BA creates a nice, neat consistent process workflow diagram that lays out their perspective of what they think happens in the business domain. Good for for him. The BA knows how to describe a process using the right symbols and begins the requirements commuication using an appropriate tool. Now in the process of working with the domain SME to confirm his assumptions, the same BA learns contradicting information but does not want to modify the workflow. He begins debating with the SME why his version is laid out better, clearer or more correct then what the SME is saying happens in the process. He says things like, " I get what you are saying but this is how the process works". How good is he really? What is someone going to remember about that BA? Certainly not the neat diagram. My mantra is alwys try to "be easy to do business with". In other words as Kupe says - don't be a jerk! Being a jerk follows you for a long time. And yes, you really have to have hard and soft skills but the soft ones combined with good hard skills will take you farther in your career.
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0 # Pete K-Star 2011-03-14 01:37
Here is another quite apt quote: "It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed." - Charles Darwin
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0 # Kupe 2011-03-14 02:42
Nice one Pete! I am going to have to add that to my improv presentation/wo rkshop! Thanks for sharing.
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