Interactions with people are omnipresent. In a professional context, both hard and soft skills (or social skills) are necessary to get things done. Since many architects are by nature analytical thinkers with an engineering mindset, hard skills are typically their strength and brilliant ideas, visions, innovative plans or solutions are a product of their work. However, the most brilliant idea is worthless when it is not realized. As Thomas Edison once said “Vision without execution is hallucination.” Brilliant ideas don’t sell themselves. In order to create support for the idea, we need to interact and collaborate with different stakeholders who have their own perspective, needs and beliefs. Therefore, social skills are crucial when evangelizing and elaborating on an idea. Developing social skills is a never ending process.
I’ve recently read the book “People skills for analytical thinkers” from Gilbert Eijkelenboom. In his book, the author guides you through a 4-step process and is offering 26 practical guiding principles for improving your people skills. The information in the book is based on academical research and personal experience of the author.
When interacting with others, we often apply – unconsciously – behavioral patterns (algorithms) which are the result of our experiences of the past. Our behavior is the end result of an analytical process in our brain that is driven by rational facts and emotional feelings. Sometimes our default behavior does not contribute to a goal that we want to achieve.
By becoming self-aware we can gain more insight in our beneficial and harmful behavioral patterns. Understanding why we behave in a particular way is an important step if we want to be more effective in our interaction with others. Once we are able to recognize our behavioral pattern in a specific situation, we can optimize and change our behavior in order to improve our interactions. Others also have their needs and beliefs and understanding the behavioral patterns of others will result in better interactions, stronger relationships and will increase your influence. Being able to steer our own behavior while understanding the behavior of other people are key success factors you need to master before being able to influence the behavior of other people. By focussing not only on your own goals and perspective but also on the goals and perspective of the other, your persuasion power will increase.