I think understanding people goes a long way toward working cohesively and maintaining good relationships with them. Two books that I found really helpful are How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie and It’s Your Ship by Michael Abrashoff.

A few cliff notes from my experience:

• People are often driven by their emotions at the expense of logic. Be quick to forgive this. We’re all that way sometimes. Part of the human condition.

• Use knowledge of the former to your advantage. People like to be trusted and given ownership of their job. Focus on clearing obstacles and enabling your team rather than micromanaging their work. If they learn to trust you, they will be much more prone to come to you for help before things have gotten out of control.

• Balance criticism with praise. You need the job done right but your main goal is to help your team succeed. Their success is your success. Have hard conversations with them when necessary. Be direct but be kind. Have these conversations in private. As much as people need to know when they’re not performing as expected, they also need to know when they are. And, I would argue that they need this more. When someone does something right, tell them and mean it. It’s ok and sometimes even good to do this publicly. “John, that feature you implemented was great and your code quality was top notch. Thanks for doing that.” It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

• Take responsibility for your own failures. You’re not perfect. None of us are. You will earn a lot of respect by being willing to own your mistakes, not to mention it shows you’re a person with integrity and at the end of the day, it’s worth more to know you can sleep at night because you did the right thing even if was hard.

Good luck! I hope this helps.

For me, I’ve just accepted I may not be everyone’s cup of tea. And that’s fine. That doesn’t make me any less valuable.

For me the risks are a lot higher since I’ve been looking nonstop for work (in software) for the past 2-3 years. I realize I do have a strong personality: I love to get engaged in a project and really own it. Whenever I feel a potential employer/client trying to play it “cool,” I’ll often try to engage with them more and try to provide more value for them.

I do try to temper this. But at the end of the day I realize that while most people may not want someone engaged with their team, there are some companies that are desperate for people like me. And I just need to find out who they are…it just might take a while.

I’m very successful in what I do in IT and interact with many business users. They just come to accept that when I go on a technical jargon tangent, I will rehash it for them in layman’s terms once I speak the incomprehensible version which gives me the opportunity to get my thoughts in order. I am slowly learning to do that part in my head and to know my audience. I found that reading books on philosophy, politics, communication, and time management have all helped me to make my discussions with other it’s a strategic game where I know that I have to say things properly to accomplish the goal. If you realize that why you are opening your mouth is to accomplish a specific objective, then you can target just that objective and bulletpoints you other thoughts in notes for later. I’ve gone as far as to state allowed what I needed to and sent my bulletpoints soon after as either meeting notes or in the meeting chat if on zoom.