Many years ago, whilst
taking a very important course that eventually would change my life, someone
mocked of engineers in general due to their lack of communication skills and
general sensitivity to other people.
As I identify myself as a
technical person, I felt… It was fair, but not a nice thing to hear.
I understand what this
person has meant as it is very common a technical person using logic instead of
feelings while taking a decision or talking to other people, and although it
works well, it doesn’t cover all dimensions.
A good example for me was
when I was a programmer. My aim was to create good effective software for
users, to save their time and to help the organization, but I really didn’t
take in account their difficulties or issues at the time of implementation. One
of the features of a particular application was a command that would display
the present time (yes, I am talking about
long, long time ago, when computers did not display the present time). The
user struggled with that function and eventually, to save memory, I planned to
eliminate it completely, and of course, I’ve blamed the user! Today, I see the
problem was not the lack of effort by him, but my lack of proper communication
and effort to training the user.
Many years later, an
auditor shared a story. The company was going through SAP implementation,
something that is costly in terms of money and energy, and many times have resistance
from the part of users.
His company used to produce
and sold beers. In this particular case, they were dealing with the delivery: a
truck would come, present a sheet with all the order details, the person in
charge would input that into the system, receive the proper authorization; then
the truck would load the boxes of beer and leave.
However, the computer was
far from the gate, about 100 meters, so the employee used to take time to reach
there… due to that, he started to get slack in relation to the system, giving
the beers and later inputting the information. Eventually, the company was
robbed – it was only when the young man introduced the details realized the
order was fake, which was too late, as the truck had left already. My surprise
was that the auditor did not blame the employee and worked hard to fix the
situation. Technical people do understand others…
A few years later, I had
the opportunity to work with a very technical team. When we were planning the
workshop, as a surprise, one of our meetings took place at the general
manager’s home as he was still on vacation. He opened his house and the hearts
of the family to us and it was beautiful to see a very human interaction. I was
inspired and the workshop with them started by identifying their dreams…
Nobody is uni-dimensional.
We are very complex people, with many layers and many levels. If you are a
technical person, enjoy that soft side; if you have a friend or relative who is
technical, enjoy their soft side. It is always there…
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