Our Focus on 9 Soft Skills
We’re really big on soft skills at Pixelocracy.
It stems from our belief that a workplace should consist of people with a personal drive for progress.
Progress can mean a lot of different things for different people. So it’s the leadership’s job to pave the way and help enforce and maintain a strong sense of self-management inside the company.
There’s also no great mystery about it.
Each group of people — essentially the definition of a company — believes in different things for different reasons.
We believe in self-management, self-reliance and self-drive.
To help sustain these traits as part of our company’s DNA, we try to cultivate and practice a set of specific soft skills, either in the form of quarterly retrospectives for each member and/or on a daily basis. The latter requires taking a step back and assessing a fast paced situation through the lens of coaching, which we admit can sometimes feel extraneous.
We also don’t discriminate.
While we focus on empathy for our current and future leaders, we coach everyone on these soft skills, from our Delivery Associates and Lead Software Engineers to our managers.
It’s also our primary focus for the first 4 weeks of our new members.
Our 3 Levels of Soft Skills
To help provide some context and structure on these 9 soft skills, we initially identified a set of 3 levels.
These come in the form of a “be an X” definition.
1/3 — Be a professional
Handling yourself.
Essentially what that has come to mean for us — and resonates across the board from our entry/junior positions to senior management — is sustaining self-management skills necessary for you not only to survive inside a fast paced software development house with multiple fronts, but to thrive as a self-sustaining individual.
These soft skills are mostly focused and practiced when things don’t go as planned, things are unexpected and at the last minute.
- Time management
You’ve got your day planned. How do you handle your allocation of time when not everything’s sorted through Jira tickets? - Task management
Again, all planned. But how do you handle your backlog when priorities are fluid and circumstances adjust most of the time? - Self management
Really, we all plan. But what happens when you wake up late or it takes 4 hours longer to complete something?
In retrospect, we practice these skills because we seriously hate micro management (we only use it as a tool in critical junctures such as releases and rather important deadlines).
We don’t want to keep asking you how’s that ticket going & why you dived in the wrong direction without telling no one. We trust and rely on you to bring these things forward yourself.
Nobody’s over your shoulder, ever. It’s up to you.
2/3 — Be a partner
Handling yourself with others.
It won’t come as a surprise that the next level of soft skills is of a similar mindset around you working together with other people. Just as our first set of base skills focused on your self-management, so do our partnership skills focus on your self-reliance inside a group setting.
These skills really stem from some of our principles, such as a partnership-based approach to our clients and even in our belief on the hybrid model of office-remote work (which is also about self-management).
- Communication
Obvious one. But there’s a bigger challenge here. Communicating across multiple projects, teams and functions every day. - Analysis
Wait, what? We might rename this one in the future, but what it essentially means is communicating information across so many things in a two-way street manner. It’s a different ballgame. - Financial awareness
Yup. We don’t do time tracking. Instead, we use a value output method, that relies on self-management (duh). So, we need you — and we will teach you — to be aware of the financial workings of everyday work.
In retrospect, just as we practice the previous set of skills to help you achieve self-management, we practice these set of skills to help you achieve self-reliance as you work together with other self-managers.
Nope, financial awareness has nothing to do with managing finances or budgets (for the Software Engineers out there and in here).
3/3 — Be a leader
Handling others.
We don’t necessarily mean leadership positions or responsibilities with this level of skills — which can of course — but rather the leadership skills that can be practiced on top of being a professional partner with us.
These skills are built into our core when it comes to being able to handle the fast lane and drive safely in it.
- Ownership
It’s never a task. It’s an ownership transfer. Ownership transfers do not require completing a task, but never allowing the ball to drop. - Proactiveness
Ah, our holy grail. Can you protect us from something that’s 7.5 weeks ahead? 6 months ahead? Tell the client we found a horrible bug on production that destroyed everything before they do. - Coordination
Being a maestro that uses all 8 skills like an orchestra. This one’s a little hard to describe, but it basically helps us transform, say, bad situations to positive outlooks and overflow of information to channels of actions.
In retrospect, just as you practice the previous set of skills into becoming a self-managing and self-reliant member in a group of self-managers, leadership skills extend these traits into helping you become self-driven.
Questions or feedback?
Feel free to reach out to George Kary, our Director of Services.
