This blog post is actually not about Star Wars, I just needed an analogy for a disturbing piece of information: YOU ARE A SALES PERSON being in charge for selling yourself! I figured an average technologist would appreciate this message as much as young Skywalker liked the one in the title.

Why I provoke you? Think about it: this is late March and you are stuck at Heathrow because an inch of snow fell. Flights are cancelled, the crowd is getting enormous, ground personnel are as ugly as it gets and you still need to get your parents on THAT flight. OR: your true love has a problem with tremendous pain and the waiting room at the proctology is full to the brim, you want her to see the doctor BEFORE the dozens of those poor souls. I could go on for hours; you will encounter situations in your life when you have to close that deal. Selling yourself is one of those deals.

As usual this post was triggered by one of my colleagues. During a discussion I managed to push the “big red button” that resulted in an outburst of dissatisfaction about the fact that he would not get promoted this year. As the conversation went on a story unfolded that was more than just resentment about being treated unfairly, it showed a pattern I have seen before. The guy thought he deserved it; he was ready, while the committee thought he wasn’t. This post is about the root cause and a suggested remedy.

The way our educational system picks candidates for electrical engineering and IT/developer professions is fundamentally based on the students’ skills in mathematics. I still recall that only 60% of my class of electrical engineering would pass the math and theoretical electrical engineering final exams (the latter being applied math peppered with physics.) The thing is that even Rainman could have passed these exams if he had been good at math while Forrest Gump would have failed. (At that time I failed to take notice that Forrest was slightly more successful in monetary terms plus he got the woman he loved.) The whole system is geared towards folks with high IQ, being biased to facts over “fluffy things”, buying on face value and sometimes a bit weaker on EQ. The 17+ years one spends in the school system will make him/her believe that success depends mostly on his/her IQ and hard work while downplays the role of soft skills like empathy or communication. Then suddenly the rules of the game change and being smart does not cut it anymore. Houston, we have a problem! IQ alone is NOT enough (!@%$#), unfair, isn’t it? IQ is like the height of a professional basketball player, most of them are over 6 feet 4 inches (Magic Jordan was around 6 ft 6 in), but beyond this point height does not matter anymore, other traits like speed and passing skills do.

So let’s have a look at what matters in success. The rest of this post is based on two sources, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Daniel Pink’s TED talk about motivation.  With a minute of thinking you will name several other types of intelligence, linguistic, kinesthetic, musical or interpersonal intelligence being the obvious ones, so chances are one or more of these are at play. Since no post can exist without a geometry based explanation of a psychology related problem – I came up with this one: success is proportional to the area of the triangle defined by 3 factors  - analytical intelligence (IQ), emotional intelligence (EQ) and drive (passion to become really good at the selected subject matter).

On a diagram it looks like this:

The problem is that God - in his infinite wisdom - usually does not grant the same quantity of these to the same guy. There are examples that IQ can be improved with surgery or drugs (for details see Flowers for Algernon or Awakenings) but the improvement is temporary and comes with serious risks. The good news is that the folks I work with have plenty of IQ, so this is not an issue.

 How about drive (motivation)?  Well, this is difficult to produce a sustained level of motivation with external means. 

As a practicing dad of 3 teenager girls I dare to say that this is more than difficult, this is impossible to maintain enthusiasm say about Hungarian grammar, if they just don’t care. Carrot (I buy you tickets to the Imagine Dragons concert if you get an A) and stick (I put your MAC address on a blacklist in the Wi-Fi router if you get a C) will work only for a short time right after being applied. If we accept the following cause - effect sequence: Passion -> Activity -> Mastery -> Success, then we have to live with the fact that it either comes from within (intrinsic motivation) without any external pressure or you should look for something else that you really care about. There is a simple test to find out if you found the real thing, just answer this question: would you do it for free?

Let’s have a look at the emotional (practical) intelligence or the lack of it. A few examples on both sides:

• In 1921 Lewis Terman, a Stanford University psychologist (and a pioneer of the IQ test) started tracking 1000+ elementary school students with very high IQ to prove his theory that success depended mostly on the IQ of the person. He failed to prove his point.
• As a doctor you are more likely to be sued for a malpractice due to poor communication than for an actual medical mistake. Simply put, patients do not sue doctors they like.
• Ferruccio Lamborghini would have stayed in the tractor manufacturing business if had not been insulted by Enzo Ferrari when he brought up his concerns about his Ferrari.
• Robert Oppenheimer attempted to poison (!) his tutor at Cambridge University – and could get away with it because he had impressive communication skills.

The good news: John Erving was a bad speller since he struggled with dyslexia, but still managed to win the National Book Award for Fiction with The world according to Garp. Rick Allen from Def Leppard is a fine drummer although has a single arm. That is: you can improve your communication skills and can beef up your practical intelligence by hmm… practicing.

The aim of this blogpost is not to teach communications, just to demystify IQ as the ultimate key to success and to raise awareness about the importance of communication skills. As a starter here are a few basic rules:

• Know your own personality type and its relationship to other personalities (DISC or Myers – Briggs, does not matter, just know who you are!) Know your stakeholders’ personality and what the hot buttons are of that personality. Some folks love numbers, some other charts while others care about the story (and large Excel sheets are a no-no for them.)
• Know whom you want to serve – know who your stakeholders are and know what matters to them. Know what you can give and once you determined what they need and what you can provide, just go for it.
• “Yeah-But” was a Maya goddess who ate ideas for breakfast and defecated objections… Do not wake her up by telling her name. Delete the “yeah, but” from your dictionary.
• Extroverts, repeat after me: successful sales let the client speak more. You can substitute EQ with hearing skills, people tend to take a breath before speaking up (you know vocal cords need air to function). When you hear this type of breath taking, pause and listen. Your client is about to say something. If this does not work for you, remember what a CSMA/CD network does when two nodes “speak” at the same time: they stop transmitting.
• Keep in mind: if there is one thing your boss does not have enough that is TIME. Be concise in your written communication. If it does not fit on a single screen without scrolling, it is too long! (Did I tell you that your manager is the gatekeeper for your promotion?)
• Hold your horses on judgement; you may not see the entire picture. (Particularly applicable to those poor souls with a “J” at the end in their MBTI.) Even if you do, address the act, not the actor. Always give feedback in private and appraisal is public. (cc-ing everybody and his mother on a feedback mail will surely miss the goal.)
• Developers: Come out from your comfort zone and learn about the problems of your client, eg. bit of ITIL to understand your ops counterparts. Clients do not give crap about the programming elegance; they care about the business process your code helps to automate and the ease of use of that code.
• Treat others with respect! Respect is free and when applied with a bit of humor it can break the ice. As one put it: everybody is stupid, except they are stupid in another way.
• Keep in mind: decision making is neither linear nor sequential; in most cases the verdict is finished earlier than the indictment and the whole process is to justify the already existing judgment.

The final word on this blog post: IQ alone will not bring you success. If analytical intelligence and hard work are present, but the promo does not come chances are you have a communication deficiency. The good news is that you can improve this. Should you have questions or a counter argument, please let me know.