Engineering Influence and Forgetting the Soft Skills

QCon San Francisco 2024

Session Psychology

Engineering Influence and Forgetting the Soft Skills

Wednesday Nov 20 / 11:45AM PST, Ballroom BC

Abstract

Soft skills are overrated and dangerously oversold! The stigma with soft skills comes from the soft definition of these skills and gets confounded broadly with "being a people's person."  What if you could engineer getting more influence, driving a stronger culture, and being more effective as a leader? This talk takes a hard look into the biology of the brain and using the psychological underpinnings to make us truly exceptional. We will explore the relationship between AI and leadership by drawing insights from Work and Organizational Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Neuropsychology. You will walk away with new, concrete tools to apply in your daily interactions to increase collaboration, commitment, and ownership across your organization.

Interview

As Co-founder of Bravely, my core focus is elevating leadership at Tech companies to the highest possible level. This means being excellent on the content and strong on relationships.

My motivation comes from the deep belief that working with the brain leads to smarter choices and stronger relationships. Knowledge is power; knowing how to work with your own brain is a superpower that will literally improve every aspect of your life -  work and private. 

Everybody is welcome. Whether you're struggling to build relationships; influence others; deal with your emotions; handle challenging people; say no; give or receive feedback; speak up - if you know how your brain works in challenging situations, you will gain access to the tools to regulate it and change your behaviour.

Concrete skills to achieve your desired results in your own behaviour and/or the responses of others.

Humanity. The loss of psychological safety and trust in inter-human relationships due to the blurred lines between AI and humanity. 

Topics

Psychology Tech Leadership Communication Psychological Safety Trust
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2024 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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