People skills for geeks
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Posted by John Rusk on 1 July 2010 | 1 Comments
Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend, and speak at, the inaugural AgileRoots conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference was organised by the outstanding Agile community that has developed in the Salt Lake area. It was a great privilege to be able to visit the official birthplace of Agile (the Agile Manifesto was written at a ski resort near Salt Lake City) and to meet so many of the people I have corresponded with online. The core of my presentation was "people skills for geeks". When I first entered the industry, I had little skill or confidence in dealing with other people, but the ability to present clearly and communicate confidently with both technical and non-technical audiences, is now a required skill for all of us working in IT. In this videoed extract from my presentation, I outline my own personal journey, talk about the fact that "people skills" can be learned, and re-iterate the original Agile goal of valuing people and their interactions. I hope you find it useful and invite you to share any other communication tips that have worked well for you. (And a big thanks to my colleagues at Optimation over the past five years for helping me learn the things I describe in this talk. Thanks also to Optimation for sponsoring my travel :-). )
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I was a member of Toastmasters for about 6 years and found it a great organisation to help communication skills. Interestingly it was the listening skills that improved most and the presentation skills came along for the ride.
Posted by John Murphy, 22/07/2010 3:18pm (2 years ago)
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