This repo is a Clone of a Classroom(.المهارات المنسية لتنمية حياتك المهنية) course content made by Mohamed El-Geish and Ahmed Essam, all gratitude for their dedication and efforts.
- Introduction
- Presence and Communication
- Written Communications
- Persuasion Skills
- Feedback
- Thriving in Company Culture
- Trust
- Learning to Learn
Topics We Will Cover
- Topics/modules in classwork (still evolving)
- Any other topics from participants
Why Are We Talking about This
- Your job is not the current job; it's building repeat successes and growth over time (for yourself and others around you)
- What employers want (e.g., reliability) and how to be so good they can't live without you
- The importance of building a "personal brand" intentionally (being in the driver’s seat of your career)
- The importance of continual education and unlearning what holds us back (preconditioning can hinder our progress)
- Three dimensions to track: IQ (intelligence quotient), EQ (emotional quotient), and AQ (adaptability quotient); soft skills are actually the hard part
- Taking inventory of skills (see assigned exercise) and the importance of introspection
Module's Video Session
A Timely Example of Bad Communication
-
Henry Ward is the CEO of Carta, a company that helps startups keep track of equity ownership, which is highly confidential data. One of Carta's customers, Karri, complained publicly on X.com that Carta is using customers' confidential data to sell a new Carta product. Read Henry's response and choose the best course of action if you were Henry:
-
Choices
- Karri accused Carta publicly so Henry should counter-attack publicly as well
- Come up with excuses that no company is perfect and Carta will do better in the future
- Offer Karri a refund and free services for a year
- Rebuild trust by conducting an investigation and share apology, findings, and mitigations publicly
- Say nothing at all and hope that the news cycle moves on to another company's fiasco
Skills Introspection Exercise (15 Minutes)
- Please fill out the attached form. Important Note: Assignments are mandatory. Failing to submit an assignment will result in giving up your seat in this classroom. We have very limited capacity and we would like to focus on engaged attendees. Thanks!
- Skills Introspection Exercise (15 Minutes)
Presence and Communication - Assignment #1
-
Please fill out the quiz form and turn in the assignment. For the assignment to count, you have to turn it in. Thanks!
-
Resources
How NOT to Answer Questions at Work
-
Watch the attached video. If this were a conversation at work about the estimate of days a task would take, what can be done better?
-
Resources
How to Own the Narrative in Meetings?
-
Listen to the attached podcast episode. Based on the material, what’s a good way to handle disruptions in the flow of meetings/conversations?
-
Resources
Owning the Narrative
- AIM: Audience, Intent, Message
- Focused conversations (sticking to the agenda)
- How to own the narrative when answering questions (when to use "Answer, Explain, Educate" and other techniques)
- Answering adversarial questions
- Pocket questions (especially useful for presentations)
- What to do when you forget what to say next
- materials
The Power of Pause
-
“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” — Viktor Frankl
-
Frankl founded a school of psychology, logotherapy, which promotes the ability to endure through searching for meaning. The power of pause is in leveraging it to search, for meaning, for where the other person is coming from, for what we want to achieve — to frame a response that is thoughtful and meaningful. It’s a superpower that can be trained. The first step is to observe that the situation requires a pause. Meditation and other mindfulness practices help. Perhaps the first step is to acknowledge that, just like any other skill, learning is a journey and practice is lifelong. Here’s an example of Steve Jobs pausing for almost 20 seconds, on stage, to answer a loaded question thoughtfully.
Listening and Taking Notes
- Active listenting
- Why taking notes helps even if no one will read them
- Tools and tech to stay on top of things
- materials
Observing Without Judgment
- Why it is hard not to judge/evaluate; it’s what we do constantly
- How to observe without judging
- Advanced topic: “Negative Capability”
Entrainment and the Dance of Conversation
-
Watch the first six minutes of the attached video (or finish the rest, which is also good).
-
Entrainment in speech is a form of isopraxism (mirroring) when participants in a conversation match or find a middle ground for word choices, speech rate, tone, volume, etc. Here's an excerpt from an attached study:
"A phenomenon that has been repeatedly documented in human-human conversations is the tendency of interlocutors to become more similar to each other in the way they speak. This behavior, known in the literature as entrainment, accommodation or adaptation, has been shown to occur along several dimensions during human-human interaction, including: pronunciation (Pardo, 2006); choice of referring expressions (Brennan and Clark, 1996); syntactic structure (Reitter et al., 2011); turn-taking cues (Levitan et al., 2015b); choice of intonational contour (Gravano et al., 2015); and acoustic-prosodic behavior (Ward, Litman, 2007, Levitan, Hirschberg, 2011)... Entrainment has been associated with multiple social aspects in human-human conversations (Beňuš, 2014), such as degree of success in completing tasks (Nenkova, Gravano, Hirschberg, 2008, Reitter, Moore, 2014), perception of competence and social attractiveness (Street Jr, 1984, Levitan, Gravano, Hirschberg, 2011, Beňuš, Gravano, Levitan, Levitan, Willson, Hirschberg, 2014, Michalsky, Schoormann, 2017, Schweitzer, Lewandowski, 2014), and degree of speaker engagement (De Looze, Scherer, Vaughan, Campbell, 2014, Gravano, Beňuš, Levitan, Hirschberg, 2015)."
Disagreements and Hot Debates
- Why crucial and high-stakes conversations are necessary and threatening at the same time
- Getting to yes, si, oui, … (how culture plays a big role in disagreements)
- Disagree and critique in private; agree and praise in public
- Know the decision and work out the objections before calling for a (pro forma) meeting
- Negotiations: Never Split the Difference
- materials
Answering Questions
- Listening to understand, not to respond
- Asking clarifying questions before answering
- Answer, Explain, Educate
- Advanced topic: challenging the premise of statements disguised as questions and reframing traps
Asking Questions
- You can sound stupid once
- One of the most dangerous phrases in business: "I assumed"
- Soliciting "Answer, Explain, Educate" from others
Standup Meetings
- Why do we have standup meetings
- Mental models: describe your mental model of how a standup is run (e.g., inputs and outputs)
- How to present your work effectively (e.g., tell me the time; don't build me the clock)
- How to say you are blocked on someone without throwing them under the bus
- Advanced discussion: the spotlight effect
- Advanced discussion: how to suggest improvements to your team's standup/agile processes
1:1 Meetings
- Why spend time one-on-one
- Agenda and goals of conversations
- Building rapport (e.g., managing up and sideways)
- The emotional bank of trust
Some Percepts to Follow
- Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say in front of your grandmother
- Silence is golden; we have two ears and one mouth for a reason
- Feynman’s Razor: complexity and jargon are used to mask a lack of deep understanding
The Need for Persuasion
- ABC: Always Be Closing
- When to debate and when to yield and prioritize relationship-building
- The two levels of any debate: the content and the meta
Pathos, Ethos, Logos, and Kairos
Cognitive Biases
- Why learn them: to observe and detect; avoid falling into these traps or getting dragged into one
- Mitigations and fixes for these "thinking bugs"
- Resources
Clean Escalations
- The different kinds of escalations (e.g., unilateral)
- A framework for Clean Escalations
- Agree/abstain/disagree and commit (you can't win all arguments)
- Resources
Writing = Thinking
- Why to improve writing (for software engineers)
- How to write an essay
- Frameworks and mental models for writing (e.g., SCQA)
- Resources
Writing Style
- The goal of style is clarity above all
- Knowing the rules and knowing when to break them
- Read better to write better
- Resources
Reframing Feedback
- What it is (and what it is not), what purpose it should serve, and why we don't like it
- The power of reframing and changing how we think about things
- How to reframe feedback when receiving and giving it
Giving Feedback
- A checklist: intent, timing, rapport, context, evidence/examples, etc.
- A framework example: SOUL
- Advanced topic: giving and receiving feedback on feedback
- Resources
Receiving Feedback
- How to open up for feedback and actually mean it
- Kinds of feedback and goals behind each
- Closing the feedback loop
- Advanced topic: walking the line between being misunderstood for a long time (disagreeing with feedback) and counterproductive persistence
- Resources
Observing Company Culture
- What makes a culture
- Advertised vs. shadow culture (words vs. actions)
- Noting power dynamics (The First 90 Days)
To Fit In or Not to Fit In
- To fit in and adapt is not to pretend
- Culture osmosis goes both ways
- How to use company culture to advance your career
Case Study: Amazon's Leadership Principles
- Introduction: what makes companies different from one another
- Leadership Principles (Values) at Amazon
- How values are used in hiring, promotions, coaching, and firing
- Resources
Trust at Work
- Various definitions depending on how you look at it
- The default position: whether to trust first or not until earned
- How to earn trust
- Deposit before you withdraw from trust accounts
- Advanced topic: how trust helps everyone in game theory
- Resources
Getting Others to Commit
- Trying is lying - why commitments matter
- A framework for getting others to commit
- Navigating software projects' time estimation and commitments
- The 70:20:10 learning framework
- The Feynman technique
- Studying tips
- Resources