Improving My Communication
Mon, May 25, 2020Recently, I’ve been reading a lot to supplement my career development. I’ve slowly come to the realization that the greatest thing I can do to further my career is by improving my communication:
- My thoughts will be more clear and concise. This will help build my arguments and improve my persuasive capabilities.
- Discussions outside of engineering will be a lot easier. I’ll be able to relay my ideas to non-engineers a lot better.
- It’ll increase my impact across my organization and company.
All of those are important but to really level up as an engineer you have to expand your impact on the organization. Instead of being singularly focused (how can I push out features faster?), a senior engineer has a broader organizational focus (how can we push out features faster?). Writing is one of the best ways to have impact. It has a multiplying factor that can touch a broad set of people. It gives people an opportunity to read and respond in their own time, at their own pace. This is especially true with COVID-19 and work from home mandates.
Writing is also the best way to improve my communication. I’ll improve on my persuasive style and build better, more concise arguments. It gives me time to form my thoughts and edit them into a better structure. I can also get feedback from others. The feedback could be explicit: “Could you expand on this argument?” It could also be implicit: “I don’t understand this portion.” I can take that feedback and immediately improve the current document. It’ll also build my understanding about writing and what works and doesn’t work.
The best way to improve my writing (and thus my communication) is just by doing it. I’ll get more practice and slowly get better at forming my thoughts. I’ve made it a goal to write more going forward. This means at work I’ll be writing more documents about my thoughts on our designs and our app. It also means at home I’ll write more in this blog.