I just listened to one very interesting audio book. Book title is “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. And I think that it worth to read, or listen to it as I did, because it teaches you how to interact with others. If you are going to grow in your career you indeed need such stuff to know.

This book is of psychological type and author (Dale Carnegie) is talking about interaction with other people. Mainly it talks about how to correctly behave when you want someone to be on your side.
Book could be very useful for managers and for people in their lives. For developer it could be useful in future when you are going to drive few people in your team. If you just starting as a senior developer you already should have some experience driving junior stuff. When you are Technical Leader you need to drive whole team, you need to establish correct processes in your team and one of the hardest tasks in all of this is to make others work on tasks you assign them in the way that they will want to work on that.

Sometimes there are situations when you see somebody’s mistakes and there should be a way to show them this, but at the same time not make them your enemies – they should look at you as at friend, who wants to help.

Book has a lot of different examples from real life when you convince others to do what you want, but for them it looks like they really want to do it, because it seems useful for them.
There are a lot of rules in book. You could go and see contents of the book.
Go to this wiki page to see main points of book. (I recommend).

But now I will try to list down what I remember:

• Honor others for the smallest they did.
• Show that they are valuable – all people indeed what to be valuable.
• Start conversation with what people want and make them answering with “YES” on your questions, only then you could give bad news.
• Smile to others but don’t bluff.
• Build reputation for mentees in eyes of others. So your mentee will do everything he could in order to prove what you said about him.
• Really think about how to walk in his/her shoes.

I know that you heard about that a hundred times. But when you will spent 10,5 hours on listening to this book and when author talks about this during all the time. This will ensure that you remember it and probably will force you to try it in real life. You could start with your team members or with you wife. I think that I will try with my girl just today… or even before I will meet her, since I’m now disconnected from internet and typing this in bus road to Lviv. So will be able post this in evening.

I would recommend this book if you have time for such things or if you could get audio version as I did.

P.S. I tried today some tips from book – it works! You should try.