Nikola Bosic | Source | VP of Engineering (Pumble) at CAKE.com

What different soft skills engineers need to know, how they impact their work and more importantly, actionable steps they can take to develop those skills.

"Working in a team of engineers would definitely be a challenge without the ability to communicate, collaborate and empathize with others. Being able to spot the moment when it’s necessary to let things go and not insist on an idea are also crucial soft skills every engineer should possess. However, from my personal experience, developing each of those skills might not always be possible. Empathy comes more easily to some people than others, and it might take years of hard work to become more empathetic. Although I’ll always recommend never giving up on developing new skills, sometimes it’s better to think about the already present strengths and skills and focus on improving them first."

As a lead developer what are things that you have in mind when you delegate? To put that person into a position of success, how often do you give your members feedback?

"Before delegating a task, I always try to take into consideration my team members’ workload, their interests and wellbeing, as well as the level of urgency of a certain task. The key to successful delegation lies in finding the right balance and never adding the workload over a team members’ capacity.
Providing regular feedback is imperative to task success. Therefore, even when there’s no room for scheduling a formal feedback session, lead developers should always try to find time to provide ongoing informal feedback if they’d like to see their team flourish."

How did you learn to let go of perfectionism and build trust within team members?

"I learned how to give up perfectionism the hard way — after burning my fingers trying to make everything perfect instead of delegating tasks to my team. But soon enough, I realized that giving people a chance works miracles — quite often they’ll arrive at a solution you hadn’t even thought of, or even do a better job than you could have done alone."