Day Two Cloud 116: Emotional Intelligence, Hard Conversations, And Other Essential Management Skills

Today on Day Two Cloud we talk about moving into management, the complications that come with it, and the professional and emotional skills that can help you succeed at it. Our guest is Shelley Benhoff, an author, speaker, and Pluralsight instructor. Shelley also runs her own technical training business, Hoffstech. She has twenty years of experience in IT. She started as a software developer and advanced into management roles. We discuss the challenges and pitfalls of management, why emotional intelligence is a critical skillset and how to develop it, why managers need to be able to have hard conversations, and tips to help you decide if management is the right career path for you. Sponsor: Zesty Zesty provides an autonomous cloud experience by leveraging advanced AI technology to manage the cloud for you. Our AI reacts in real-time to capacity changes and enables companies to maximize cloud efficiency, reduce AWS bill by more than 50%, completely hands-free. It’s cloud on auto-pilot. Find out how to spend less and do more at zesty.co. Show Links: Hoffstech @SBenhoff – Shelley Benhoff on Twitter Shelley Benhoff on LinkedIn Shelley Benhoff on Pluralsight Tiaras and Tech Day Two Cloud 114: Successfully Transitioning From A Tech Role To Management – Packet Pushers Day Two Cloud 107: Making The Management Mistake – Packet Pushers Transcript: [00:00:00.000] – Ned Zesty provides an autonomous cloud experience by leveraging advanced AI technology to manage the cloud for you. Their AI reacts in realtime to capacity changes and enables companies to maximize cloud efficiency and reduce their AWS bill by more than 50% completely handsfree. Cloud on autopilot with Zesty companies can spend less and do more. Check them out at Zesty dot Co. [00:00:31.710] – Ned Welcome to Day Two Cloud. Today we’re going to be talking about moving into management and how that’s not always the easiest transition. Our guest today, Shelley Benhoff has lived it for real, and she’s also written some courses about it. [00:00:47.240] – Ned She’s a fellow Pluralsight author, and she also has her own company, HoffsTech. So she’s going to be leading us through sort of what are the good things that you should develop as a manager and maybe some pitfalls you might run into as you climb the management ladder. What jumped out to you, Ethan? [00:01:04.510] – Ethan There was a theme for me Ned, in this episode, which is developing emotional intelligence. In other words, those of us that are really good with the technology and we can talk to the APIs and make the things happen and fix it when it’s broken and all that kind of suck when it talks, when it comes to talking to humans, we’re not that great at it and we lack empathy a lot of times. And Shelley was really great at explaining how to develop that skill set, that emotional intelligence skill set.