How an engineer can increase his influence

How an engineer can increase his influence

Read the Cao "influence class" a article, feeling more. For the past two years, I've been thinking about influence, and overall, if the more people you can influence, the greater your influence, and the greater your energy.

Influence includes horizontal and vertical two dimensions:

Horizontal is the range that you can directly or indirectly influence, simply speaking, how many people can be affected by you

The higher the level, the more people can influence

An ordinary person, front-line work can affect colleagues, superiors, customers and suppliers, life can affect family, friends, classmates, neighbors, in addition, no contact with the object, there will be no more influence, the total number of influence in the range of dozens of people, hundreds of people;

An ordinary manager, in addition to ordinary people can affect the scope, but also directly affect his management subordinates, his subordinates more, can affect the more people, so can affect hundreds of people, thousands;

A business owner, in addition to as managers affect his subordinates, but also affect the use of his services or products of many customers, can also affect his partners, but also may include the government, so can affect thousands of people, even tens of thousands of people;

The wider the contact, the more people are affected by an ordinary person, can only affect the few people you have contact with; a developer, such as developing an app, can affect everyone who uses your app; an entrepreneur, other than the person who affects his or her business, may influence others through friends and partners; an actor, A star, the influence extends to all who watch your work, because the audience potential through the work to accept your influence;

Vertically, is how much you exert influence on the person, simply speaking, how much you can influence a person as a parent, your words and deeds and the material conditions can affect the child's life; As a manager, your decisions affect the income and development of your team members; As an ordinary worker, your job will have a certain impact on your boss and your client, and as a neighbour, it will not affect your neighbors.

Another example of a longitudinal effect, as a manager, is mainly responsible for the work of subordinates arrangements and assessment, but the income of subordinates have no power to determine; compared with a manager who has the same job but has a decision on subordinate income, who has more influence and who has more influence.

So horizontally, the more people you influence, the more influence you have, and the more people you influence, vertically, the more influential you become.

As the company's first-line engineers, the environment is relatively closed, not with the machine is dealing with the code, not with the test, is to deal with the siege Lions, the scope of contact is very small, limited impact.

Return to the theme, this article mainly explores how such an engineer to enhance lateral influence, that is, how to influence more people.

Plainly, as an engineer, want to enhance influence, only two words: output ... Only if you have output, can more people know you through the output, you will have the opportunity to influence more people. What's the output?

Document Records

To be honest, after years of work, I've never had the habit of writing documents because of laziness.

Because of the nature of the work, always help customers diagnose and solve a variety of problems, but I never thought to write a document, even one, so the work is always repeatedly encountered the same problem, such as how to set the function, how to solve the problem, and so on, today the customer asked, tomorrow to another customer ask the same question. If there are some q&a documents, customers encounter problems, throw it directly to him, let him follow the document processing is good, quick response, can save a lot of things. Customers get your documents, you can quickly solve the problem, advance the project progress, guarantee that they will be in front of the boss to praise you a little, said you do well, virtually give you points; in other words, you are not praised, but at least you save yourself some time.

A lot of things in your job are repetitive, you do it now, maybe you'll do it in two weeks, and you won't be able to do it again in a few months. Well, write a document that records the steps you're working on, and record the pits you've encountered, when colleagues do, with your document as a reference, you can take a lot of detours, I believe he will be grateful to you; The boss also likes such employees, because with your document, do not worry about substitution will spend more time, Because of this document, you can be very relieved to give a person to do. Gradually, because you pay, save time, improve efficiency, Word-of-mouth slowly came.

Especially to point out that, in particular, some difficult problems, once you have solved and document the way out, the follow-up contact with people, in addition to appreciate your help solve, no one will not upgrade your tall image, difficult and incurable diseases can be solved, you are not Daniel who is Daniel. Imagine, if there is no document, who knows you can solve such a problem. Besides, you will not see people every day to say, I solved that what what the problem.

You may worry that once I have written the document, there is no secret to it, and it will jeopardize your work. In fact, this worry is superfluous. Because you write a document, you can let others refer to your document to do so that you can liberate yourself to do more and more challenging, more meaningful things. Otherwise, this kind of thing, every day, do, month, year or so you do, you do not wearies, anyway, I am bored, time is wasted, but also talk about how to grow.

Network sharing

Share your skills and experience on the Internet, and let more people you've never met to accept your influence and raise your profile.

Now see, the well-known technology Daniel, how much is not in the forum, in the know, on the blog day after day, year after day, the sharing began to affect more people, no forum posts, no answers, no blog sharing, who to understand him, who knows him. Let's talk about the research of Daniel, which is not the results of the publication of people to understand them. Now the network to the unknown engineers to provide such a platform to show their own.

As for blogging, you may be worried that you don't know what to share. I had this worry before, to see what Cao said:

Dares to share, dares to challenge, dares to express own opinion and the viewpoint

Of course, in the face of the rebuttal, criticism, if it proves that they are wrong, to be courageous to accept, fast learning, this does not grow up.

Never dare, you can always do to eat melon masses.

What does it say? Write your ideas and write your research. In case there is no written, broken read can also, so at least you can exercise your writing, thinking.

Actually there are a lot of things that you may think you will, do not need to write, but the real when you want to use the text, the article organized, you will find that there are a lot of not to consider before. By writing things, you can help you consolidate and systematize existing knowledge.

In a word, writing can push you to grow.

Open Source Projects

If you have good works, you might as well open source, no works can also participate in some open source projects, grow their horizons, do not stick to their own that point of work.

Specific open source, to see the individual, open source projects will spend a lot of time, everyone is different, not one by each.

A big piece of nonsense, for engineers, the interface is relatively limited, through the documentation and network sharing to indirectly output your influence is a good choice. Increasing influence is a long process and there is no way to do it overnight, so start by writing a document and sharing a blog.

Finally, attach two good article:

Cao << influence Class >>, click on the link to read.

Well, then I recommend an article << why I insist on blogging. >>