Some thoughts on 'social skills' and office politics.

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I didn't read through the whole tips and tricks thread, and i decided not to post to it because I'd prefer to start a more targeted discussion.

I had an experience today where i walked into work and stepped directly into an inter-departmental conflagration where there were three major stakeholders who were utterly failing to effectively communicate. And the worst of them was the most neurotypical of the bunch.

The NT was in a situation where he was perceiving a threat to his leadership position. Which was a reasonable presumption for him to make, because the general consensus is that he's not been an effective manager.

I don't even report to anyone who reports to anyone he reports to, but his poor decisions have made my life much harder. He knows it, everybody knows it, and most of 'everybody' is suffering right along with me.

He is correct to fear for his future in the company. Perhaps it will motivate him to be a better manager.

But this discussion wasn't about that.

This discussion was about the NT's boss trying to micromanage my boss because what he hears from my team is different from what he hears from his own team, and he chooses to believe his own team.

The whole argument was stupid and fueled entirely by the fears of two people.

As for MY part in the mess, I was present as a subject matter expert, required to offer information to settle disputes about the facts of the situation, and just wanted to get people on the same page so i could retreat to my desk and consider getting some actual work done.

So it occurred to me afterward, as i was remarking to a coworker that I'd had tooth extractions that were more pleasant, that when we use the phrase "social skills" to refer to an aspie's difficulty interacting with others, the term is both wryly astute and painfully inaccurate.

One of the common attributes we have is an inability to have a normal autonomic, emotional response to others.

NTs go through life reacting to stimuli naturally.

We don't. We have to use logic to understand our stimuli and calculate a response.

For the neurotypical, "social skills" are like muscle memory. Not a skill so much as a reflex.

We have to learn them. More than that, we have to decide to learn them, study them, and experiment with them. We use them like tools. It requires effort and discipline.

I wasn't the only person in that conference room who was reacting to the situation rationally rather than emotionally, but as the subject matter expert i was the only one who was being listened to by both sides. I was forced to act as a diplomat, for my own best interests, to keep my boss quietly settled in his defensive position while simultaneously ameliorating the perception that our objective was to make the other team look bad.

I think i would not have gotten as far as i have in my career if i had not grown up in a large family where i often perceived a dire need for diplomacy. The other aspie in the room was hung up on semantic arguments that nobody wanted to listen to.

I'm lucky that i don't need toes to count the number of jobs that i lost because of some unfortunate event when i abruptly decided to speak my mind instead of carefully considering what to do.

I know that a lot of you have workplace struggles that go far beyond office politics, particularly if you are just starting out in your career or still trying to identify a career while struggling along in whatever job you can get - but i think that a considered study of diplomacy and deportment can go a very long way to helping people see past our quirks and recognize our skills.

Oh if only they would just stop being monkeys and get the job done! This is one reason why jobs can be unstable. Like an ant standing on top of a firetruck's tire, you can't always see everything that's going on and you may get squashed. Earning substantially more than you spend is a privilege that many don't have at a given time, so save all you can. My general rule is to save enough for 1 additional year of living expenses for every 2 years of earnings. At one point I was saving for 1 additional year of expenses out of each year of earnings, and it's a good thing I did because I would have run out of money had I not done that. If you can't control the monkeys, then you need the financial buffer.

Very nicely worded. I commend you. Your observations on the way in which adults with AS approach social situations has similarly been noted in the research community, and has been given the name "external theory of mind".

If the person is not managing his team very well, it might be that he is unclear on what the company expects of him and how they expect him to do it. NT's aren't exempt from social issues, and companies tend to have cultures which even the most socially well versed NT might have difficulty syncing to.

I think perhaps the person in charge of overseeing this person, and the people who lead the teams that this person's team interfaces with, should two meetings. One to find out what type of incompatibilities the other teams have with this person's team, and one with the person himself and address the issue in a non-hostile way. The nature of the meeting shouldn't be accusatory. The boss should present them self as an allying trying to help him address problems rather than his adversary.

Well, I work in software. I test a very mature server application with fairly well committed customers.

You've never heard of it. At least, there are only a few thousand people who've ever used it. It has a specialized, boring niche.

We're undergoing a much needed technology update - which means that programmers who have been using one technology for a long time now have to use a different technology. And in the last six months we lost a troubling number of programmers who were at least somewhat familiar with the new technology.

In addition to the learning curve, we are adding two complex new features (which are being implemented with the new technology stack).

At the outset, the programmers were allowed to select the new technology stack and initially specified that this is a big enough challenge that we should only attempt to add one of the two new features in this upcoming release.

We are contractually obliged to release twice every calendar year. Typically one summer release and one winter release. We last released in December. Previous to that was August.

The customers do not expect to receive a release before June or so, and have not requested it any earlier than that.

Between the incompetent dev. lead and his boss, this turned into adding both features and attempting to ship april 1st.

It's great to over-deliver, but only if you can actually deliver. In February I was predicting that we'd ship June 1st. I am beginning to believe that i was overly optimistic.

That all is bad enough, but the dev. lead - he's new - turns out to be a yes man.

He's been telling his bosses for the last 3 weeks that the programmers are essentially done writing code.

In programming, there are three major forms of being "done". You are feature complete when all required features are in place in one form or other. You are code complete when all necessary code is written and compiles. You're released when a majority of known defects found by QA have been fixed - this has been a management decision at every company I've ever worked at or heard about. QA is never done, we just eventually relent.

What the programmers tell us is that they are certainly not yet feature complete.

What the manager in question tells his boss is that his team is code complete.

His boss then turns to my boss and asks why QA is only 53% complete and doesn't seem to be making any progress.

The real answer is that only about half of the new feature set is even minimally functional.

There is certainly a cultural challenge on the part of both the dev lead and his boss, but they've been working in the US long enough to know better.

This is certainly not the best job I've ever had - that was an idyllic geek paradise where the only problems were a product that the sales force feared and the customers didn't understand. The whole accounts receivable thing eventually catches up to you.

But it's the longest I've ever worked anywhere, and I seem to have filled a very specific void that they would hate to have unfilled again. I don't love my boss, but i can tolerate everything he does and he seems to think very well of me. There is every possibility that i can stay in this job for 8-10 years or more. I have some coworkers who have been with the application for 17 years. This application turns a solid profit every year with an exceptional margin, and the greater corporate picture is deeply in black ink.

I'm just afraid that if these kind of management shenanigans keep up, I won't want to stay.

Edit: But, well, the other thing that had me thinking about this subject was my little sister. She's just getting started in her career, and while she's very talented she has some severe symptoms. Sometimes she just can't handle it and has to go home. She has the best boss in the world, but I realized that every time she asks me for advice i seem to be preaching professionalism, diplomacy, and a conciliatory attitude.

Do you guys have a systems architect? I used to work at a SMALL software development company (I was the lead of the technical writing team) and we did matrix management, which was horrible. It was like trying to bake cookies while simultaneously adding the ingredients.

A (probable) aspie senior developer and I went to a usability conference and came back realizing that we needed a systems architect to act AFTER listening to the users and BEFORE writing code.

Our company was a mix of men, women, Indians (from India), undisclosed aspies, and NTs. Now, my son is a white male NT, and I have nothing against them, but I can tell you that most of the problems came from the white male NT programmers and business analysts, who did not want to hear it if something didn't work. They want to MAKE it work instead of doing something else.

I usually got things done through a network of Indians, aspies, and women allies there who, like me, just wanted to get things done and go home.

blauSamstag, I totally agree with you.

I think you're spot-on with your description of how "social skills" are totally different to us for us. I've always felt that I can read and understand people, just in entirely different ways that NTs can.

Similar to your explanation of muscle memory, I usually like to use the analogy of personal finance:

- When we are young, no one has any feeling at all for personal finance, but as we grow to adults, some people start internalizing the idea and understanding it. They become extremely good at just being able to keep track of their finances and being able to immediately understand how what they spend our flows down through their budget.

- But for some other people they are so bad with personal finance that they will permanently in debt that it cripples their life yet they still have no ability to internalize their spending. Some people who are not as bad are just not really able to clearly understand how they are spending so much - when they see a price, it never really clicks much they are spending, and they will always underestimate the impact of a particular purchase on their bank account. The cause for this must be behavioral or psychological at some level - our ability to internalize prices is extremely dependent on contextual cues or beliefs or tendencies that are illogical and that varies across individuals; and the way we plan or take risks differ significantly from person to person.

- However, for those with absolutely no natural understanding of personal finance, they can start using tools (like budgeting tools or mint), or force themselves to constantly think about what they are buying and how much they are saving in a systematic and logical way. In addition, some might even study finance or economics in college, and therefore be in the strange position where they still have a very poor feeling for personal finance, yet they have a very nuanced and analytical understanding of theoretical finance which can be applied to personal finance to some degree. They will never have a natural feel for personal finance, and they will always be in danger of overspending, but many of these people will eventually be able to mask this natural tendency through a mixture of tools, practice, or study. They will never be able to "quickly" size up financial situations, but if they are able to take a step back and given some time to think, they may even be able to provide a better financial judgement (in certain ways), than those with a natural feeling for personal finance.

What great insights! Thanks for writing this. This explains it very well. This also explains why I suck more at social stuff now than I used to when learning social skills was my special interest, back when I thought I could "fix" myself.

I'd just add to that that we also often have to be at our best to handle social situations the way we want to, since it takes mental energy. And because we tend to have high standards for ourselves, that means we probably beat ourselves up when we aren't able to perform the way we want to.

My main obstacle is social anxiety, which can strike me mute; my second-biggest obstacle is talking well when I am also thinking. Because I am very verbal, though, I am able to repeat phrases of smart-sounding nonsense as filler, but it kills me that I am not really communicating, just being a parrot.

It seems like NTs are more easily able to absorb social norms from the people around them while growing up. Depending on the social norms they were exposed to, this could be great, horrible, or a mixed bag. It seems like they often run into trouble when thrown into a professional environment with people from various backgrounds.

I started reading the famous social skills/human relations book, How to Make Friends and Influence People, and during the intro, the author says that he wrote the book because this topic was the most frequent answer he got when he went around asking people what they thought they needed to know to be more successful. There are a lot of other less famous books on the topic too, which don't seem to be aimed particularly at autistic people.

I often see people (way to often to be only autistic people) fail to use basic/easy human relations techniques that I am aware of. It seems like most people don't seek to improve their social skills. I don't think they realize that there is any room for improvement. If they've rarely had to "perform" socially like autistic people do, they don't realize it's an option.

If society as a whole started teaching human relations skills to school kids, everyone would benefit. But I wonder if autistic people might end up being more skilled than NTs, in general, if that were to happen.

Personally, I've got a lot of "book smarts" about social skills but I often don't know what to do "in the moment." But at my current job, I feel like the Master of Awesome Social Skills, mwahahaha.

All very good stuff.

I've learned how to deal with a good lot of office politics. Where I'm at right now is a cesspool of rabid incompetence drowning in jealousy, backstabbing, power plays, insistence that we all ignore reality, etc. Because I've been consciously studying how to work within office politics (after being severely bullied out of another high paying job and not understanding what was happening and how I was actually making it worse), I'm able to comprehend a lot more of what's going on that any of the NTs involved. I have the objectivity they don't have. I also have priority interest in just getting the dang job done well and in a way that will make our customers cease cancelling our contracts, unlike my NT management and coworkers, whose priority is in protecting turf, forcing program ideology over reality, defending their embedded feelings of personal worth, etc.

I've realized this last time that it isn't that I have difficulty with socialization. Rather, it's that I have difficulty with socialization that requires a high level of deceit, trickery, power playing, etc. In short, I can't easily survive in environments where the individual and collective emotions of the people there are in real truth more important than what we are supposedly really there for (creating a product that sells and creates profit). However, when I'm in an environment where there are mostly other Aspies or less emotionally demanding NTs, I have far less difficulty.

Not to say these latter environments are without issues. For example, last week one Aspie on a mostly Aspie team became angry because the meeting speaker wasn't getting to the point, and it began an argument. However, this way of being angry and arguing was much "cleaner" than the NT ones are, because it was very simple and to the point. No one pretending to be feeling something they aren't, for example, in order to score points.

I'm interviewing this week with another company that actually gains, rather than loses, contracts, and where I will have a chance to be a bit more independent of office politcs. We will see.

I've had to force myself to learn how to "get by" socially with my coworkers & supervisors over the years. I learned early on that I had a knack for quickly learning any new technology and marketed myself as an "I.T. Jack-of-All-Trades" Within a month on any job, I found myself being labeled by others as the "New Subject Matter Expert (SME)". I would be brought into meetings with management & executives to explain whatever new technology they were contemplating, and found value also in being the company I.T. trainer. I also discovered that after 2 years, my value started diminishing despite my technical capacity, and I would find myself looking for a new job somewhere else, even during my 4-year enlistment in the Air Force when I would find myself not being allowed to re-enlist like the rest of my peers.

It wasn't until my current wife suggested this past Christmas that I might have Asperger's and that all my work troubles might be attributed to what she clearly saw as my "forced attempt to mimic my coworkers just to prolong employment" that I began to look back and reflect on my I.T. career through this lens.

Office politics were something I always avoided, or dreaded if I couldn't avoid it. I could fake my way through interacting with my coworkers when needed, but many of the social nuances of management were beyond me. The social skills needed to get by were truly skills that I needed to invest time, effort, and lots of mental gymnastics just to learn....such as just how much eye contact to forcefully subject myself to during a one-on-one conversation (between one-third of the time and two-thirds of the time), and what voice inflections are needed to create a "normal" sounding speech pattern (to NT's) that I could reliably reproduce at will, and many other social skills & nuances. Years later, I refined my voice inflections so that it cut down the amount of mental gymnastics from me, while still sounding "normal" to NT's that require it of me.

But the office politics, always caused cognitive dissonance and were unavoidable...or so it seemed to me at the time. I would prefer to stay in the lab, or at my desk, and avoid (as best I can) any of what office politics the NT's immersed themselves in throughout each workday.

I am SOOO aware of manipulation and subtle negativity from other NTs. I'm able to keep up with them, but it's really unpleasant for me, so I elect not to. A mentor of mine once said that the longer you study sociology and social interactions, the worse you are at behaving "normal." I completely agree. Now when I see someone being manipulative or two-faced, I just ask them flat out "what are you doing?" or "what do you want?" It puts people off, but it cuts down on my own irritation of having to deal with crap.

It would be much easier for everyone if people stopped pretending to feel things they don't feel or have opinions they don't have.

Agreed! It would be much easier, but I've not had any luck yet trying to steer my coworkers this way. The last time I tried, I went out of my way to sound as polite as possible, made sure my facial expression wasn't aggressive, used a soft tone....and yet I still found myself being forced into another round of "company sensitivity training" on the issue.

And NT's wonder why I always turn down management promotion offers...

This reminded me of this

Still in university, but I dread the day when I have to deal with these sorta things.

Hahaha!! ! Yes, exactly! I agree.

That comic exactly summed up my fear of getting promoted to a white shirt.

That is definitely true. Some people say that I am a very good listener. That may be very well true, because I experience that many NT are not good at listening; they are easily distracted. They break social rules about interrupting (see a different topic), and I think they don't realize it. It can be avoided easily unless you are deaf (then you can see people talking) or blind (then you can hear people talking).


The same person (counselor) that told me that I am a very good listener, told me that I am definitely social, according to NT norms, and very social according to ASD norms.

Last edited by hmk66 on 24 Sep 2015, 8:38 am, edited 1 time in total.