A major task of the software engineering manager is to help people in the organization develop their social skills, not just because the workplace is better when people are polite, but because social skills influence more and more the effectiveness of technical skills. Teaching social skills is an investment in problem resolution, but even more in problem prevention. As the organization learns to be congruent more frequently, the amount of time spent dealing with incongruence decreases.
Feeling unable to trade off either quality or schedule goals, managers are too often tempted to sacrifice the quality of human interaction, for which the soon pay the price in both quality and the schedule.
