If you have a members of your team thumping their chest at being a “senior” technical staff member that’s great. To get their true value of the senior salary that comes with that title, you must ask yourself if they are still considered “senior” given today’s job climate. Here are 5 mojo skill sets that I think are invaluable in a senior technical role that are sometimes not considered as core competency traits:
 

1. Can your senior technical staff verbally articulate an idea?
   Can they come to a meeting with 6 to 20 people and make the audience feel at ease that someone truly understands their issue and is coming up with a way to solve it? If not, why not? Can they ask the right questions to get to the heart of the issue? It is well understood that many highly technical folks lack good communication skills, but this is becoming less accepted as the cost of miscommunication can sometimes be the difference between having or not having a successful project. I’m not saying we need a senior developer to be a motivational orator that gets standing ovations upon every point made, however, a well thought out idea should be able to be communicated to a listening audience when needed.
   
   
2. Can your senior technical staff write technical specifications?
   This is an interesting one. If you read technical articles a lot, you would get the impression that only morons and newer coders would dare to work without technical specs. It seems the opposite these days. So many places that I have consulted with have a culture driven by a few head technical folks that think that technical specs are never read and they get out dates fast so why bother. Here’s why…you can’t operate an agile process or any other buzzword-of-the-week process without a common vision if its a big enough project. You also cannot afford to put your company at risk by not documenting the processes involved so that someone else can pick up where the AWOL resource left off. But there is a catch; I am not suggesting the waterfall project management methodology by any means. I am simply suggesting that senior technical staff need to be able to communicate through the use of a technical specification document, what their approach will be to tackling a problem. The level of detail needed for that specification can only be decided by the critically of the project, the time lines involved, and the complexity of the issue to be solved. But an even bigger reason to do technical specs is because it forces the author to think through the solution before diving head first into a trial-and-error approach.
   
   
3. Can your senior technical staff wear a business hat?
   There are not lots of developers out there with business degrees so lets not fool ourselves into thinking that your senior team go preform competitive market analysis for the company. But at the very least they should be thinking in terms of how to make something cost less or be more efficient. Does a feature actually make a difference? Many places have the one developer who is always upset that the company did not “do it right” on a particular feature. They usually are the ones mumbling all the time about how the company is soon headed into a downward spiral for all the shortcuts they are being forced to make just to get something out on time. This type of senior developer cannot wear a business hat. As an example of Parkinson’s Law, if you gave a developer one hour to come up with a log in page for a website they could do it. However, if you gave them four weeks to “do it right”, they could would still finish just in the nick of time (or possibly be late) by filling up every moment with the coolest gadgetry possible. However, the business has hundreds of other issues competing for that developers time too. If the business took this kind of time to do everything in an ideal manner from a developer’s stand point, it would be severely misusing the companies funds.
   
   
4. Are your senior technical staff members team players?
   This is such a cliché now-a-days. What is a team player anyway? In the most basic sense, I think it all comes down to having a good attitude. Throw in a bit of mentoring skills, a dash of knowing when to say “I don’t know”, a teaspoon of good team time management, and a splash of always willing to give and take ideas before assuming their idea is best and you have a recipe for a great team player.
   
   
5. Are your senior technical staff members able to look beyond today’s issues?
   I have always subscribed to the idea that people are either tactical or strategic and its easy to get stuck in a mode of one or the other. Most are stuck in a reactive tactical mode just trying to keep their head above water for the list of the day. A senior role needs to be spending more time than others thinking strategically. A lot of people will give their own definition to what strategic is, but checking off a list given to them from others daily or weekly should not be what a senior role is doing. They need time to figure out how to do things better. No matter what process there is, there probably is redundancy in it that could be improved upon.  
   

So how can you help your senior staff become truly senior? Insure you are fostering an environment that stimulates this behavior. You need to have goals that include the senior aspects of the job. Don’t make meeting project goals the only focus that a senior role has. Sure it is important to hit your milestones, but allow the senior role to sharpen their tool set to improve the odds of the next successful project too. I’ll dive into incentivizing your senior technical staff in another article.