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The article leaves out one very important skill: teamwork. Teamwork is tested very well by contests like the ACM ICPC programming competition: teams of 3 people, one computer, and 7 or so problems to solve in 5 hours. Speaking from first hand experience, my team won the ICPC (many years ago...) based totally on coaching on our teamwork. Essentially, we arrived in the competition city 5 days early and somehow got adopted by the coach of another country's team (which said they didn't need her help). She spent those 5 days observing us approach each phase of the contest, and gave feedback on every aspect on how we worked together: triaging the problems in the first minutes of the contest, who to allocate which problems to, optimising sharing the single computer, when to switch when stuck, helping each other debug, etc, etc. Right down to how to lay out our stationery and stack our working notes on the table. After doing 2-3 prior competition problem sets a day for 5 days, we became an amazingly efficient machine. Not because we were individually better problem solvers (thought there was some improvement there). But because we all instinctively did the right things in the right order, there was no dead time, no miscommunication, and no stress about our performance versus others. Thanks to Raewyn's coaching, we converted probably a 5th place into a convincing 1st place. And she'd already won 1st place with her own country's team two years earlier. So the focus on teamwork paid off. Both in our contest, and in work situations subsequently... |