As someone reading along: > Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either. Iden

As someone reading along: > Meaning: If you find yourself struggling to get along with those geeky developers, you don't have great social skills either. Identifying their poor social skills does not give away their own. Being unable to get along with them does. Essentially I read this as "if you have good social skills, you can diagnose what's going wrong in the current setting and if the other person is unlikely to change their actions, you can adjust your social interactions to fix the communication issue". In this case, that means not freaking out when a subordinate says no and calmly asking "Why not?", which would then lead to this information and an opportunity to explain that X is more important, and everyone moves on happily with their day. The manager's failure to go through that highlights the issues in their own social skills.