Yes, be easy to work with, but once you get into institutions, that means something entirely different. One of the reasons I can be difficult to work with is th

Yes, be easy to work with, but once you get into institutions, that means something entirely different. One of the reasons I can be difficult to work with is that I have technical skills that make many concrete truths obvious very quickly, and truth is the ultimate forcing function. It's also the source of my value, since I trade on those skills. However, much of business is about timing, positioning, alignment, association, exposure to opportunity, narrative attention, and literally just talking, stalling, and bullshitting until another variable in the equation resolves or falls into place and makes the decision for all involved without having to spend precious political capital on buy in. Sometimes the technical truth is that free variable. When it isn't, as someone who trades on being the guy with insights, options, answers, and integrity, saying I don't know when I really, really do to sustain some necessary uncertainty for others is sometimes a bigger lift than I'm prepared to make. That's a natural cost of having tech skills, but it's also a ceiling on how much value you can provide if you can't sustain dissonance long enough to support your team as they get positioned around those business variables above. If you get fired, it's probably over this. The point is to say, a durable skill like room reading, extended to organization and narrative reading takes a lot of intentional practice, and a lot of the non-technical people we work with have only ever done this, and have thousands of man hours practice ahead of you. Being easy to work with isn't about being nice, or agreeable, or even "political," it's recognizing the abstractions that hold the team and org together and providing reinforcement and continuity for it. That's the job. Revenue, growth, savings, optimizations etc are the downstream effect. I don't think anyone really articulates this stuff because you can't both play the game well while providing commentary for it at the same time, so a lot of career advice is the elaborate charade of pointing to these things without saying them and giving the game away. YMMV, but this is to say, consider whether being right is being smart, and make sure you always practice indexing on the latter and opportunity just appears.