Soft Skills In The Workplace

By definition, soft skills are an individual’s ability to sense, regulate, and respond in a constructive way to other people’s ideas as well as how to explore resolutions to issues, challenges, problems or conflicts with others. Soft skills are about exercising influence and building trust with others.

Common soft skills examples and topic areas include the following list. While this is not an exhaustive list, these are common areas many organization focus on in their effort to develop leadership soft skills.

Harvard Business Review published the results of a study conducted by Porath and Pearson. This study indicated that poor leadership soft skills like rudeness, incivility, disrespectful interactions and hostility had astonishing results on the bottom line and on the organization’s culture. A poll of 800 managers in 17 industries plus thousands of interviews with workers over a 14-year period indicated that people will respond to ineffective soft skills in a negative way.

• Employees are 30% less creative when they feel disrespected
• 48% deliberately decrease their efforts
• Good people leave
• 38% lower the quality of their work

Experiencing poor soft skills from salespeople lead customers to form negative impressions about the company, the brand and the people in the organization. This is just a sampling of how devastating it can be to a business with weak soft skills and why soft skills deserve more attention.

Company leadership and HR professionals believe that improved soft skills lead to better behavior and business climate, which leads to better results. A strong soft skills culture in any organization is a differentiator which creates a positive, steady and predictable work experience and greater efficiencies for leaders and team members alike.

Organizations have doubled down on soft skills development and training. This effort has a significant impact on retention and turnover. Studies are clearly showing that soft skill focused organizations have:

• Higher retention
• Higher employee engagement
• Improved business results and profitability

There is no doubt soft skills have become just as important as technical knowledge in the workplace. For leaders, it is especially critical to master soft skills in order to develop a team, build trust, establish credibility and create an environment where people find work more meaningful and motivating.

A leader or team member with exceptional soft skills has good interpersonal skills, works well with others, and will produce and achieve goals and targets. They communicate with excellence, demonstrate a commitment to others and the organization, and listen when others express themselves. Someone with soft skills thinks with creativity, offers solutions to solve problems, is engaged in facilitating success, and has a great work ethic. In short, soft skills have an elevated importance because they help a workplace in multiple ways.

Too often in the workplace, it is easy to ignore a problem, be passive aggressive, or snap when the problem becomes too much. Team members and leaders with effective soft skills, great emotional intelligence, and a people-first mindset know how to talk through difficult issues and have courageous conversations with anyone in the organization. Their approach to problems and issues is to work toward defining scenarios and options that solve the problem and are not focused on the persons and personalities involved with the issue.

If you are an organization looking to address this need, CMOE offers a number of different soft skill solutions in various formats, giving our customers the flexibility to select, tailor, or build the best option that works for them.