Three big reasons you need soft skill development today
December 27, 2012Leave a comment
1. The late quality guru, W. Edwards Deming, taught us that one way to improve quality was to listen to the people “in the system” . It required senior leaders to listen to (and subsequently empower) lower-level employees’ ideas. It also required lower-level employees to relate better and more confidently to senior leaders. As this practice increased, organization hierarchies ”flattened” in practice if not in structure. Today, smart companies (and their leaders) regularly engage in dialogue across the organization. This requires a far greater range of interpersonal skills on behalf of both those at the top and bottom of the corporate rung.2. In the late ’80s or early 1990′s, organizations began forming matrixed teams – that is representatives from different functional areas coming together to solve a problem or complete a project. The spread of globally-based personnel has only increased its use. Teams that organize and disperse must learn to form, storm, and norm much more quickly. Executing business processes with speed is a major competitive advantage. Countless stories abound in the halls of business about teams who got stuck in the “storming” process because of their inability to get along.
3. Finally, corporate hierarchies reflect seniority of roles or positions, but not how work actually gets done. Individuals must work up and down the organizational food chain and influence others outside their own department, division, or company. We are used to thinking about soft skills for salespeople, but not our own internal organization. Why not? Ideas need to be sold, people influenced, and good relations must abound for the critical work of good business execution.
Food for thought: Consider adding behavioral insight training as a foundation for company learning like DISC, MBTI, or other similar learning.
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