Helping organizations across sizes and industries navigate rapid digital transformation and change management over the last 12 years, I have come to the conclusion that soft skills are the really hard skills for organizations and leaders to master. Our work focuses a lot on training, and while technical and process training plays a role, soft skills training plays an equally important, if not greater role.
What are soft skills?
First let’s describe what we mean by “soft skills.” Another term for it is emotional intelligence.
At CultureStrategy, we define “soft skills,” or emotional intelligence, as encompassing the following areas:
- Self-Awareness — the ability to identify our own beliefs, feelings, needs, and desires
- Curiosity — the ability to ask questions that elicit important information about others’ beliefs, feelings, needs, and desires
- Empathy — the ability to put oneself in another person’s position and understand their point of view
- Communication — the ability to share one’s beliefs, feelings, needs, and desires in a clear and effective way
- Alignment & Collaboration — the ability to find win-win solutions that work for all parties involved
While your professional network may have many people who are great in business, IT, data, and even AI, how many people can you think of in your life who have mastered these 5 areas? You can probably count them on one hand.
Why is that?
Lack of Formal Education in Soft Skills
The main reason for this is that there is no existing structure anywhere within our society for learning soft skills. The public K-12 school system, amazingly, still seems to lag behind in integrating emotional intelligence into curricula, despite rising trends of bullying, racism, and violence, and the uptick in mass school shootings by mentally disturbed students. Similarly, colleges and post-secondary schools never address emotional intelligence as a mandatory area of learning separate from students’ majors.
As a result, children and teens are subject to “picking up” emotional intelligence skills on their own, mostly through observation of their parents, extended families, and communities, rather than through formal learning.
Obviously, this introduces a ton of variability, since people come from very different backgrounds and family situations, some less favorable to developing these skills than others. And since parents are also often taught to focus only on how their children are doing academically, emotional intelligence teaching, by and large, gets bypassed.
The Need for Workplace Soft Skills Training
What results are a bunch of grown-ups who may (or may not) be highly intelligent, scientific, and strategic thinkers – yet are often cut off from their own feelings, and the feelings of others. These grown-ups turn into our institutional leaders, resulting in flawed, inequitable systems and processes, and discontented people.
Research continues to show the strong link between soft skills/emotional intelligence and job performance. Harvard Business Review published a paper in 2019 that presents strong evidence that emotionally intelligent companies report higher levels of productivity and employee engagement. This “EI” advantage gives them an innovation edge through stronger customer loyalty and profitability, as well as employee engagement and satisfaction.
Research by Workable shows that emotionally intelligent employees thrive more in a team environment as compared to others.
Soft skills are hard to master precisely because there is no curriculum. There are no widely accepted metrics. And most importantly, there is usually not the necessary level of priority and budget being put on this learning in the workplace, with leadership development and communication skills training often being “add-ons” rather than compulsory learning at most companies.
However, according to Apollo Technical, more than 77% of organizations in the USA report that leadership is lacking. At the same time, 83% of businesses say it’s important to develop leaders at all levels. Yet less than 5% of companies have implemented leadership development across all levels.
The numbers are nice for proof, but I am sure each and every one of you reading this article have experienced the unpleasant consequences of working with colleagues and leaders who lack soft skills. So what can you do about this problem, in light of plummeting employee retention rates, increasingly stressed out teams, and mental health in the workplace at an all-time low? The answer is clear: invest in soft skills training!
We can help. Our aim at CultureStrategy is to help change organizations by giving emotional intelligence and soft skills trainng the structure it so needs. Partnering with academics, scientists, designers, and adult learning specialists, we have developed a program that infuses organizations and their leaders with soft skills and emotional intelligence training in a systematic and engaging format. And the best part of it, for all you data buffs, is that we are actually able to quantify emotional intelligence, so leaders can track their improvement over time.
Learn more about how we help you bring EQ into your organization. Schedule a call with us and let’s talk!
