“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves, their strengths, their values and how they best perform ……” (Peter Drucker).
Irrespective of our role or our business, we are all increasingly part of the knowledge economy where factors that led to success in the past are no longer reliable indicators of success in the future.
The business environment continues to change rapidly and increasingly individuals are faced with the challenge of achieving more and more with fewer and fewer resources. Command and control approaches are no longer effective. Most businesses, large and small, rarely have major shortages of knowledge, but many do not have the culture where knowledge is openly shared amongst all employees who are in turn aligned with, and dedicated to, the business objectives.
In this increasingly team driven and intimate workplace, leaders and followers interact much more closely and clashes in behavioural styles surface more regularly with more damaging results.
How many of the problems and challenges that you have faced over recent months have been more of an issue of who, not what was involved?
Irrespective of the size or nature of our business, we all face the same question. How do we improve our relationships, enhance our leadership skills and build more productive teams? The answer lies in consciously investing in our “soft skills” such as building trust, confidence, empathy, listening, adaptability and self-control.
Deficiencies in soft skills are often easily recognised by the results, i.e. inter-personal conflicts, poor morale, high turnover of staff and customers, but much more difficult to define in terms of what can be done to overcome them.
There is no quick fix to developing soft skills within an organisation. Trust, the fundamental constituent of effective inter-personal relationships, cannot be taught on a one day seminar, but is developed over a period of time. It is about making many more deposits in the “Emotional Bank Account” than withdrawals. Our ability to do that is greatly influenced by the degree of development of our soft skills.
There are three key stages:
- Understand our own behavioural and communication styles and the key drivers of our behaviour.
- Learn to recognise the behavioural style of others and develop the skill and flexibility to adapt and blend our approach to meet their needs.
- Learn to value not judge the differences!
A range of behavioural styles will enhance the effectiveness of a team but a diversity of values can tear it apart.
There is an increasing body of hard research internationally on the impact of soft skills on performance, with productivity differences of those with highly developed soft skills exceeding the average person by factors in the range 3-10 to 1.
Individuals and organisations ignore this trend at their peril, as many organisations hire or promote for hard skills and fire for lack of soft skills.
