Staff Performance: Why Hard Skills Need Soft Skill Support

Introduction

Work is a social event. That doesn’t mean it’s a party. It means that it can only be conducted by and with people. It also means that successful staff performance requires “soft skills”: the ability to be effective with and through others.

The Reality Of The Workplace

What are you doing about the soft skills of your employees? We all look for hard skills: the technical skills that make a “good” engineer, accountant, salesperson or IT specialist. They’re essential. But they’re not enough.

Great Engineering And A Great Engineer

To be a great engineer you need more than great engineering. You require a skill set that enables you to exercise your great engineering ideas without alienating others including bosses, colleagues and customers. Without those soft skills you’ll never be a truly great engineer.

Who Needs Soft Skills?

Everyone in the workplace needs soft skills. People must work together effectively for business success. That success stems from focused collaborative effort. If an employee can’t contribute effectively to the collaborative effort his or her usefulness is seriously reduced. And it doesn’t really matter how well they can demonstrate their hard skills or how well they work alone.

Some Essential Soft Skills

• Team participation: do contribute effectively to team performance
• Basic negotiation: the give and take of working with others to clarify work roles
• Face to face communication: simple paraphrasing, listening and presentation
• Non threatening presentation: stating views in a way that doesn’t threaten others
• Poor recognition: willingness to recognize contributions of colleagues to effective performance
• Questioning: able to ask questions for clarification and better information
• Professional respect: recognizing and accepting that other employees and other teams have an equally important role in helping achieve business results

Actions to Promote Soft Skills

• Cross training within and between teams
• Set up projects requiring contributions of two or more teams
• Establishing methods of giving team members input into measurement of individual member’s performance
• Emphasizing team above individual goals
• Opportunities to interact with customers regularly regardless of formal job roles
• Stress limitations of a “hard skills” emphasis.

Not “Niceness”

Soft skills are not an exercise in “niceness”. In reality, soft skills are most valuable where no close personal ties exist. It requires greater skill to negotiate successfully with someone you don’t know well than with a friend.

Not Just Managers

Normally we don’t  concern ourselves about soft skills until an employee is promoted into a supervisory or management role. That’s a mistake. And it’s usually too late. It’s important to develop soft skills in the day to day work of normal operations.  By doing so, staff learn about their importance in day to day operations. They can build on them as they progress in their career.

Conclusion

Don’t wait! Don’t wait until you promote an employee to try to develop soft skills. Successful teamwork is essential teamwork is essential to the success of your business. Soft skills help build successful teams. Good performance by individual employees is most desirable. But without effective soft skills, the impact of successful individual performance will be seriously diminished.

What To Do Now

Firstly, ask yourself if there’s too much emphasis on individual performance in your business. Look for ways to encourage co-operation and collaboration both within and between teams. Contact me if you’d like help. And please leave a comment.

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