Soft Skills Can Get Hard Results

Want to win the Safety Game…start with you. Any time you help prevent a near miss, accidental discharge, injury, or crash, you won, that one round anyways. So how do you take these one off situations and turn them into a series of continued wins. Given the modern safety environment and the almost endless safety management systems, the approach can be varied and sometimes blurred. This is especially true as we tend to focus on process and overlook the individuals charged with the task. As Professionals, we have the unique task of using soft skills and hard skills. In safety, hard skills are pretty well defined, if not expected and for the most part take center stage. Hard skills can be federal compliance, polices, methods, training, and procedures for executing a task. But what’s a soft skill, you may ask? A quick web search will probably tell you that a soft skill is really an interpersonal skill used to describe your approach to life, work, and relationships with other people. This where starting with you matters.

Here are some quick tips to help develop your soft skill game:

1.      Learn to communicate in a manner that invites others to listen. This can be a challenge in our go-go culture where time is a valuable resource often not allocated to good communication. Communication comes the Latin commuicationem, which means to share, impart, inform, join, unite, participate in, and is related to communis which means common, public, general. To communicate is to give not direct. Giving good advice, imparting wisdom, and teaching are at the heart of good communicators and the messages they convey. Often times we confuse communicating with commanding or instructing. Each has their place but often times good communication has a lasting effect over telling.

2.      Learn to comprehend without bias. Sometimes we tend to hear what we want to hear verses hearing what we need to know. Comprehend is a verb, and therefore implies action on the part of the receiver from the communicator. Comprehend has two root meanings, again from the Latin comprehendere, com means with, together and prehendere means to (get a) hold of, seize. So when we hear the message and learn to take hold of it, interpret it, grasps its literal and deeper meaning it is powerful tool for the receiver of information. And of course doing so without our preconceived notions (bias) of right or wrong helps us make rational determinations.

3.      Learn to coach. Oh yes, coach has an origin meaning as well. It comes from the French world coche and means large kind of four-wheel, covered carriage. In 1830 the word took on the slang meaning of instructor/trainer and meant one who ‘carries’ a student though an exam. When applied with our comprehension skills, we can coach in a manner that communicates meaning and value rather than impart criticism (aka constructive feedback).

4.      Learn to empathize. This is when we seek to understand the feelings or thought processes of another. Unlike sympathy, where we adopt the feelings of another, empathy seeks decode the process of defect in thinking or action. When we understand the mechanisms of decision making that lead to poor actions or outcomes, then we can help the person via coaching for improvement in thought and action.

5.      Learn to celebrate other’s accomplishments. To celebrate is the perform the action publicly with appropriate rites. Translated into today’s terms, it means to make a big deal about positive improvement in action or behavior (that lead to diminished at-risk behaviors). What gets recognized get repeated, especially from when it’s the leader who celebrate the worker’s actions.

As safety continues to evolve into a proud and valued profession, we Safety Professionals have the unique challenge of delivering value added quantitative results. This can be a difficult when we are often left with qualitative constructs and a vast array of differing people and personalities. However, learning to harness the attributes of soft skills can give us the added wind we need to move our ships across the vast oceans of safety and compliance.