Three lessons about developing “soft skills”

At work, at life, and even before our kids are born or our employees are hired, we are concerned about our/their soft skills. In my research and coaching/advisory practice, I learned a few lessons about soft skills and developing them.

• What do we mean by “soft skills”? Perhaps there are as many disagreements about soft skills as the number of definitions! Often we put a vague label on things that are essential, but are difficult to be clearly defined. “Soft skill” is one of them. For this reason, we must talk in the “language of examples”.?I tried to compile a list of such examples that often turned out to be central to my research and coaching. This is not an exhaustive list; it is only to give you some examples.

Instead of saying I need to develop my soft skills, we must define the specific examples of soft skills that we want to develop.?

• My soft skills are unique to “me” and “my conditions”: Two colleagues working in the same team may both want to develop their “communication” skills. Yet, for one, it means “the capability of using confident tone and authentic expressions when presenting in front of clients” and for the other one “the capability of articulating ideas into a logical flow”. Hence:

Forget about the abstract labels and categories. Rather clearly describe your target soft skill by clearly saying “the capability of performing this specific task/activity”.?

• Soft skills are like body muscles: If you go to a physiotherapist and say I need to improve my muscles, she will look at you strangely and will ask, which of the 600+ muscles? We may feel some pain in the neck, but we should not proceed with any physiotherapy activity unless we specify which muscles need to be improved. We have many soft skills across our “self”. Which ones do we need to develop?

Honest truth: more than often, we need an experienced mentor/coach to explore the different muscles (soft skills) and accurately identify which specific ones are weak or damaged.