Your team culture counts.

This week I’m busy facilitating every day. I have a lot of team workshops on, workshops about leadership and communication, teamwork and productivity, staff retention and engagement and culture and climate - how do we create a great culture and climate at work?

Lots of people often talk about the hard skills.

The systems and the processes, the policies and practices we have at work, how we reward people and what our work conditions are.

While all of those are important as hard skills (especially things like planning and strategy and how people's day-to-day work ties in with that strategy),? it's important to remember that soft skills are equally as important.

I’d even go so far as to say in the past few years soft skills have become more important.

Quite often they were seen as light and not such a big deal, but more and more soft skills have gone hard. Soft skills are beginning to out outweigh the hard skills as we move more and more into a higher tech, AI Chat GPT world.

Sure, we can plug a question into something like Chat GPT and it can pump out a whole heap of data and information and ideas, but it still requires a discerning human to pull that apart, to identify what's important out of that, to reword it in a way that's meaningful and so we still need our humanness.

We still need our human skills.

We still need an ability to discern.

We also need an ability to relate, to communicate and connect. We need an ability to coach and guide others, to show the way, to be true leaders.?

We need to collaborate and connect the dots for people.?

We need to support creativity.

While these things can be supported by stems, they’re most going to require the soft skills first. They need us to show empathy, to engage. It needs our human insight and the power of the collective to really make those things sing.

If you’re interested in building a company, a team, a culture, a workplace, a family, a community group, don't leave out the soft skills. Value them, the emotional intelligence, the grit, the creativity, the courage as much as you do the strategy, the thinking, the IT skills it's as equally important if not more in our modern world.

I’ve got a simple little sheet that shares a little bit about the skills that are needed. If you want to know more, get in touch and I'll send it to you.

Listen to the 10 Degree Shift podcast for more tips and ideas to help you make a small shift at work, in your team, in your leadership, and in your life.