Defining soft skills

What Are Soft Skills?

By definition, soft skills are an individual’s ability to sense, regulate, and respond in a constructive way to other people’s ideas as well as how to explore resolutions to issues, challenges, problems or conflicts with others. Soft skills are about exercising influence and building trust with others.

Common soft skills examples and topic areas include the following list. While this is not an exhaustive list, these are common areas many organization focus on in their effort to develop leadership soft skills.

Communication Skills
Collaboration
Conflict Resolution/Management
Delegation
Emotional Intelligence
Influencing others
Leadership Styles
Teamwork
Team Meeting Effectiveness
Time Management
Recognition
Performance discussions
Feedback

Why are soft skills important for an individual?

For both individual and organizational performance, most business leaders say that soft skills are at least as important as technical skills. Most also report significant challenges when it comes to finding talent with the soft skills to support effective collaboration, customer service, employee engagement, productivity, innovation and many other workplace capabilities that fuel bottom-line business results.

Demand for soft skills is expected to grow in the coming decade. Continuing evolution of artificial intelligence and machine learning will only make soft skills more valuable as the differentiators we humans can bring to the table.

Business case for soft skills in a work place

Harvard Business Review published the results of a study conducted by Porath and Pearson. This study indicated that poor leadership soft skills like rudeness, incivility, disrespectful interactions and hostility had astonishing results on the bottom line and on the organization’s culture. A poll of 800 managers in 17 industries plus thousands of interviews with workers over a 14-year period indicated that people will respond to ineffective soft skills in a negative way.

Employees are 30% less creative when they feel disrespected
48% deliberately decrease their efforts
Good people leave
38% lower the quality of their work

Company leadership and HR professionals believe that improved soft skills lead to better behavior and business climate, which leads to better results. A strong soft skills culture in any organization is a differentiator which creates a positive, steady and predictable work experience and greater efficiencies for leaders and team members alike.

Organizations have doubled down on soft skills development and training. This effort has a significant impact on retention and turnover. Studies are clearly showing that soft skill focused organizations have:

Higher retention
Higher employee engagement
Improved business results and profitability