Soft skills – great communication, the right workplace behaviours, the ability to lead, problem-solving, adaptability – have too long been seen by the world of business as a desirable luxury. Over the last six months, we’ve all observed the business world waking up to the serious costs of this approach, with a proliferation of articles and commentary calling for a better way.
In fact, creating a culture of excellence around soft skills is the only way companies will thrive in a complex economic landscape. The world of work has changed beyond recognition and continues to change at a rapid pace. When technology changes year by year, the ’hard’ skills you learn one year are obsolete the next, every worker needs the capacity to adapt which is what a good grounding in soft skills offers.
James Caan CBE and McDonalds UK are currently leading a high-profile campaign to re-evaluate the UK’s approach to soft skills. Supporters include Tesco, the Duke of Edinburgh Award, Pearson, Mencap, AON, the CBI, the Federation of Small Businesses, the National Youth Agency, Barclays, City & Guilds and LearnDirect.
McDonalds UK commissioned research for this campaign that showed soft skills – such as communication, teamwork and time management – contribute £88 billion to the national economy, a figure projected to rise to £109 billion by 2020 (Development Economics Ltd, January 2015). Without a doubt, there really are hard costs attached when soft skills are neglected.
Yet the UK is in a weak position going forward: economists project that over half a million workers will be significantly impeded by a lack of soft skills by 2020 (Development Economics Ltd, January 2015).
There is a mood of frustration across the business world around the difficulties caused by young people (whether graduates, apprentices or standard employees) entering the workplace without the skills needed to perform at even a basic level (indeed, these frustrations were the source of our own motivation in setting up Flying Start XP).
“When I was running my company, I used to always encourage my team to read the newspaper! I found it frustrating that they were apathetic about business, that they didn’t understand that being interested and aware of current business news would be an asset in their role – it would help their relationships with clients, they would be able to talk more authoritatively and it would give them confidence to do their role more effectively.” Business Owner / CEO?
Greg Hewitt, Director of Rock Oil Lubricants, told BBC Radio 4 in early 2017 that the one thing he would ask Prime Minister Theresa May in her review of the UK’s post-Brexit industrial strategy would be:
‘that she is going to give me a skilled workforce for the future, so that when people are coming in here they’re going to have skills which I can put to use from day one, not from six to nine months down the line’.
Mr Hewitt is not the only one concerned. Recent research shows:
What are soft skills?: Tools vs behaviours
Soft skills are not just about public speaking, teamwork or being a good leader. Soft skills are the personal qualities that allow people to operate strategically so they can succeed in their goals at work. Soft skills ‘encompass an individual’s ability to listen well, to communicate effectively, to be positive, to manage conflict, accept responsibility, show respect, build trust, work well with others, manage time effectively, accept criticism, work under pressure, be likeable, and to demonstrate good manners’ (Todd Smith, Little Things Matter, 2010). Easy, right?
Approaching soft skills is less overwhelming if you group them into two camps: the tools employees use to perform, and the behaviours that underly everything they do, and which will determine their successes and failures. Our belief is that (whilst we can and do help with tools and techniques), if you get the behaviours right, the tools will fall into place painlessly. If they are embedded through practice and understanding, these behaviours can be recalled easily when the situation arises. So yes, it can be easy.
Young people need confidence, self-awareness and the ability to read situations and understand people. Once they have had the chance to develop those qualities in themselves, they’ll pitch confidently, they’ll ask for help with their presentations when it’s needed, they’ll contribute usefully in a meeting and they’ll make sure they know what you want from a key report.
THIS DICHOTOMY TO BE DONE AS A GRAPHIC
Basic soft skills – the tools everyone needs
Verbal and written communication skills
Time management
Project management
Attention – the ability to follow through on tasks from beginning to end
Budget management
Key relationship building
Behavioural soft skills – the key to success
Confidence and assertiveness
Lateral and critical thinking skills
Emotional intelligence and empathy
Ability to work in a team
Resilience and ability to deal with setbacks
Humility – the ability to reach out for help when you need it
Flexibility
Self-awareness
It’s certainly important to teach public speaking, presentation skills, meeting skills, report-writing and how to pitch an idea. If you shift your thinking and teach workplace behaviours, however, there will be a long-term positive change in your company, as everyone from the bottom up starts to think like a leader, with a personal investment in your business’ success.
Case Study – Radha
Radha had an impressive degree from a great university. She’d always dreamt of working in publishing, and was lucky enough to find her dream job on a prestigious graduate programme. She quickly found herself intimidated by her articulate, ambitious graduate peers, however, and fell into the habit of lying low at meetings. She made little effort to get noticed, but kept hoping that her intellect and application would put her on everyone’s radar. This never happened, because she never got the more interesting tasks that would have brought positive attention. Radha often got lumped with the dull jobs, which drastically reduced her motivation all round. At the end of the graduate programme, she’d applied for a PGCE and gone off to become a teacher.
Great for the students, but a poor investment for the company, and a bruising experience for Radha. Had this company invested even a week in high-calibre soft skills training for Radha and fellow graduates, her peers would have learnt that quiet and less confident people have great ideas and they should have the skills to bring Radha in to the conversation. Radha would have likely become a high-performing and valuable employee as her ideas would have been recognized by others, her confidence would have grown and she would have then been brought into more exciting programme, a lot more motivating. The world of business can be a cold, hard shock after university, but that doesn’t mean we should leave graduates to drown.
Teaching the right soft skills means, as our founder James Prior put it in a recent interview, that young people will know ‘how to work a room, how to network and read situations and people to their own and the company’s best advantage’, and will know how to ‘walk in the shoes of a client and anticipate and understand their requirements from a business perspective’.
Where to start with soft skills
The whole debate around soft skills has become overly negative. It is not the case that young people are a lost cause: soft skills and the right workplace behaviours can be taught, and taught quickly with the right approach.
Businesses employing young people have a really unique opportunity. Whilst it would be great if schools and universities could do more work with students around employability, this is not always the correct capture point. 17-year olds doing their A-levels and stressed final-year Uni students rarely have the right mindset to work on employability, and it can be an uphill battle for mentors and teachers.
Companies, however, get the young person at exactly the right point, when at least some of the following will be true:
*They’ve landed a job they’re proud of.
*They’re excited by the opportunities they see to advance.
*They’re struggling to perform as expected and want to do better.
*Work and their career are now their main focus.
Training at this point will be more cost-effective and more successful than at any other time.
Martin Edmonson, CEO of Gradcore, offers useful advice to companies, removing the focus from berating universities and schools. There is relatively little to be achieved in the short-term by expecting universities and schools to produce ‘oven-ready’ employees. Therefore, he suggests, more flexibility is needed. His suggestions include taking the time to properly diagnose skills shortages within companies, and considering ‘growing your own’ effective employees by upping the budget on training.
So, if you’re wondering where to start, our advice would be to make a good assessment of the soft skills gaps your own business is currently experiencing, and make the hard decision to invest and increase in training budgets and more time to work on these skills, not just the technical skills of the business.
CASE STUDY: Media sales agency in Manchester – this company had a nagging sense that their employees were a bit overworked and that morale was weakening. Perhaps they needed some help with managing workloads and thinking positively? They bought in an afternoon session led by a workplace psychologist, in which employees took the Meyer Briggs personality test. Everyone was entertained by the findings and enjoyed an afternoon away from their desk. They went back to their desks the next day, and there was almost zero long-term change.
CONTRAST THE ABOVE WITH A SUCCESSFUL, LONGER-TERM EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE
Develop or commission training for your youngest employees that focuses at the behavioural level: give them a safe, risk-free space where they have the chance to really understand what is required of them. Slides, guidebooks and e-manuals are a step in the right direction but the greatest impact is through experiential learning: confidence, adaptability, self-awareness and leadership behaviours are best taught by doing. The power is in the debrief allowing you to really reflect and understand how your behaviours are key to your and your teams success.
Flying Start XP offers both business skills courses and bespoke training, so do get in touch if we can help you start on this process.
Soft skills as a long-term investment
Soft skills are not just a question of getting new graduates and apprentices work-ready. Over time, an effective approach to skilling up a workforce will permeate a company’s culture and provide workers with more satisfying, effective careers. Good people will get the skills to reach their potential, and will want to stay and work for your business. Executive coach and author Peggy Klaus writes of her work with frustrated senior executives:
‘What struck me most about their stories of missed opportunities and derailed careers was this: Their problems rarely stemmed from a shortfall in technical or professional expertise, but rather from a shortcoming in the soft skills arena with their personal, social, communication and self-management behaviours’.
Companies who do soft skills properly at all levels will have better retention rates. Finance and accounting expert Syed Hussain advises HR leaders as follows:
‘Don’t underestimate the softer skills that make for a great employee, such as organisation, communication, and leadership. More than a third of failed hires result from personality conflicts or a poor fit with the culture’.
So, as Bruce Tulgan puts it, ‘People get hired because of their hard skills but people get fired because of their soft skills’. You’ll find yourself hanging onto talented people for far longer if you get the soft skills right. Even better, with everyone accessing the behavioural learning needed to realise their potential, you will be likely to feel a year or so down the line that you suddenly have far more ‘talented people’.
It takes courage to change the way we do things, but if the facts are indisputable then its time to take action. Accelerate your apprentices’ and graduates’ learning by challenging what you have always done and discover a quicker and more powerfully solution. Save money, time and lead the way.
by
EngageBay
