Do excellent leaders need Soft Skills - really?
Beatrix Baron
🌱Mindmover|voor een frisse duik in je geest 🌊Psychodynamisch Therapeut✔︎Coach✔︎Trainer✔︎
'Leadership is much more an art, a belief, a condition of the heart, than a set of things to do. The visible signs of artful leadership are expressed, ultimately, in its practice.' — Max DePree
Principles of Competition
Think of soft skills in the light of competition principles.
Imagine you are a company producing something, let’s say light bulbs. You come up with a revolutionary new technology. Your light bulbs are suddenly much better than others and your profits go up.
But, after a while, your competitors get hold of the technology: you license its use, perhaps, or they develop alternatives. Suddenly, light bulbs are all the same again and your profits are suffering. You still need the new technology, but you also need a new competitive edge.
Hard skills are like your technology: anyone can acquire them, with training, and they are necessary. Without them you will not be able to operate in the workplace. Soft skills are your unique selling point and give you a competitive edge in the workplace, and perhaps even in life.
Emotional Intelligence
Many people have characterised soft skills as those relating to Emotional Intelligence, the ability to recognise and manage your own and others’ emotions. However, in reality, they go beyond that, and into the wider realms of how you organise yourself and how you approach life.
# The good news is that you can learn and develop soft skills as well as hard skills.
# The bad news is that it’s often much harder, and there is no easy measure of success.
Like hard skills, soft skills require a lot of practice to make you really skilled at using them. Unlike hard skills, there are no exams to prove that you can do them. You measure your success in developing soft skills in how well you manage the relationships with those around you: family, friends, and co-workers, as well as customers and those who provide you with goods or services.
What about you and your skills?
Thank you for reading.
Have a powerful day, your ArtoVivo works Team