Ignore "Soft Skills" at Your Peril!
The other day I heard the point of view that Australian companies are losing interest in developing their staff’s "soft skills" because they have their eyes set on a future where IT will streamline, facilitate or replace many of the functions that are currently seen as needing such skills. This was just one man’s opinion, but it is a dangerous and erroneous notion, and rang alarm bells for me, so at the risk of attacking a straw man, here is why failing to invest in people skills is a fatal error.
IT is certainly changing the way we work, but until IT takes us beyond the need to function in harmony as a social species, then #HumanCommunication skills will remain central to any organisation where more than one person has to coordinate their efforts towards a common goal (which is most organisations!)
We all naturally preach for the importance of our own area of expertise, but think about it: remove language from the equation and very little of human society remains functional. If you can’t see that, here’s a challenge for you: try to spend an entire day without employing language at all! No speaking, no listening, no reading, no writing… Short of meditating alone in a closed room all day, it’s just impossible!
We are a social species. We have to interact constantly with other people in order to keep society working, and the main vector (not the only one, but the main one) that we use to achieve this interaction is language.
But our normal understanding of the word “language” is rather narrow. Language is the most visible and best understood aspect of what we do when we communicate, but it is only a thin thread in a connection that includes many other variables (gesture, tone, posture, facial expression, context, beliefs, assumptions, culture…)
These kinds of communicative and interactional skills get called “soft skills” because they are difficult to quantify. But that certainly doesn’t make them less important. They are the basis of trust, respect, personal motivation, leadership, teamwork, job satisfaction… performance.
Poor internal communication will cripple an organisation more effectively than any more readily quantifiable problem.
#HumanCommunication is built on interpersonal (affective) connections. It is intrinsically interactional. Poor communication will damage these kinds of connections which will further impair communication within a group. In this way poor communication does not remain an isolated problem. It’s a disease that can spread through an organisation and can kill it from within.
The problem often gets mis-identified as poor leadership, poor team cohesion, poor HR architecture… But this is labelling the symptoms, not the disease. A wise man once said to me that
“The worst organisational structure can be made to work if populated with a real team, and the best one will fail if populated with individuals.”
(OK, he actually said “idiots”). And the difference between a group of individuals and a team is communication.
Another reason why this is not often seen as a priority is because everybody thinks they’re a good communicator… Including you (and me). Our language is a central aspect of our self-image. This is true of our communication habits in general in fact, but we are most aware of language, and few people maintain a globally negative self image... But the irony here is that we learn or are taught notions about what language is and how it works that are quite inaccurate, and that lead us to dysfunctional communicative habits that we cannot easily be aware of without the help of a #HumanCommunication specialist of some kind (i.e. a trained, external pair of eyes).
As we head into an era of IT-assisted “communications”, the need to focus on #HumanCommunication skills does not diminish, it becomes all the more urgent. Developments in IT can change the surface rules, but do not impact millions of years of evolution that have made us what we are: a social species whose entire existence (psychological, emotional, social, political, economic) depends upon human interaction and #HumanCommunication.