Promote Yourself (8 page)

On the most basic level, soft skills—sometimes called
emotional intelligence
—are nontechnical skills. But it's a little more subtle than that. They're interpersonal skills, skills that enable you to form relationships with coworkers, fit into the corporate culture, and communicate successfully. Hard skills, which we talked about in the previous chapter, are what will help you navigate the technical elements of your job, but it's soft skills that will enable you to move ahead. Soft skills are generally very apparent to the people around you, and if those skills are sharp, people will notice. By gaining and mastering communication and other soft skills and developing your own emotional intelligence, you'll become the person everyone wants to work with. You'll become an influencer and a leader. You'll also be very much in charge of managing the way you're perceived by others. Don't wait to be judged by others. Instead, focus on highlighting your abilities in a way that clearly demonstrates (as opposed to you having to say anything) the skills you have and the value you and those skills bring to your team and your employer.

The difference between hard skills and soft is kind of like the difference between a single computer and a network. You can do a lot of stuff with the computer, but the network allows you to communicate with other computers, access the company's intranet from home, and print a document from the other side of the building. One computer gets the job done, but the network lets you get so much more out of every device that's connected. I asked a number of managers at Fortune 500 companies to tell me about the soft skills they think young employees will need if they want to move up in their careers. Here's what they said:

•
Strong work ethic

•
Optimism/positive attitude

•
Good communication skills

•
Good conversation skills

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Storytelling abilities for presentations

•
Time management abilities

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The ability to listen and to speak to the “human needs” of coworkers and customers and make them feel understood and respected

•
Being good at reading people

•
Ability to build relationships and connect with others on a deep level

•
Exercise tact when delivering a message

•
The ability to propose solutions to problems, not just talk about problems

•
Meaningfully contribute to brainstorming

•
Ability to write well

•
Problem-solving skills

•
Team player

•
Being likable

•
Self-confidence

•
Can accept and learn from criticism

•
Flexibility/adaptability

•
Can work well under pressure

•
Empathy

•
Integrity

•
Sense of humor

 

How Important Are Soft Skills?

To be perfectly blunt, people with hard skills are a dime a dozen. A high school kid can probably learn most of the hard skills that would be required to do just about any job, but it's doubtful that he or she would have the emotional maturity and people skills to make it in a Fortune 200 company. In Chapter 2, we talked about how important it is to stand out. Well, nothing will make you stand out more than the ability to bring out the best in yourself and others. So how important are soft skills? In a word, they're critical.

“Sufficient soft skills enable the employee to learn the hard skills: they see the value, and they see the bigger picture,” Susan Langill, Food & Nutrition Director at Sodexo, told me. “A successful employee has enthusiasm, drive, social filters, interpersonal skills, and an eagerness to learn and succeed. This employee will advance your team and your organization and with these transferable skills is capable of learning most or all the hard skills needed to perform most of the job tasks within an organization.”

Let me give you a few more examples:

 

• 71 percent of employers say they value emotional intelligence over IQ, according to
CareerBuilder.com
. Fifty-nine percent would not hire someone with a high IQ but low emotional intelligence.

 

• When my company interviewed employers about the most important traits they look for when hiring students, 98 percent said “communication skills,” 97 percent said “positive attitude,” and 97 percent said “teamwork.”

 

• 89 percent of people who get fired within the first eighteen months on the job are let go because of attitudinal reasons; only 11 percent because of a lack of skills, according to Mark Murphy, founder and CEO of Leadership IQ.

 

• When evaluating an employee's performance, 32 percent of employers say hard skills are the most important, 7 percent say digital/tech skills, and 61 percent say soft skills, according to our study.

The bottom line here is that being able to do your job isn't enough. The big question is: How well do you fit in with the corporate culture? Can you build relationships with the people you work with and for? Do you have the skills to overcome personality conflicts, motivate your team members, and sell your ideas to your managers?

Now that you know how important soft skills are, all you have to do is get out there and learn them, right? Unfortunately, that's a lot easier said than done. Unlike hard skills, soft skills are hard to teach—and they're even harder to measure. And unlike hard skills, where you can take what you've learned in a lab setting and put it to work right away, with soft skills it's all about putting yourself in situations where they're needed and slowly getting better and better. But before we can start turning you into a soft skills expert, we need to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

 

Assess Your Soft Skills

Let's do a quick self-assessment. This isn't intended to be a scientific analysis—you can get that with any number of tools, including Myers Briggs, many of which are available for little or no cost online. What we're doing here is trying to get a rough idea of where you stand. On a scale of 1–5, where 1 is Not Good at All and 5 is Spectacular, rate the following statements:

Okay, now add up your total. If you got anything more than 45 points (the max is 50), you can skip the rest of this chapter—you're a soft skills genius. If you're somewhere between 30 and 45 (which is where most of us are), you're going to want to take advantage of every opportunity to polish your soft skills. Anything less than 30, and you've got some serious work to do.

 

Ways to Improve Your Soft Skills

Now that you have a rough idea of your soft skills strengths and weaknesses, let's get into the specifics of how to improve (or develop) soft skills. Learning to communicate effectively is the most important soft skill of all. It's also probably the most misunderstood. Communication involves more than just talking. A lot more. Just think of all the e-mails and texts you send every day, the way you order your coffee in the morning, the smile you give to the cute guy or gal on the subway on the way to work, the face-to-face meetings with coworkers, and even when you're standing silently next to people in the elevator. Just about everything we do—even the way we sit, walk, eat, or play—communicates something to someone. For the next few pages I want to take you through some excellent ways of improving your communication skills.

LISTEN.
   If you don't listen carefully, you can't possibly know what people want, what their state of mind is, why they're doing what they're doing, and how you can help them achieve their goals (as opposed to how you can convince them to do what you want them to do).

The most important part about listening is not talking. I know that sounds pretty basic, but a lot of people are in such a hurry to get their opinions heard that they interrupt others, talk on top of them, and sometimes just won't shut up—especially when they're nervous. One way to tell whether you might be too chatty is to think about how you start conversations. Do you launch into a long story about something that happened to you or that you did, or do you start by asking a few questions and listening to
their
stories?

When you're talking with someone really be there and ask a lot of questions—but don't make it into a cross-examination. If they say something interesting, explore it a little deeper. Base your follow-up questions on their response to the initial question. The more you let people talk about themselves, the more they'll be interested in you and support your ideas.

And if you're easily distracted, practice focusing. One method I've used to test my focus is to try to recall the details of a conversation after it's over. If I've got some paper handy, I'll jot down a quick summary of what the other person said. Or I'll dictate those notes into my phone. I know this sounds like something you'd hear in Psych 101 or from one of those tech support people who've been trained to repeat back what you've said, but it actually works. First of all, it demonstrates that you were actually listening; second, it can clear up any misunderstandings; and third, it can give you a chance to ask follow-up questions so you can dig deeper into what the other person is trying to get across. If you find that you can't remember what the person you're talking with said, that's a big red flag that you need to be paying more attention.

Being a good listener is a critical communication skill on its own. But it also affects the way you communicate in other areas. For example, your ability to listen will have a direct effect on your ability to write summaries of meetings, follow-up e-mails, and even thank-you notes.

WRITE WELL.
   “If I had to give our young leaders one piece of advice, it would be to work on your writing skills,” Nancy Altobello, Vice Chair of People at Ernst & Young LLP, told me. So while you may spend a fair amount of time tweeting and texting, as you move through your organization, you'll also need to be writing reports, white papers, newsletters, and, of course, e-mails. Being able to produce well-structured, intelligent, concise, written materials that people will want to read is essential. “When it comes time to deliver that tough message to a client or coworker, chances are it will take more than 140 characters,” Altobello adds. Whatever you're writing be sure to get to the point quickly and have a strong call for action. People who read what you're writing (and that includes e-mail subject lines) should come away knowing exactly what you want them to do. At the very least, this will save you having to deal with a hundred questions asking you to explain things that you left out of the original document.

It's also essential to know your audience. The e-mail lunch invite you send to your boss should be very different from one to a friend. And everything should be proofread before it goes out. Bad grammar, spelling, punctuation, incomplete sentences, and endlessly long and rambling text will make you look sloppy and unprofessional. It's extremely difficult to proofread your own stuff, so having an extra pair of eyes may be necessary for some documents. And since you never know where your paper or e-mail or whatever will show up (people routinely hit Reply All or accidentally forward documents that they shouldn't), I suggest that you always write imagining that someone you're really trying to impress is going to be reading it.

Writing is a bit of an exception to the soft-skills-can't-be-taught rule, meaning that if your writing isn't what it should be, you can take classes and improve your spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and other basics. But what's harder to teach is exactly
what
to say in all those perfectly spelled, beautifully structured words.

All of our communications skills are connected. We've just seen how listening affects writing. Well, writing, in turn, affects other areas. For example, knowing how to put your ideas down on paper in a logical, well-organized way will make it a lot easier to present those ideas to others.