Impactful Leadership (Part 3)

3 Ways to Improve Your Soft Skills

Meet your skill improvement goals using one or more of the 3 ways below.

1. Assessment and Behavior Modification.
2. Mentoring BOGO: Be One Get One.
3. Attend Professional Education Courses.

Soft skills are loosely known more as how you act than what you know and can prove you can do.  They are more about people and less about numbers or technical skills like the ability to read an X-Ray.  They are more about being a follower and a leader than your computer skills. Collaboration, Leadership, Communication, are some of the more requested areas to improve.  We all have the responsibility to work on our ability to interact with and get work done through others and that means our soft skills.

If you want to define and improve your soft skills, read on!

Our course covers these and many more topics in an experiential way.  www.dataanalysis.com/training/courses/impactful-leadership-and-management-best-practices-for-supervisors-to-cxos.

This post (Part 3 of 3) discusses three ways to improve your Soft Skills.

Assessment and Behavior Modification

In our experience, about half of the people we know who want to improve their soft skills know what they want and about half don’t.  Even if people think they know what they need to do to improve, many times they are at least a little off base.  So, how do you know what to improve?

First, lay out your goal or goals.  Do you want to improve your personal relationships?  Would you like to be considered for a promotion at work?  Are you willing to serve in a volunteer leadership position?  If you don’t have a main goal, you may become overwhelmed with all the choices of both skills and methods to improve and end up not accomplishing much.  Instead, find an area to focus on. It could simply be a quick choice!  It is hard to make a mistake here, other than doing nothing at all.

So choose one goal even if you just force yourself to decide.  If you want a guide, use the self-assessment below to map your results to your goals.  Doing that, will at least narrow your choices and allow you to focus on one thing at a time.

Do a simple self-assessment.

Here is a reasonable place to start.

https://leaf-ohio.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/III.A.3-LEAF-Soft-Skills-Self-evaluation.pdf

An hour or so spent in true reflection on your capabilities in these ten areas will let you know, in a general way, some areas you should choose to work on.  The next step is mapping your areas to improve to your goals.  If you find one or two areas that stand out as being the most likely to help you move forward in your goals, great!

If not, allow us to suggest working on your speaking, general communication, and leadership skills.  One of the easiest and proven paths is ToastMasters International.  They have a proven process of planning, presenting, soliciting and applying feedback, all in a clever collaborating and generally enjoyable way. See www.toastmasters.org for an overview and to find a club near you.  Many large firms have multiple internal ToastMasters Clubs that meet at convenient times and perhaps even at your place of work.

Mentoring BOGO: Be One Get One

The best way we know to quickly hone in on areas you would benefit greatly by improving is to be both a mentee and mentor.

Thankfully I have had many mentors throughout my life, and every one has helped me in at least one major area.  When you decide to solicit a mentor, remember you are deciding to listen and actively work toward changing your behavior, not just listening to them.  The best mentors will give you “assignments” to experiment and power through barriers that you may not have even realized existed.

As one quick example, I was a developer working my way into a project management position.  By default I organized the work that a group was doing and pushed management to prioritize rather than just blast out assignments.  There was one senior manager whom I did not like as they seemed reasonably complimentary of everyone’s work, but when we interacted they gave me a lot of very candid feedback that was uncomfortable, and to my young feelings, was “picking on me.”

So what did my mentor do?  Insist I seek out that manager, of all the managers in the building, for feedback twice a week until I was totally comfortable with them and the candid feedback process.  I hated that task but I valued my mentee relationship more.  I finally became comfortable with the feedback and the manager.  When I asked them why they had been so hard on me early on, they replied, “Because you had the capacity to do great work and I don’t spend time with people without the capacity.”  If I had not sought out a mentor, and the mentor did not make me do the hard things, I would not have progressed in my career nearly as quickly nor as far as I did.

Your organization may have a formal mentor program and LinkedIn has a way to solicit and volunteer to mentor, yet you may have to seek people out and ask them for help.

Attend Professional Education Courses

Another way to improve your soft skills is to seek out people you respect and ask them to teach you!  That is how we got into training.  Our clients observed the behaviors our people showed on consulting engagements and asked us to build both hard (technical and process) and soft skills training and deliver to their staff and sometimes to their vendors and partners.  We now deliver dozens of courses in-person and virtually around the world.  For a list see www.dataanalysis.com/training/delivered-courses.

Our most popular soft skills course covers these and many other topics in an experiential way and, while useful for everyone, is especially valuable for those in or seeking or wanting to improve their performance in formal or informal leadership positions.

Topics include: Who We Are & What We Do as Leaders, Change Yourself First, Set and Fulfill Expectations, Lead By Example: Model the Behavior You Want, and many more.  www.dataanalysis.com/training/courses/impactful-leadership-and-management-best-practices-for-supervisors-to-cxos

What Should Leaders Do to Leverage You and Your People?  Your Thoughts?

Thoughts on how you can best improve your skills that we did not touch on?  Good luck and keep your eye out for ways to improve your relationship and leadership skills!

Your path to business success.