This is a guest post from Pick Empowerment
(Member since 2018)
Social and emotional intelligence, or soft skills, are necessary to attain and cultivate in business at every level. Why? To enhance internal and external customer service! Social and emotional intelligence is the ability to be aware of our emotions and those of others in the moment, and to use that information to manage ourselves and manage our relationships.
Being able to meet team members and customers where they are at, identify strengths and challenges and act appropriately, are skills essential to developing a healthy work culture. Tools to assess and enhance soft skills are being used by over 75 per cent of fortune 500 companies according to the Institute for Social and Emotional Intelligence. The U.S. and Australia have been implementing strategies to foster soft skills in classrooms and boardrooms with positive results. Being able to play nice in the sandbox of life is a win-win for everyone.
Our genetic makeup is established at conception (nature) and does not change much over our lifetime if at all. An individual’s personality is pretty much formed by the age of six or seven. Our nurture, social interactions, influence our behavior. We do not have control over our nature or nurture but we do have control over our behaviors. Soft skills can be taught to infinity and beyond — there is no ceiling such as with our IQ.
Understanding the unique strengths and challenges of an individual or team provides a solid foundation to develop empowering strategies to overcome roadblocks. Self and other awareness, as well as self and relationship management skills, can be learned. Specific skills such as; personal power, service orientation, integrity, behavioral self-control, communication, powerful influencing skills, teamwork and collaboration, achievement drive, personal agility, building trust, and many more skills can be fostered with the correct tools and cooperation of individual/team.
How many times have you known you that you or another team member were to meet goals but couldn’t determine why? Do you invest in training if you do not know what the issue is that you are trying to address? Do you let skilled labor go without first supporting strategies to enhance effectiveness? You are wasting time and money! You are addressing the symptoms not the cause. Use training dollars effectively.
Be empowered!
Charlene Pickrem is the Host of Mental Health – Let’s Talk About it! Contact her at cpick@live.ca or check out the website at www.pickempowerment.ca.
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