- We’ve become lazy communicators and it’s deepening the chasm between what we mean and what was understood
- Our overdependence on ‘hard skills’ means the value of ‘soft skills’ has degraded
- Focusing on soft skills simply requires focus and practice, like anything else
We have become intellectually flabby where communication is concerned. Yes, we all communicate everyday, but that doesn’t mean we’re doing it well. The basic acts of speaking and writing may be things we all learn from a young age, but just like playing a sport or instrument, communication skills require practice.
The way we improve our communication skills is by practicing or performing them with intention, but for maximum improvement, we can all benefit from being coached and given feedback on our performance. The reason for this is simple: we rarely communicate with the intention of receiving feedback.
Sure, we may get lucky from time to time when managing a meeting or conflict, but I also get lucky sometimes when I try to swing a baseball bat (and it is luck, I played little league for 7 years and only hit the ball once). Focusing on these skills makes us better, like anything else that requires focus.
No matter where you are on the spectrum of communication skill level and regardless of what career stage you’re in, you can always improve. There’s no such thing as a perfect communicator and there never will be. But like any skill, when we stop practicing, get lazy, take it for granted, or simply neglect it, we get rusty and take shortcuts, assuming people are receiving and understanding our messages. This breakdown of skills results in avoidable problems. This is precisely why I’m passionate about focusing on helping others improve these skills.
Let’s start with defining what I mean by skill.
A skill is a behavior or action you perform to reach a specific outcome. Simple right? It is, though some skills are simpler than others. In the workforce, we often talk about hard skills and soft skills, with an unspoken bias towards which are more valued. Hard skills are behaviors associated with precise and specific sequences, order and procedures. They’re black and white, right or wrong and there’s little room for interpretation. Think of learning to use software, becoming a pastry chef or flying a plane. These skills are much more straightforward skills to teach than soft skills, because they’re extremely process-oriented and mistakes or skipping steps lead to near-instantaneous failures. But I want to be clear, I am not saying hard skills are easy to perform. I am saying there are clearer ways to teach hard skills because they are not as dependent on context and the processes are more precise than soft skills.
This, however, is why I believe we have it backwards. Soft skills are really the “hard” skills to learn and deepen one’s expertise at because they’re not black or white, right or wrong, and they’re different in every situation. They require nuanced attention to many cues and variables that are different in every single interaction.
Soft skills have an important focus because they manage humans, ideas and information. They are dependent on variables like situational awareness, individual people and their backgrounds, organizational culture, context, historical timing, and whether the person you’re dealing with is rested, alert and engaged. Simply put, these are communication skills. For too long, we’ve undervalued these skills and many people and companies have found themselves in some very expensive and often damaging situations because of how they communicate or how they failed to communicate effectively when it mattered most.
Soft skills are people skills, borne of how we communicate, and let’s be honest, people are complicated. We all come with baggage and with that baggage, we create a complex human system that requires core skills to manage it competently and effectively. Most issues in any organization can be related to people and how they interact. It’s time to give the soft skills the respect and deference they require because we’re losing millions of dollars to ineffective communication skills every year.
Why focus on soft skills now?
Companies are seeing more issues than ever before because they’re dragging their feet to solve issues that stem from how they’re communicating. This is a result of our epidemic level of under-practiced soft skills. We don’t talk to each other as much as we used to, and when we do, it’s often purely transactional. We’ve become a society driven by text-based communication, we email and we can’t even bring ourselves to answer the phone. When was the last time you left an actual voicemail for someone? It’s fallen so far out of favor, many of us are carrying messages around for weeks, avoiding listening to them for as long as possible. The bottom line is that we avoid in-person interaction and these skills have become flabby, at best.
Now, I’m not saying we should never email and throw away our phones and move to the woods. Technology can be a very good tool for communicating, but we need to be wise about when we choose that channel. The tools designed to help us be more efficient should not and cannot be used for everything. When we use a text-based channel for most of our communication, we remove the nonverbal or emotional component of the message, which leaves the receiver with an open opportunity to perceive that message as they see fit. And remember, perception is reality.
Without the nonverbal and emotional components, they can only interpret your words through their experiences and feelings. And we all know that sometimes the situations we create in our heads tend toward the extreme. I’m sure I am not the only overthinker in the bunch. More often than not, much more is achieved when I communicate with people using my voice, lowering the anxiety that surrounds so much of our communication.
This is the practice of focusing on our soft skills and using them the way they were intended. I encourage all of my clients, regardless of what they do and how dependent they are on tech tools to transmit messages, to lean in and embrace soft skills development.