Episode 30 - Soft Skills

Episode #30: Soft Skills

The so called soft skills of authenticity and emotional intelligence are anything but soft.   They are the key to becoming a trusted advisor to those you serve.  These are soft skills that produce hard results. We need a coherent method for improving soft skills among talented people.  Often when a company is struggling financially the first thing to go out the window is the very thing they should be focusing on for better results.  The development of people with the courage to embrace innovation and change.  If your organization wants to create more value and better profit margins these are the people we need to be relying upon.

Almost all company soft skills training is terrible at creating sustainably better results.  The central skill of future jobs will be an individual's willingness to do the emotional labor that change and innovation requires.  Schools have not taught us this so we need to encourage people to close this developmental gap in their abilities.  If we care enough about our future success we need to be unleashing the human potential within our organizations.  Culture beats strategy and technology every time.  We need to be creating cultures that truly care about those they serve.

Management and leadership require different skill sets designed to achieve different outcomes.  Management's primary function is to maintain and improve upon the status quo.  The role of leadership is to move beyond the status quo in order for innovation and change to occur.  You can manage tasks but you must be willing to develop the soft skills of authentic emotionally intelligent leadership if you want you and your organization to succeed. 

Our special guest is Andrew Wright, post-production supervisor at George Brown College in Toronto.  His credits include feature films, documentaries and other commercial projects. https://www.linkedin.com/in/liquidstairs/

Thanks so much for listening!  If you like the show please subscribe to Master of Business Leadership and rate and review it wherever you get your podcasts.  It really does help new listeners discover the show.

iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/master-of-business-leadership-podcast/id1335503365

Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/master-of-business-leadership?refid=stpr

Libsyn http://masterofbusinessleadership.libsyn.com

Phil Johnson on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipjpjohnson

Music

http://www.bensound.com