When it comes to Presentation’s I’ve always thought that Soft Skills have a lot to offer.
Storytelling, Question technique, Nonverbal Communication, Influence and Persuasion…oh, just a minute, you didn’t think about using Soft Skills to help influence what the audience are thinking?
You thought those techniques were just to help them do a more satisfying job?
That was my general feeling about delivering the Soft Skills tools…they add knowledge and give a more enriched connection with the audience so that when they are being delivered to the end user, there can be a wider sharing of ideas and experiences.
Right?
So, an article caught my eye the other day because, it was talking about using Soft Skills to achieve outcomes that are much more focussed than let’s say… ‘ways to be creative with Accounts Receivable’
For example, ‘rallying the workforce around a common goal’ was mentioned as a soft skill currently in demand.
The article also had some interesting data about which companies asked candidates about their Soft Skills experience during job interviews. Multinational corporations had a 4.7% increase in the probability of including references to social skills in their job descriptions and companies involved in Mergers and Acquisitions were 3% more likely to seek social skills.
Study models also found that firms requiring large numbers of employees with IT skills were associated with a 5.2 to 6.3 percent increase in demand within the social-skills cluster.
That last example reminds me of how I.T professionals are, indeed, well known for being social. At one of the organisations I worked for early in my career, the IT department worked around the clock (this was a long time ago!) and during the night shift the staff liked to play cricket in the corridor until… a stray ball made a big dent in the mainframe which shut it down for several hours.
The article referred to was originally published by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.
After working in sales and then purchasing roles for almost 18 years with companies in the UK, Japan, Korea and then here in Hong Kong, I became involved in the field of business skills development. 20 years later, my special interests in this area are individual management style building, interpersonal communication and influencing strategies. 