Welcome to our latest blog: The Big Question, where Robyn De Villiers, Founder of Three C’s delves into the often misunderstood world of soft skills. While these abilities are casually referred to as “soft,” their mastery is anything but straightforward. Robyn explores the complexities of interpersonal skills that are crucial for leadership and professional success, and why investing in these skills is essential for bridging the gap between technical expertise and effective team leadership.
Robyn is the Founder and CEO of The Three Cs and the Founder and Chairman of BCW Africa. She has been engaged in public relations, corporate communication and training across the African continent, and globally, for 30+ years. Robyn is widely recognised as an Executive Coach, Communicator, Educator, Collaborator and Facilitator.
We asked Robyn: Are soft skills the harder skills to master?
If you followed the ‘traditional’ path to employment, you probably went to school, graduated, went to university, graduated, created your Curriculum Vitae, completed numerous job applications, went to numerous interviews and finally landed your first job. You entered the working world with enthusiasm and determination, ready to put to work all the ‘technical’/intellectual skills you had acquired over the years. Because you are hard-working and technically proficient, you quickly climb the corporate ladder. Then, one day that BIG promotion comes. You have proven yourself, through your technical expertise, as an asset to the business and now you are given the chance to lead a team, to lead people.
Now is the time to let your so-called soft skills shine. It’s proving to be more difficult than you thought. Your team is not responding to you the way you thought they would. Team performance is weak. And your boss is starting to wonder, subconsciously, what went wrong. Thinking back to your university career, did you have a module that covered soft skills? A module that taught you how to communicate, how to build trust, how to negotiate, how to disagree, how to lead? If you are lucky you might have. However, I would argue that the majority of you had no such thing. Perhaps it’s the misnomer of the term ‘soft skills’ that makes us think these skills are easily acquired and mastered. They are not. These skills are synonymously and often interchangeably referred to as people skills and, actually, this better describes their complexity. People are different, people do things differently, depending on their culture, where they grew up, what school they went to, their religious practice and the rules instilled at home by their elders. People communicate differently from one another, some are high context and some are low context. Some people like it when you send a follow-up email post a phone call, others think it’s annoying and disrespectful. People lead, and respond to leadership, differently.
Some people like structure and hierarchy, others prefer a more egalitarian style. Some people are comfortable to talk directly to the ‘boss’, others would never dream of it. Some people are happy to shout out and share their ideas, whilst others will wait until you invite them to speak, out of respect. To paraphrase Erin Meyer (author of The Culture Map); the range of human culture is an endless source of discovery… a source of continual learning that can never be exhausted.
Those soft skills are starting to sound quite complicated and difficult to master.
If you don’t know about the different human complexities associated with the already tricky to master soft skills, then inevitably, the person who once was the up-and-coming star in the business, based on proven technical prowess, quickly becomes the disappointment. It is for this reason, and at this transitional time, that it is most crucial to support young talent. During this formative time, it is important to help these ‘stars’ develop and master the people skills that can, so easily, trip us up and stop us from climbing that ladder successfully and gracefully. One way to do this is to invest in your talent through coaching. Coaching is designed specifically to help these technically proficient stars bridge the soft skills gap often associated with becoming the leaders they aspire to be, and you need them to be.
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