Soft-skills are the interpersonal relational skill of business that moves beyond quantitative management. It ensures that executive leadership is fixed in the people business alongside the bottom-line drivers.
- High performance attitude: Motivation and confidence are significant drivers of high performance attitude. Motivation is derived from the interpersonal relationships wherein team members feel included and important to the goals and tasks of the group. Leadership will ensure that each individual member is aligned by talent, aptitude, and ability to complete their role. Confidence is a catalyst of high performance attitude. The staff member who is confident not only in their technical and mechanical expertise, but also in their human attributes, works with a positive frame of mind. The effective leader nurtures this confidence through encouragement, compliments, and honest rewards. Dishonest platitudes and misalignment of interpersonal relationships cannot sustain high performance.
- Trust and Commitment: Commitment and trust are a necessary fusion of soft-skills that build team cohesion. Trust is an internal feeling; commitment is the resilient attitude that emanates from trust. Building trust through honesty and integrity is critical and fundamental for successful team building. For individuals on the team to be utilized to their maximum ability and skills, trust must exist, or individual members will be prone to reducing their performance level to the detriment of the team in their fulfillment of tasks and goals. Commitment will be have been compromised.
- Conflict Management: Eventually all teams will have conflicts. If they are managed and resolved effectively, it will limit the damage on the soft-skill s of trust, commitment, and communication that are core glues to team cohesion. Ineffectual conflict management through insensitive coercive or autocratic authoritarian dominant leadership will fracture the team. Conflict is often unavoidable as the human condition is often tainted with negative impulses and suspicion toward leadership. Effective leadership must overcome this negative tendency through engaging the soft-skills to build high performance attitudes.
- Communication: Creating an open, trusting environment for honest communication, lends itself to team unity and commitment towards the goals. In this vein, conversation moves beyond superior-subordinate dictates, to a two-way collegial conversation that seeks cooperative results and solutions.
Soft Skills and the Katzenbach and Smith Model.
Katzenbach and Smith theorize how a high performance team is characterized by members who share ideas freely and build upon each other’s strengths. They develop a model of effective team work and the initiatives that senior leadership must take in maximizing the performance of teams. Rather than a-top-down accountability, they advocate a trust being built among the team members in making themselves accountable to one another. Trust and commitment are borne from a well-defined purpose statement and task that places all team members into the project. “When people work together toward a common objective, trust and commitment follow.” “The essence of team is commitment.” Where there is mistrust team members must work to overcome the “natural reluctance” to trust.
Interpersonal skills are critical in the maintenance of the team in engaging “effective communication and constructive conflict.” This develops the ability to take risks, critique results, listen to one another, and recognize the successes and failures of team members in a non-deprecating way. Foundational to Katzenbach and Smith’s thesis, is that effective teams have a distinct and common “team purpose.” This creates an emotional drive towards goal completion of tasks. Within this realm, the soft-skills function as the “grease” that enables the technical and mechanical skills to achieve a greater result within the team construct.
Soft Skills and the Shared Leadership Model
The shared leadership model creates the question: When are two (or more) leadership heads better than one? The strengths and opportunities of soft skills often benefit from shared leadership.
- Shared Authority and Responsibility: When the feat of the task is too great for a solo act, shared leadership becomes essential. Shared leadership responsibilities require giving away some authority and power. Have others help carry the load of responsibilities, no one can do it alone. Effective leaders need to delegate and put trust in others as an equal part of the team.
- Change Management: There is a complexity in business in trying to create change. Management tends to need the shared leadership model to balance the linear, mathematical, and quantitative results oriented methods of strategic planning that lives in a danger zone of undermining the human element of staffing. The collaborative power of shared responsibility and cross-pollination of talent that breathes in shared leadership is a necessary energizer of change management.
- Complementary Skills: When the challenges of the task are so complex that they require a set of skills too broad to be overcome by any one individual, shared leadership is the answer. Shared leadership works when two or more individuals involved play different and complementary roles.
- Team Accountability: Shared leadership holds people accountable to one another, not having to depend on the work reviews of people in authority.
- Leadership Development: Becoming an equal member on the team, a peer among peers, a leader among leaders, staff members nurture their own leadership gifts in a synergistic environment. Managers are able to observe emergent leadership.
