Soft Skills

Today don’t want to write any article regarding to tech let’s try to be different today and talk about the non tech essential skills (Hard skills and Soft skills). In this article I am just discuss about soft skill. A soft skill is a personal attribute that supports situational awareness and enhances an individual’s ability to get a job done. Soft skills, often called people skills or emotional intelligence, refer to the ability to interact in peaceable manner.

Soft skills are personal attributes that can affect relationships, communication, and interaction with others. Soft skills can include, or relate to, the following:

• Negotiating
• Customer service
• Networking
• Presentation
• Conflict resolution
• Communication effectiveness
• Teamwork
• Problem-solving
• Working under pressure

Soft Skills Need Work

Soft skills aren’t generally “all or none.” Many people are suffiencent  or even exemplary with some skills yet  struggle with others. For instance, you may have excellent communication and teamwork abilities but struggle with time management or crack under pressure. 

It’s not uncommon to either underestimate the importance of soft skills or overestimate your own proficiency. Here are a few common scenarios that may be improved with stronger soft skills:

• You are frequently  late for meeting or struggle to meet deadline
• You have a low client retention rate compared to others in your field
• You are frequently late for meetings or struggle to meet deadlines
• You fail to grow your professional network, or avoid networking opportunities altogether
• You manage to land meetings with prospective clients, but rarely proceed to the next stage or close deals
• You have a low client retention rate compared to others in your field 

How to improve?

A first thing we should do is recognize and acknowledge the areas in which you need to improve. This can take place through personal reflection and self analysis, an evaluation of your work performance, or through feedback from trusted colleagues or may be friends. You may find that daily journaling regarding your professional interactions and their outcomes is helpful self-evaluation.

After gaining your strength and weakness certain plan of action for improvement that aligns with and supports your work plan need to be done.

There are a number of ways to develop or enhance these skills like:

1.  Working with a mentor who can provide feedback and model appropriate skills. 
2. If your focus is on improving communication, courses in subjects like public speaking or joining a group such as toastmasters can be helpful.

Soft skills that should have in every one 

There  are certain skills that are as necessary now as they have always been. So-called “soft skills,” such as comprehensive listening, holding meaningful dialogues and having difficult conversations, can be learned, but are often not taught. 

1. Empathy:-  Empathy, an  important soft skill that  anyone needs when starting his/her carrier. Without empathy, you won’t understand where someone is coming from. Empathy helps us read people and situations, adapt accordingly, build trust and connect more effectively with others.
2. Ability to influence others:-Another important soft skill anyone needs when entering the workforce One of the biggest surprises newcomers face is matrix work environments. Getting things done usually requires working through others to achieve results. The ability to influence peers to provide deliverables even without direct authority is a learned skill. Mastery is essential.
3. Teamwork:- However, it’s hard to get a group of individuals to work together smoothly. Don’t you agree? A leader that can’t work with a team, is a failure and defiantly will fall. The reasons of  importance of teamwork  are as follow:- 
   1. Teamwork motivates unity in the workplace:- A teamwork environment promotes an atmosphere that fosters friendship and loyalty. These motivate employees in parallel and align them to work harder, cooperate and be supportive of one another.
   2. Teamwork offers differing perspectives and feedback:- While working on a project, it is good to listen different different perspective. 
   3. Teamwork provides improved efficiency and productivity:- 
4. Adaptability & Flexibility:- Adaptability is the nature of changing or create modifications in oneself to suit to the new environment. It is important to have adaptability skill to  adapt to new environment as said by Mr. Joel Garfinkle, “The speed of change in any given workplace is so rapid”, The company environment is continuously changing itself as the technology changes  and so we should continuously improving ourselves, be adaptable with new things such as tech or non technical things. An adaptable person is someone who can carry out multiple tasks, manage multiple assignments by setting priorities and making changes to attitude to merge with the new culture. Where as flexibility at the workplace allows one to evaluate what is happening and adjust to the role and responsibilities or even the job being offered.
5. Problem solving:-  Another most essential skill that person should have. A problem is any unpleasant situation which prevents people from achieving what they want to achieve. Any activity to eliminate a problem is termed problem solving. Problem solving skills refers to our ability to solve problems in an effective and timely manner without any impediments. Obviously, every organization has problems and every individual has problems too. For this reason, the ability to solve problems is of great importance to individuals and organizations. Some of the benefits include:
   1. Make the impossible possible:- Yep It is true, solving different different problems not only brain exercise  but also gives us a mechanism for identifying these things, figuring out why they are broken and determining a course of action to fix them. It also improve our performance and opens the gate of new opportunity  
   2. Makes you a stand out:-People hardly can solve the problem what they do’t understand because mostly are trained in only particular sector. if you become a regular problem solver at your workplace, you are easily noticed new problem, recognized it, solve it, and appreciated from others.
   3. Increased confidence:- No matter where you work or what your profession is, having the ability to solve problems will boost your confidence level.

Conclusion

• One of the most important and difficult skill
• And the most common reason of not hiring, not promoting, and poor performance of any.
• It is important to all employ to adhere soft skill to obtain managerial position