The importance of soft skills for your leaders
Understand how best to meet the new demands of your employees in order to determine the future success of your organisation.
As the world emerges from the pandemic, the global workforce has fundamentally changed. Leaders and managers need to understand how best to meet the new demands of their employees to determine the future success of their organisation.
Enhancing soft skills in the workplace
Last year, Forbes found empathy to be the most important leadership skill according to research. This, along with leadership and management skills, can be difficult to learn as they are often embedded within our personalities. However, addressing the need for these crucial skills is critical when it comes to attracting and retaining the best talent, especially in a world in which we’re seeing a significant shift to hybrid or remote working.
The importance of management skills
Deloitte pointed out that the future focus of work will switch from maximising output to ‘unleashing potential’, by encouraging talent to harness and fulfil their own potential in order to add the most value to an organisation. This, along with focusing on the uniquely human values of adaptability and creativity would also be key to an organisation’s ability to be resilient in the face of unexpected change.
This change in mindset is truly critical for achieving results beyond simply doing what has been done previously, what is cheaper, or faster. Instead – leaders need to think about what is needed tomorrow and be able to tune into the skills and talent within an organisation to ensure that it is able to succeed in a world which is constantly changing and evolving.
In 2021, BPP carried out HR Professionals Learning and Development Research and we found that employers ranked ‘business’ skills and ‘leadership and management’ skills as their current top two areas of training within their organisation, and these were chosen over ‘digital, data and technology’ skills which have certainly been a dominant focus over the past two years.
Emma O’Dell, Director of Client Capability at BPP, noted that “softer skills, such as coaching, emotional intelligence, adaptability and developing trust, are now more important than ever to grow leadership effectiveness, workplace motivation, and commitment to goals across an organisation.”
Through our work with HR leaders across a variety of sectors, Emma has seen that many employees are experiencing:
A desire for balance between productivity and flexibility
Pressure to create and reinvent
Effects of stress and fatigue on mental health
An increased want for transparency across diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives
A desire for belonging, both holistically and inclusively
How to develop and improve your talents’ soft skills
“Many of the skills we’ve mentioned are relevant to all employees, not just managers and leaders,” explains Emma, “we’ve been helping our clients to create organisational-wide skills frameworks that are agnostic to role in order to develop the strategic capabilities that are needed both now and in the future.”
BPP currently offers a range of training solutions designed to ensure the individual needs of employers are met, and outputs for leadership effectiveness, workplace motivation, and commitment to goals across the organisation is maintained.
Such short courses include:
Your strategic talent partner
We’re able to support capability identification through the use of online workshops and diagnostic tools to engage employees at foundation, core, and strategic levels. We then work with our clients to identify high-priority skills that require training both immediately and in the future.
The outcome of our process summarises the skills data we’ve collected with tailored capability plans and training programmes to help plug those all-important skills gaps.
