7 Essential Soft Skills Everyone Should Master
Soft skills, also known as common skills or core skills, are skills which are desirable in all professions. These interpersonal attributes you need to succeed in and out the workplace.
Below is a list of the soft skills that I personally think everyone, regardless of their field of work, should work on from now on.
1. Creativity
Definition
Creativity is one of the soft skills and is supposed to help develop innovative solutions to problems. It requires an openness to innovation and mental flexibility. In many sectors, creativity techniques are seen as a means to an end and are designed to achieve better results.
There are several kinds of creative skills that you can practice to become more creative in the workplace. Used in combination, they can be effective in helping you think differently about a problem or a task. They include:
- Making connections
- Asking questions
- Making observations
- Networking
- Experimenting
Why is this Soft Skill important?
- Creativity helps you see the big picture: Being able to see the big picture is important in many areas of life. Whether it’s your personal life or a work project, it’s easy to get bogged down and lost in the details.
- Creativity helps motivate you: Feeling discouraged and frustrated about something? Doing something creative can lift your spirits and help you shake off a bad mood.
- Creativity helps with problem-solving: When you’re trying to find the solution to a problem, thinking creatively opens up the possibilities.
- Creativity can make you more productive: Creative people have open, active minds. They’re usually buzzing with ideas and soaking up inspiration from the world around them.
- Creativity boosts your confidence: Being creative helps you see the big picture, stay motivated, and solve problems. What could be more confidence-boosting than that? When you think creatively and overcome all kinds of challenges, you’re proving to yourself that you’re a capable person.
- Creativity helps clarify your thoughts and feelings: The mind can be a chaotic place. It can feel like you’re chasing one thought or feeling after another like a dog chasing every car he sees. Traditional ways of outlining your thoughts and feelings are often too linear and don’t encompass what’s going on.
- Creativity lets you express yourself: Freedom of expression is considered so important to a person’s well-being that it’s a human right. Creativity is the key to the door of expression, no matter what form of creativity you choose
- Creativity brings people together: Being creative can be a solitary, personal experience, but it can also be community-driven.
- Creativity relieves stress: Research shows that being creative relieves stress. This is important because stress is like poison to humans.
- Creativity can help you live longer: Did you know being creative can extend your life? In a study published by Scientific American Magazine, researchers showed that creativity exercises a handful of neural networks in the brain.
How is creativity measured?
Three main ways of measuring creativity have been proposed: the creativity quotient (CQ), psychometrics, and the social-personality approach. Measuring creativity by a quotient similar to an IQ was mostly unsuccessful because creativity is a highly abstract concept, there can be no right or wrong answers to a set of questions about creativity.
However, researchers have managed to test creativity by tests which employ imagination and open-mindedness to various options. Such tests, known as ‘divergence tests’ consider the uniqueness of a response and how people understand different concepts, instead of asking for a single right answer.
2. Emotional Intelligence
Definition
Emotional intelligence, also known as emotional quotient or EQ, is the ability to understand and manage your emotions and the emotions of others.
Similar to IQ, emotional intelligence can be measured through various assessments, but IQ represents cognitive abilities while EQ is a measure of one’s emotional capabilities.
While emotional intelligence is beneficial for everyone, it’s especially important for those in leadership positions. Emotionally intelligent leaders can empathize with others, communicate effectively, and manage conflict. All of these abilities are qualities of effective leaders.
Why is Emotional Intelligence important?
EI is important for everyone who wants to be career ready. Drawing on the work of Daniel Goleman, below are five pillars of emotional intelligence and how they give you an advantage in the workforce.
Self-awareness: Self-awareness is the ability to recognise one’s emotions, emotional triggers, strengths, weaknesses, motivations, values and goals and understand how these affect one’s thoughts and behaviour.
Self-management: Drawing on one’s self-awareness, self-management is the ability to regulate one’s emotions.
Motivation: Motivation is essentially what moves us to take action. When we face setbacks and obstacles, checking in with our motives is what inspires us to keep pushing forward.
Empathy: Empathy is the ability to connect emotionally with others and take into consideration their feelings, concerns and points of view.
Relationship management: Relationship management is all about interpersonal skills — one’s ability to build genuine trust, rapport and respect from colleagues.
How is Emotional Intelligence measured?
There are three common ways to measure emotional intelligence: self-report, other-report (360 tests) and ability measures. The Bar-On EQ-i uses the self-report approach, with a questionnaire including 133 items which the participant is asked to score on a scale of 1 to 5.
Other-report uses feedback from workplace colleagues, in the familiar 360-assessment format. The commercial EI-360, devised by the north American Institute for Health and Human Potential (IHHP) contains 47 statements for the participant and 10 colleagues to rate on a seven-point scale.
Ability tests measure the individuals skills or abilities. John Mayer and Peter Salovey, who originated the term emotional intelligence, are the authors of the first ability measure of EI called the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale (MEIS), which contains 122 questions.
3. Comunicatiton
Definition
Communication skills are important in almost every job. You will likely need to communicate with people on the job, whether they are clients, customers, colleagues, employers, or vendors. You will also need to be able to speak clearly and politely with people in person, by phone, and in writing.
You will also likely need to be a good listener. Employers want employees who can not only communicate their own ideas, but who also listen empathetically to others. Listening is a particularly important skill in customer service jobs.
Why is comunication important?
Being able to communicate effectively is perhaps the most important of all life skills. It is what enables us to pass information to other people, and to understand what is said to us. You only have to watch a baby listening intently to its mother and trying to repeat the sounds that she makes to understand how fundamental is the urge to communicate.
Developing your communication skills can help all aspects of your life, from your professional life to social gatherings and everything in between.
How is comunication measured?
Employee surveys, email open rates, intranet analytics and focus groups are effective ways to measure internal communications. Leaders can also track turnover rates and observable behaviors, such as work performance, to get insights into their communications strategy.
4. Empathy
Definition
Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand what other people feel, see things from their point of view, and imagine yourself in their place. Essentially, it is putting yourself in someone else’s position and feeling what they must be feeling.
When you see another person suffering, you might be able to instantly envision yourself in the other person’s place and feel sympathy for what they are going through.
Types
There are different types of empathy that a person may experience:
- Affective empathy involves the ability to understand another person’s emotions and respond appropriately.
- Somatic empathy involves having a sort of physical reaction in response to what someone else is experiencing.
- Cognitive empathy involves being able to understand another person’s mental state and what they might be thinking in response to the situation.
Why is this Soft Skill important?
Empathy is important because it helps us understand how others are feeling so we can respond appropriately to the situation. It is typically associated with social behaviour and there is lots of research showing that greater empathy leads to more helping behaviour.
People who are good at reading others’ emotions, such as manipulators, fortune-tellers or psychics, might also use their excellent empathetic skills for their own benefit by deceiving others.
How is empathy measured?
Empathy is often measured with self-report questionnaires such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) or Questionnaire for Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE).
5. Adaptability
Definition
Adaptability as a skill refers to the ability of a person to change his actions, course or approach to doing things in order to suit a new situation.
Why is adaptability important?
It is quite easy to downplay the essence of adaptability. However, it is one of the key skills or factors that keep many multinational companies running. It is also the reason why some professional connoisseurs never get outdated — Their services are in high demandalways.
Supposing your manager just installed a new manufacturing machine, how quickly will you get used to its operation? What if you just got a new superior who is extremely strict and almost impossible to please? Would you be able to cope with him for long?
For a businessman, entrepreneur, or manager, the ability to adjustan organization’s internal systems easily to conform to other external environmental factors such as raw materials and economic variables is a very necessary skill. It is an effective way to sustainthe business and reduces the risk of suffering organizational crisis.
For employees, it is imperative that you develop adaptability skills. New educational programs and courses are introduced every now and then, new rules and regulations spring up within organizations and industries etc. It is therefore necessary to adjust smoothly and quickly to such changes with very little difficulties.
6. Critical-thinking
Definition
Critical thinking is a key skill in the workplace. After all, critical thinking helps employees solve problems and build strategies that make them better at their jobs. For this reason, employers may look to hire employees who have strong critical thinking skills.
People exercise critical thinking by using rationality to determine what to do or believe in a specific situation.
Why is critical thinking important?
Applying critical thinking helps you make decisions that require a lot of thought. Big, life-changing decisions, like whether or not to make a career move, are aided by critical thinking, which encourages you to research and favor objective logic over your initial emotional response.
Here are some of the ways critical thinking is important to the workplace:
- Some professions require it.
- Decision-making improves.
- Critical thinkers are happier.
- Being well-informed is a bonus.
- It encourages self-reflection.
- It bolsters the knowledge economy.
7. Problem solving
Definition
Problem solving skills is a cognitive skill that involves several levels of the Bloom’s taxonomy: remember facts, analyse them (which implies understanding) and think critically or evaluate them.
Why is this Soft Skill important?
Problems are new situations that require individuals to respond with new behaviours. Solving a problem implies carrying out tasks that demand complex reasoning processes and, in many cases, do not simply an associative and routine action.
How can this Soft Skill be assessed?
The construct of competencies is an integrative construct of knowledge, skills and attitudes. Therefore, evaluative assessment should offer an opportunity to show this integration. Competences are demonstrated, evaluated by means of performances or demonstrations.
Miller’s pyramid (1990) can be a helpful tool to identify the best coherent assessment strategies according with the learning outcomes.
Some assessment strategies could be the following according with the discipline:
- problem-solving tests
- laboratory exercises
- case studies
- final projects
- Problem based learning (PBL)
