Working with a diverse group people over a span of 8+ years has taught me a lot of things about life, work, and culture in general too. Dealing with people with diverse backgrounds as Advertising, Telco, eCommerce, Military & Defense and Software Development. I have noticed a few things that are common in all of them. Though a great majority of the people are academically capable for the job, and possess a decent set of core-skills. A lot of people lag behind in reaching their maximum human potential. Arguably their soft-skills aren’t as polished as they can be. This limits them from reaching the peak of the professional life.

If you care to wonder, why does all of this matter and why should anyone care about all this? Though a person’s core-skills are important in getting a job, the soft skills help you keep the job. Both are very distinct attributes, because one is about the skills to do the job and the other the skills that help you interact with your team. The soft-skills are the ones that increase like-ability and enhance the cohesiveness of a team. Soft skills act as a glue that keeps people together, and also acts as an oil, that keeps people from different functions working together smoothly and effectively as one-unit, without friction.

Empathy, I believe is that most important of the soft skills. Empathy will help you understand your team members and your clients. Perhaps more importantly, your sense of empathy will increase your corporate success since you can capitalize on what your potential clients feel about things. Developing your sense of empathy is not an easy task, it requires a sense of maturity that comes only with time. Not everything can be communicated via email or via a phone call. Sometimes a short casual conversation to grasp what is stopping a person from getting a task done is far more important, than a complex email or a formal meeting. So is asking thoughtful and deep questions that help you draw out feelings, without making the person feel insecure. All this requires a person to listen very intently and talking much less than they are used to. Just try it and you’ll be amazed at how much more insight you gain from a short conversation. It’s about seeking a moment of opportunity, when the other sees a difficulty. Moving on I am going to elaborate on how to do all this.

Creating a healthy corporate culture for your team requires these essential characteristics which are not always easy to implement in a corporate setting.

1. One must be caring and genuinely interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.
2. Being emotionally comforting for one another, and providing support, including offering kindness and compassion when others are struggling.
3. Avoiding blame and deal with mistakes positively by having a solution oriented mindset. Make sure the scope is very clear when you start on the task, so that you are efficient and not wasting time on a task that is not required or that you end up delivering something different than the requirement.
4. Inspiring one another at work by reading magazines or articles about your area of expertise, this also keeps you in-sync with the pulse of the market.
5. Placing emphases on the meaningfulness of work, helping your team-members feel that the work serves a greater purpose and is not just for the sake of a task-list, or getting paid.
6. Lastly, don’t put people in boxes. Avoid dichotomization. Humans beings are continuously variable, you can’t gain much by treating them as machines, fit for only one purpose. What people say and what people do, might seem contradictory, but try to gain wisdom and learn something out of both.

I think that’s a lot to digest in one article. Until next time. Keep in touch and let me know what you think 🙂