Soft Skills Issues
What are some issues that may be happening in your organization if there is a gap in soft skills?
1. High turnover in staff.
Staff turnover is high in organizations in which there is poor interpersonal communication, lack of listening skills, lack of inclusiveness, respect, trust. Are your employees engaged? You’ve probably heard the comment…Employees aren’t leaving the job, they are leaving the supervisor, manager, boss.
2. If you’re really good at getting but not retaining clients.
I personally love repeat clients. You don’t have to tweak your processes as you have already established rapport and standards. Clients may be commenting that you aren’t listening. (It’s worse if they are commenting that you are an animals orifice!)
How are your communication skills?
3. You may be TELLING your consultants what to do without their input.
You hire and work with consultants because they are intelligent, creative individuals. (At least I hope that is why you are working with them and not just because they are the cheapest.) It’s been my experience that you have a better project if you include the consultants and multiple stakeholders early in the process and respect their ideas. Collaborative approaches have different view points, this is what makes them better.
4. Your solutions are starting to look the same
Is creativity being stifled in your organization? Is your organization open to new ideas or are you using per-Recession standards that don’t work anymore?Are you more focused on saving money by reusing old projects rather than increase the efficiency of your processes?
I’ve worked for a firm that was using old technology practices with new software. Their software was capable of printing projects in 15 minutes, but they refused to change the format of their file structures causing printing to take three hours. They charged their clients on an hourly basis. Another example…Using three people and excel spreadsheets to track project time. There is inexpensive software created for that.
5. You are dropping your fees to compete on price…
This could be negotiation and communication issues. What is your value? What makes your organization unique?…and no, X number of years does not count.
6. Micro-managing staff
There’s a difference between leading your Team and micro-managing them. So many potential issues here. I like to think of the saying: what got you here won’t get you there. Business owners and leaders may may micro-manage if they have delegation and trust issues. Your staff needs the opportunity to make mistakes in the short run in order to grow profits for the organization and their careers in the long run.
We could go on and on…