This month I finished my first mentorship program as a mentor. It was an eye-opening experience that I’m planning to share more in the future. One of the things that caught my attention was the hesitation of my mentee to ask questions related to people and communication.
The source of her hesitation was the misrepresentation of soft skills from our society as something easy. And things like coding and designing as super hard. Honestly, she didn’t ask me a single question about code, which is fine. Our conversations were focused on people, communication, and management.
Since then, I started doing research. According to Wikipedia:
Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others and perform well.
Meanwhile, I started looking at how other people value and talk about such skills. Words have a tremendous amount of power. With a surprise, I discovered that for many of them it’s nice to have.
But how are we going to change the representation of these skills? We need to start by shifting the conversation to focus on their impact and importance. I believe “soft” is a word that doesn’t represent them. These skills are anything but soft.
An excellent alternative to soft is essential. These skills are necessary if someone wants to succeed in life and work. For the rest of the post, I’m going to refer to these skills as essential.
A study conducted by Harvard University:
Noted that 80% of achievements in career are determined by soft skills and only 20% by hard skills. Experts say soft skills training should begin for a person when they are students, to perform efficiently in their academic environment as well as in their future workplace.
A public interest study conducted by McDonald’s in the UK predicted:
Over half a million people will be held back from job sectors by 2020 due to a lack of soft skills.
One of these skills is communication. Verbal and written communication is fundamental to everything we do in life. In our work environment is now more important than ever to communicate well. More people are either looking for a remote job or working remotely. Communication in a remote environment can be challenging.
Remote companies operate on a synchronous or asynchronous level. As a result, communication should be clear and accessible to and by everyone. It’s not an easy task since, for many people, English is not their first language.
Communication can make or break a company. By not communicating well, the roadmap, product features, culture, and employees will suffer. It will make things harder than they should be. Productivity and employee satisfaction % will fall tremendously.
Communication isn’t just important when interacting with colleagues. It’s equally important when it comes to facing external customers and clients.
On a personal level, communicating well can help you both in your personal and work life. You can share your ideas in a much better way. Tell better stories. Convince people to take up on your ambitious projects and work with you to make them a reality.
As you can see, this skill is an essential one. It’s a skill that you use daily. It’s a skill that, if you acquire, it can do wonders for you in so many different ways.
Meanwhile, many people don’t seem to pay attention to communication inside an organization. Working alongside good communicators is a blessing. I had problems myself with communication when I started in this industry. With the help of trusted friends and colleagues, I had the chance to improve in a short period.
It’s a process. If we want to become better communicators, we have to acknowledge first how vital communication is and how it’s going to help and affect everything around us.
Communication is part of a bigger story. There are many more skills that folks don’t seem to take into account or develop for various reasons. Emotion intelligence and social intelligence, self-awareness are some of them.
Meanwhile, people who acquired these skills can have a significant impact on an organization or in someone else’s life in many different ways. One of them is mentoring other people. This kind of mentorship is going to be valuable for the underrepresented folks in the tech industry.
I would love to know what you think of this broad skill-set and how we can bring this topic in more conversations among our colleagues and friends. Let’s talk shop on Twitter.