In 2024, focus on honing your ‘soft skills’

ACQUIRING a skill requires focus, concentration, diligence and perseverance. Whether it is setting the safety catches in a nuclear energy plant or sowing the seeds for next summer’s corn harvest, the skills required to do the job properly will need developing, testing, explaining, teaching, authorising and monitoring.

The expert who hones those skills will have as sensitive and delicate a touch as befits dangerous and weather-sensitive disciplines. Nobody would describe them as “soft”.

The skills of reading people, handling difficult situations, hiring, motivating and firing employees and negotiating tricky deals are not soft either. They are among the most difficult things humans have to do in order to live socially, harmoniously and economically viably together. But they are not working very successfully at present.

The world’s communication is like a roomful of people at a cocktail party. The noise is increasingly loud, resulting in having to shout louder as the only way to be heard. The volume escalates until message sending and receiving stop altogether, leaving the semblance of interaction but without any meaningful exchange.

One of two things then happens. Either the event becomes a pantomime of mouthing, smiling, nodding heads with little purpose other than to avoid physical violence – which now appears to be the only way an impression can be made. Or someone bent on making his or her point, despite the deafening roar, hits the person he or she is trying to impress and the gathering degenerates into a brawl.

In a world of war, where do soft skills come in?

Mass communications have turned life into a brawl. Worse, the pace of life is so nearly out of hand that a bloody war can be stopped – or, as the euphemism has it, “paused” – only to start again a few days later.

Common sense dictates that with the vast majority of people begging for peace, you do not “restart” hostilities after ceasing them. All of us can be forgiven for being gobsmacked at the concept that ceasing hostilities is mainly for the purpose of restarting them later.

The skills of living together were understood thousands of years ago. Their nature, scale and application have changed to meet developing technology, more cheek-by-jowl living and a faster pace of doing things. But fundamentally, they have not changed. Activity is only as good as its outcome. War is the consequence of forgetting or ignoring the simple right to life of another individual.

The way in which we try to resolve most conflicts is by agreeing. Why it should be necessary to agree with someone in order to resist killing them is hard to fathom. Soft skills start with reasoning, not with agreement. Reason says others are entitled to have a different point of view – about anything but especially about the unknown. “I am right” is a statement of prejudice.

Soft skills are about a right to life, as well as a different idea

These truisms are obvious and known. Putting them into practice is a skill which extends far beyond the avoidance of war. It becomes the route to happiness. The American constitution somewhat bizarrely enshrined the right to pursue happiness in the Constitution. It is bizarre because at the time of it being written – and very largely today, too – happiness was neither defined nor its achievement understood.

Indeed, the concept of pursuing or acquiring happiness is so misguided that happiness is better left like a butterfly to alight if it chances to, rather than be netted in a “happiness hunt”.

Soft skills are not only about someone else’s right to life. They are about ours as well – and not just a right to life but a right to have different, even controversial ideas. They are not about simply challenging such ideas but about making any challenge productive rather than combative.

Overly strong views are not evidence of a person’s intellect, and are indeed often the reverse – proof of his or her stupidity. Aggressively propounded, they merely prove the proximity of our primitive nature and the distance we are from reason. The antidote is suggested is love; but love (except in its most generic sense) is not essential for a civilised life. It just enhances it.

Soft skills at the workplace are needed, but cannot be taught with procedures

If this seems more cathedral-based than conglomerate-relevant thinking, may I politely ask you to think again. Work and life ethics used to be rather separate departments. But this is not the case any longer. Attempts by employers to recapture the separation of work and life post-Covid have largely failed.

Internationalisation has ensured that work and life are increasingly one and the same thing. We shall realise this even more as time for work and leisure overlap when most of the drudge work is done by artificial intelligence and robots. This will make the economic reasons for living harmoniously together less compelling and, ironically, increase the importance of the social reasons for doing so.

The social reasons for doing so are already in disarray. Social media – the facility to have civilised chats with anyone else in the world at any time – is being misused, presumably in the hope that doing so will advance the pursuit of happiness to the point where it actually pays off. However, whatever pleasurable rewards there may be for abusive social interaction on the Internet would seem to be so short-lived and transient that they become self-defeating.

Local societies, countries and international organisations are all bound in the race to produce a process for getting out of this dilemma. Alas, the very procedure defeats the objective. In order to reset the world we need less rules, guidelines and laws, and more personal responsibility. That applies as much to companies, organisations and institutions as it does to individuals.

Focus on the person, then the problem, then the opportunity

We are trying to develop procedures for learning and applying “soft skills”. This is a mistake. You do not handle other people well by applying a process but by understanding who they are, and their problems and opportunities.

There is process in the way this will be done, but it is not the process of pushing a format onto the inquirer. It is by comprehending the motives and drives of the person with a problem. Good doctors diagnose deeply before treating. Good mentors and teachers should do the same. In the rushed world we live in, too often the pace of treatment prevents proper analysis.

The hardest skills you will need to acquire are soft skills. They begin with reading people. When you can do that, you are on the way to mastering how to treat them. You will need to read people better than ever before in 2024.

The writer is founder and chair at Terrific Mentors International