What I am going to discuss in this blog is my experience of working with people in the last two years at Thunderbird. Let me start with a question.
How important are soft skills in business? Whenever I ask this question to my peers, they give me a grin and turn their heads away. "It's just one of those papers you have to turn in, it's just one of those classes in which you can say anything and get away with it"......and so on.
At business school, I always strongly felt there was and is a strong feeling of repugnance, antipathy and even arrogance on the part of students when it comes to learning soft skills in business. "It ain't that cool". How many of us have heard these lines before? Yes, many of us and these lines have come from our peers.
Soft skills deal with people, hard skills deal with business. This is my perspective towards the entire soft skill discussion. While it may sound cool to be a master in accounting, finance, marketing, operations or supply chain, people give you a look when you tell them you want to specialize in cross cultural communication or in organizational behavior.
I am not surprised. However, whenever I see such responses, I always pose one question to those doubting thomases casting their curious eye on the importance soft skills in business. The question is simple, the answer isn't: "In your business or professional life, what percent of problems caused while working in teams were purely due to a lack of operational efficiency and lack of knowledge as opposed to a communication breakdown or lack of people management?"
A majority of problems in organizations deal with people more and less with work. Human beings are emotional in nature and conflicting working styles and cultural backgrounds are bound to create friction.
Another excuse for not giving importance to soft skills: "I will learn them on the job, I have enough work experience, I don't need them". What is the point of calling the fire brigade and dousing a fire after the building has been completely incinerated? The entire purpose of mastering the art of managing people lies in being proactive in building people and organizations on the basis of those people you invest in.
While management literature teaches us all the basics of doing business and affecting the bottom line, very often it fails to address the key issue of managing people. While studies and research in organizational behavior has come leaps and bounds to overcome doubts posed by the hard skill lobby, I strongly feel business schools should help students more by counselling to change their attitude towards soft skills as opposed to merely trying to increase their aptitude by trying to offer more soft skill based courses in the curriculum.
If someone ever asked me what has been my biggest takeaway from business school, I would say that I have learnt to understand the way people think. I have understood the fine intricacies of communication and learnt to manage them while I am applying my hard skills to achieve the best results. I could write more about my soft skill learnings but would like to call it quits before the skeptics accuse me of writing blogs to promote my Thunderbird education through my blog.
Someone once said, "tell me the hard truth". The keyword is 'hard'. Clearly, had this person mastered the art of 'soft' skills, he would have never felt the need to ask the 'hard' questions. I rest my case.
Have a great weekend!
well written !!
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