Your Culture is Showing: The Impact of Neglecting Essential Skills in the Workplace

This episode explores the detrimental impact of an overemphasis on goals and the neglect of essential skills in the workplace.  If your company culture feels weak and your team isn't performing well, this episode is for you. I also discuss: 

• The vital role of essential skills in driving organizational success.
• The adverse outcomes of ignoring essential skills
• How to cultivate a strengths-based culture boosting leadership and team performance.
• How to proactively manage cultural challenges
• The anecdotes and research to illustrate the negative effects on company culture, productivity, and leadership efficacy.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:47

Hey friends, this is the Career Refresh and I'm your host, jill Griffin. Today, I'm talking about skills Hard skills versus soft skills, and I really want us to stop calling them soft skills. They are essential skills or dynamic skills, sometimes even called people skills. Sometimes even called people skills. Soft skills makes me think about, like softly spun cotton candy or cuddly bunny rabbits, freshly baked bread. It doesn't feel like it's a word that we want to be using regularly in the workplace. So why do we call them soft skills? Well, I had to know. So I did some Googling and I figured out that it comes from the US Army. In the late 1960s, the Army referred to any skill that does not employ the use of machinery as a soft skill, and while they didn't have data at the time, they realized that these skills were also going to be important to be able to lead groups and motivate soldiers. Okay, so that is where we got the phrase soft skills. This totally makes sense. I get it.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Many organizations recruit for what they call hard skills. If you're a project manager, you're going to need to be proficient in agile project management. If you're a content creator, you better know how to tell a story. The foundational skills the chop wood, carry water type of skills, and soft skills often include things like communication, organization, teamwork, morale boosting, empathy, problem solving, emotional intelligence, emotional quotient, the influencing ability. These are all the things that are classified as soft skills, but we're going to start rebranding them as essential or dynamic skills, and I want to point out it's really common to confuse emotional intelligence, or EI, with emotional quotient, which is EQ. In some cases, ei refers to your capacity to understand your own emotions as well as those as others, but EQ is more closely related to the measurements taken, to your own emotional skills and your ability to identify your own emotional competence. These are qualities that often are connected to executive presence, your ability to read a room, your ability to have that gravitas that you hear about. Right, that is also all part of why we need leaders who are both emotionally intelligent and have a high EQ.

Speaker 1: 3:29

But when we call the qualities that we're talking about here soft, this ensures them that well, we don't necessarily recruit for them or interview them, we don't measure them, they're not included in performance review or that they are. They're kind of subjective and they're a little squishy. We don't really know how to measure against them and then it's really hard to hold them of equal or of substantial importance, especially against the hard skills, and soft skills are undervalued in most industries because they can't be easily taught or assess, and when we can't see something, we will undervalue it. So how many times have you worked with someone or reported to someone who was brilliant at their core skill the hard skills but when everyone wasn't watching they were a little bit atrocious, right? So we see that there are key themes that happen within companies that don't focus on essential skills and only focus on hard skills.

Speaker 1: 4:25

I find this often happens when leadership is so focused on only the revenue and the goals that they end up tolerating negative or overly competitive culture, and it usually comes down to a few influential key players. There's limited cross-functional collaboration and it often creates huge inefficiencies because no one's communicating and friendly competition generates an energy that pushes a team forward. Communicating and friendly competition generates an energy that pushes a team forward. We're not saying that we don't want competition in teams and cultures. However, if no one is finding a way to unite teams or bring people together, then a lot of good work is going to be devalued or missed and colleagues are going to get really defensive and not want to collaborate or communicate with each other. You can see how this would result in a downward spiral because, again, we're not valuing the essential skills.

Speaker 1: 5:17

So some reasons where I've noticed that this happens is one there's a resistance to change we haven't done it before, we don't really know how to do it or there's fear of disrupting stability, fear that someone has to tell the senior leader or a senior person or someone who's driving revenue and growth that they need to change aspects of their behavior. And when they do this, everyone expects HR to do it. And I'm going to tell you there's a problem with that too, because HR is often not sourced financially, nor do they have the talent on staff to manage ongoing cultural issues or this type of behavioral change. Right, hr needs to have feedback mechanisms in place and that is absolutely within their responsibility, and it also needs to be done in a way that supports psychological safety, that it doesn't just become a bitch fest but, at the same time, that there's ways of putting measurement in place to really understand. Do we just not like this person or are they causing a problem because they don't have essential skills? We also need a budget for HR that they can bring in external coaches like myself, to make sure that we are sourcing people to be able to help the key and the influential players on the team. Ideally, everyone at some point gets access to coaching.

Speaker 1: 6:32

I understand that it's not often written into the goals, although it should be. The next thing I'm seeing is that essential skills, when they're not focused on it, often leads to misaligned priority right. So we're always focusing on the short-term gains and that's overshadowing long-term wellbeing. So you know, morale erodes, the culture gets damaged, there's low retention, there's a lot of turnover. I mean, if someone is working on a team or someone is leading a team and there's constant turnover on their team, you need to look at a few things. Is the team not set up for success? Is there a problem with how the team is functioning, process wise, or are the goals insane? Or is there something wrong and connecting culturally that we need to look at?

Speaker 1: 7:17

Which again comes back to those essential skills. We find that also there's a fear of losing expertise. Or you know, that person is really, really talented and really successful and they own the main client relationship. So we're afraid to make any changes because they'll disrupt us and they'll disrupt the business, and I get it. That's a real concern. But again, if you're working with HR and then external executive coaches, there's a way to mitigate that. There's also a fear at times of legal consequences and that's because we're thinking well, how are we measuring this? Well, that's the work that needs to be done. It needs to be an official 360 loop where we're having robust policies that mitigate the risks associated with addressing any of these lack of skills.

Speaker 1: 8:03

So I have permission to talk about two stories of recent experiences that I've had. I was hired by two different organizations to help them with team development and performance, strategic planning and talent mapping right. They proactively came to me because their leadership had enough prior experience to working together to know that if you are not building a strong culture and a culture that is honoring essential skills as much as hard skills, that your culture is going to be eroding. So in both cases, there were individuals that were in line for succession who had excellent capabilities. They were masters at the hard skills. They were like the top subject matter experts or SMEs.

Speaker 1: 8:46

Yet the atmosphere was so charged, there was such a palpable unease and, despite their hard skills and expertise, these leaders were not really leading. They were finding it very hard, Although they would tell you otherwise. It was clear that they weren't leading. Team dynamics were diminished, retention was down, morale was low. There was a feeling that, like everybody was looking for a job, people were often coming to calls and never turning on their camera or not participating in any of the Teams or Slack channels. They just weren't. Just was really like a very slow heartbeat. So it was clear that, despite possessing the technical expertise that they lacked the ability to inspire, guide, connect with others and really tap into their own emotional intelligence. Tap into their own emotional intelligence. And this challenge relegated these individuals to the role of highly compensated operatives rather than true leaders.

Speaker 1: 9:48

So I facilitated a series of workshops aimed at fostering a strength-based organizational culture, and this approach was designed to bolster performance, profitability, productivity and really enhance retention by leveraging each leader's inherent strengths and understanding what their hard skills were and where we could tap into some of those dynamic and essential skills. Now I'm a Gallup certified strengths coach, so my role was to facilitate this process, guiding the leaders to sort of reconceptualize and think through what is the impact they want to have as a leader in their organization In addition to their own personal goals? How do they want to think about the goals that they're responsible for helping their team achieve and how does this impact the way they think of themselves as a leader? Right, this is a lot of the personal brand work that I do with leaders. So in one situation we had a leader who had a really amazing attention to detail. So in the coaching we were able to find ways that that leader could apply that trait towards recognizing the values or the attributes of their team members. Right, that attention to detail.

Speaker 1: 11:03

When you're able to transfer that skill into seeing the various contribution that your team members are making, suddenly not only are you creating different and deeper connections because people feel seen and heard, but people also understand that they're being now brought in for their own expertise, and that takes a leader to spot that out. There was another example where another department head had a very strong analytical skill and was able to, like, zoom in on reams of data quickly and be able to see some of the trends. And the coaching there was how to channel that level of analytical skill and that expertise to understanding some of the motivations and aspirations of their peers. When you're really able to slow down and find those pieces, how might you communicate differently, again, increasing that EQ, that emotional intelligence, and being able to move it towards a measurement for yourself of how you're improving personally and then, ultimately, how your team is behaving differently.

Speaker 1: 12:12

You've got to get to the root cause of the problem. You cannot have hard skills without essential skills. You need both. And the skills they are essential. They encompass, again, the emotional intelligence, the empathy, the communication, the ability to motivate others. These aren't ancillary, but they are foundation. They are foundational to the exercise of technical expertise. They are what transforms knowledge into action and then action into results. And this journey towards being a more effective leader and to produce really productive teams is rooted in the acknowledgement that hard skills, while totally indispensable, must be complicated with essential skills so that teams can grow, scale, flourish. And when you foster an environment that values and develops both hard and essential skills, companies have this ability to unlock the team's deeper potential. Right you can start driving towards innovation, deeper engagement, community collaboration and overall success, because you're going to see that retention will start to reduce and people will feel valued, not just for what they're bringing to the table in the hard skills, but that they're also being managed and coached right.

Speaker 1: 13:33

You hear most people today saying I don't really wanna be managed, I wanna be coached. People wanna be coached towards possibility, creating that self-awareness and having the fulfillment that there was an obstacle or a challenge or a goal in front of them and they were able to work with their leader, not just on the hard skills here's how you code effectively, here's how you do this but also the skills that they can tap into in themselves to know how to lead differently. You know, in addition to being a certified coach, I'm also a SHRM CP, which is certification from the Society for Human Resource Management. The emphasis here is on strategic HR management and this case, bringing together both my certification in coaching and in SHRM, brings together not just the executive coaching and how you motivate and create sales awareness, but it's also the strategic people management. So I worked with their in-house HR to conduct team surveys that then track the changes back into morale, net thriving, which is a Gallup approach to seeing how your workplace is thriving and overall well-being.

Speaker 1: 14:43

And I tell you I was super proud of the work at all levels. Right, not only was HR completely on board and the learning and development team, executive leadership and the CEO was on board, but also these team and department heads were on board. And when you start to see leaders really tap in and balance both their technical acumen alongside these newly developed leadership skills, I mean you see how we can change the way people work. And my mission constantly is to come back and help leaders and the people they serve together make the workplace better right, so that whenever you leave your the day, you leave the work that you're doing, you're going back to the people that you love and live with and you're you're able to be present for them and not still be stuck on potentially the crappy day that you had at the office.

Speaker 1: 15:33

So the transformation because we build a strength-based culture and really valuing a holistic development of leaders. You know organizations begin to navigate the complexities of a modern workplace, one that's hybrid, one that's in the office, one that's having struggles with return to the office, policies, all the things, and we get to turn these potential challenges into growth opportunities for the organization. When you can transform a highly paid doer, someone who is supposed to be leading but is really just doing and focusing on the hard skills, into an inspirational leader, gosh, you know the change becomes that the workplace becomes more sustainable. The workplace is then able to have people who are balancing their well-being, getting great work done, having high emotional IQ, being kinder, being more collaborative, creating a community, improving the culture. All of these things become possible when we're making sure that our leadership is set up for success.

Speaker 1: 16:41

Friends, this is the work I do. This is the work that feels so mission-driven to me to be able to help leaders and the people that they serve navigate the complexities of the professional landscape and make sure that work is working for many people and that we're creating success at all levels. If you are interested and you want to talk more, my information is in the show notes. You can hit me up at hello at jillgriffincoachingcom and I would love to talk to you further about what we can do within your organization. And if you're a leader who's looking for personal support and wanting an executive coach to really make sure that you are also like navigating to the top of your career, that is the work that I do and I would love to talk to you and see what's possible. Friends, together we can create workplaces that are more successful for everyone. Have a great week and thanks for listening.