Most leaders prefer to be surrounded by teams of people with emotional intelligence, communication skills and good team players, rather than people with any specific technical expertise.
Entrepreneurs and HR experts know that soft skills are the most difficult to find, but also the most important for their businesses. 92% of employers believe that a good attitude is the key. Candidates need motivation to learn new skills, to think innovatively, to successfully face failure, take the feedback they receive in and collaborate with their coworkers.
Presence in social networks is taken into account
Among the most valued skills by employers and managers as team leaders, are leadership, personal productivity and time management, negotiation and conflict resolution and communication skills.
When looking for candidates to join their teams, those in charge of hiring take into account aspects such as presence in social networks (or absence thereof). The most important social network when looking for candidates is LinkedIn (42%), followed by Facebook (40%) Google+ (15%) and Twitter (2%).
Why we must work on soft skills
What is the difference between “soft” skills and “technical” or hard skills? Why is it important to develop our potential in emotional intelligence?
Those who are good at developing hard skills are often good at finance-related tasks, programming, statistics, etc. These skills are something fixed, it doesn’t matter the company, people or circumstances under which you work, and can be learned in books and in a classroom. By contrast, soft skills are the ability to adapt to change, to evolve. The more habitual changes are in a business, the more soft skills will be valued. They change the rules and the way we communicate with others, they change projects and our relationship with our team. And these skills are not easy to learn: you can only acquire them through trial and error.
Companies like Gamelearn have developed simulators for soft skills development precisely in order to help develop these skills that otherwise we could not acquire. Tools such as serious games Merchants or Triskelion provide instructions and simple techniques to learn and master soft skills and make us grow personally and professionally.
Interacting with others, learning how to lead, having management and negotiation skills, all of them are exceptional skills we all must learn to master not only because they further develop our potential, but because they are, as we said at the beginning, the most valued skills by employers and successful leaders.
And you, what skills do you value the most?
