Developing human skills—often called soft skills—is as essential today to a business’s success as hitting your KPIs or revenue goals.

While many characteristics are associated with human skills, empathy, effective communication, resilience, and critical thinking are at the top of the list. Prioritizing these elements within your organization can facilitate your employees withstanding challenges to accomplishing their goals—and meet your organizational ones.

RELATIONAL MASTERY

It begins with enabling psychological safety within the organization. With layoffs ramping up, your employees may be living in the shadow of fear. Psychological safety is the foundation of success through these challenging times. Transparency around expectations and the state of the business lets your employees operate from a place of trust instead of fear. Free of that anxiety, your employees can perform at their best, create and innovate, collaborate and lead.

We call it cultivating relational mastery, the ability to form and maintain healthy relationships, which depends on human skills.

When the external environment is volatile, uncertain, and ambiguous, it’s important to build internal stability, strength, and equanimity. When you come from a place of fear or instability, your emotional capacity is much lower. You’re running on empty. When we increase our emotional intelligence and understand and manage our emotions, we can show up for others.

People with relational mastery skills build relationships rooted in mutual trust, respect, and transparency. They will lead with genuine care for their colleagues’ well-being. So, when we notice someone is stressed or coming from a place of scarcity, we can help them create internal stability and calmness. Instead of reacting to “bad” behavior, we can be more understanding of what is happening in their world and not take on the energy they’re sending.

Embracing relational mastery for ourselves, we can then help cocreate it for the team.

CRITICAL THINKING

Critical thinking enables the employee to problem solve by applying reasoning, analysis, and creative thinking to first identify problems, and then offer recommendations to resolve the issue. We need our employees to be able to question assumptions (including their own) and not accept ideas at face value, find connections between ideas, and analyze a problem by asking: “Is this really the best way to solve this problem?” “Is there any additional information that we need to determine a solution?”

Critical thinking goes hand-in-hand with the ability to self-direct and drive a project through completion, for example.

GIVING (AND RECEIVING) FEEDBACK 

Everyone has their “window of tolerance” for receiving critical feedback. When an employee is triggered by feedback, they may get anxious or angry as a response. Conversely, they may go into a shut down mode where they zone out. Either one of these is counterproductive and the information conveyed will not be received (heard), since the employee is essentially reacting to what they perceive as a threat.

The human skill here involves raising your emotional intelligence in two ways. We can learn greater self-awareness to notice the signs of oncoming dis-regulation and learn to request a pause in the feedback conversation. The manager—or person giving feedback—can also learn how to attune to the other’s reactions and pause to check-in. They may decide to take a break or reschedule the conversation so that their words can be received and integrated.

THOUGHTFUL COMMUNICATION

Essential to this process is having the tools to communicate effectively with others. A lot of conflict arises when we say something that may be interpreted or experienced as having hostile intent, even though that wasn’t our intention.

It’s critical to be mindful of how we communicate with others. And when conflict does arise, to use what we call a clearing conversation, which we adopted from the Conscious Leadership Group. A clearing conversation is being fully aware of what you’re experiencing and then making a request going forward.

So, when you feel negatively impacted by what someone said or their behavior, you first acknowledge the trigger that led to your feelings and then try to understand your reaction. This  requires a lot of self-awareness and the ability to communicate with yourself, to answer questions such as: What do I need to shift so I can calm myself down, or to notice that it’s a trigger and not overreact? How can I articulate what the root of this trigger is? How can I have a productive conversation with that person once I can settle down with the emotions or the reaction?

Then follow up with a request for  the person like,  Could you be more conscious of how you deliver that message to me in the future? This part of the process involves three-parts:

1. Sharing the behavior that had an impact.
2. Sharing what the effect was.
3. Making a request going forward.

Managers are often on the front line, owning the communications to get through challenging times. There is a lot of fear around job security; managers need the skills to redirect the energy of fear toward a focus on business outcomes. It demands emotional resilience to digest what is happening and quickly shift into the dynamic of helping the organization evolve through whatever changes may occur. It requires the ability to think critically about how to solve problems and then take action.

Much of this ties back to manager training, building on your managers’ innate strengths and unique skills to ensure they can create psychological safety for their teams and have these difficult conversations. It’s rooted in manager enablement and helping them develop human skills—paired with business skills.

The outside world is struggling with uncertainty, chaos and fear. But suppose we embrace and develop the human skills of empathy, effective communication, resilience and critical thinking. This can ground us, allowing us to maintain our stability and serenity and redirect our energy toward helping colleagues and our organization meet their goals during challenging periods.