While cognitive and technical skills can be learned in a rule-based way, there are no clear guidelines for how people should work and interact with others.
The so-called soft or social skills — such as empathy, listening, advocacy, and conflict resolution — are difficult to teach and nearly impossible to scale across an organization.
Despite their role in creating high-performing and effective organizations, social skills have proven elusive to develop in team members and leaders. That’s because most organizations go about teaching them in the wrong way.
Training programs, soft skill workshops, and peer group discussions often fail to make a dent in the challenge of giving people the social skills they need to succeed.
Effective organizations have learned to develop social skills the hard way—through practice clinics.
To learn social skills, team members must practice their choices in a variety of situations, scenarios, and critical episodes.
Through trial and error with immediate feedback, team members build a repertoire of effective approaches and strategies. The more practice they get, the better they become.
Practice clinics that expose peers to situations that reflect the complexity and nuances of real-time challenges work best to build skill.
Focusing on what approaches might work best and what tactics would likely underperform teaches team members how to appreciate what they say and do, and how they say and do it tremendously influences their ability to succeed.
Over time, social competencies rise along with the confidence to try new behaviors and tactics.
Many of the best contemporary organizations supplement their practice clinics with AI and virtual reality practice sessions that team members can access at any time.
The ability to role-play and work through an unlimited set of situations at their own pace further enhances the skill development that begins in such clinics.
Teaching social skills requires situational practice and a heavy dose of repetition. Nothing else works very well. As it turns out, practice is the best instructor.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
