Field notes

Emotion, not logic, creates the powerful customer experiences.

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.

There is a typical gap between what everyone on a team thinks and what gets discussed. Those topics, issues, or ideas that are too uncomfortable or embarrassing for the team to discuss remain unaddressed and unspoken. While these undiscussables help the team to avoid short-term conflict and awkwardness, they often hold the group back from making the progress they should. Most undiscussables involve the so-called elephant in the room, which is a euphemism for a topic or issue that everyone prefers would go away. The unspoken truths of bad behavior, bad decisions, or bad outcomes are usually the elephant or 1,000-pound gorilla the team avoids discussing.

Good leaders know that team members who trust them and are loyal to the team go above and beyond to lift themselves and others toward sustainable success. They focus their attention more easily, engage more passionately, overcome setbacks and challenges more comfortably, and behave more consistently. That’s why savvy leaders do their best to amplify the trust individual team members feel toward them while also deepening the commitment they have to the team and its vision. When leaders get this emphasis right, they create a delicious meal with both the chicken and the egg.

It is a well-known view that when things get tough, people reveal themselves. Failure can be a profound teacher, forcing people to confront their mistakes and take responsibility for them. Or not. Some people rise to the occasion when failure raises its ugly head, refusing to give up and instead displaying resilience and determination. Conversely, other people give in to defeat and become sour, negative, and pessimistic. Character comes into sharp relief when failure knocks on the door. Whether people learn from the struggle, hold themselves accountable, and respond calmly and maturely are among the character qualities that people disclose about themselves as they contend with loss. Less obvious is what success declares about people. Success reveals character in ways that failure doesn’t.