Soft skills are as important as hard skills as reported by ninety-seven percent of employers surveyed. This is because they’ve realized just how much soft skills contribute to productivity and the overall culture of their business. However, not all organizations are willing to provide training to develop these skills. Most just think that money needs to be spent on developing hard skills. I won’t argue that they’re necessary. But unless you work in a vacuum with no need to ever interact with another human in any capacity, soft skills are crucial to your success at work. 

Take this last year, in particular. We’ve all had to adapt (soft skill) in order to keep our heads above water. Most of us had to get creative (soft skill) in order to turn our homes into a combination office/school/gym/restaurant. And then we had to figure out how to collaborate (soft skill) with our teammates via a virtual meeting room. None of this was fun, but because it was necessary to do these things, we’ve built some resilience along the way (soft skill). See what I mean, about the importance of the so-called soft skills? 

Today’s employers expect to provide some if not all the training for the hard skills necessary for a particular role. But the idea of having to also train employees in the soft skills is a fairly new revelation. This is something that’s occurred over the last 2 decades. So what are the soft skills most lacking in the current workforce? According to recent statistics, they are communication, collaboration and leadership. 

Communication Is A Soft Skill

Effective communication is the key to any relationship at work. I mean, we live in a world where we might be working with people across the room or across the globe. We’re doing this mostly by telephone and email, without hearing tone of voice or seeing body language. And this leads to A LOT of miscommunication. However, even if we are able to speak with someone in person, we aren’t always able to communicate effectively. Why? Because our personality styles often get in the way. Each of the four major personality styles have different priorities, motivators, stressors and emotional needs which we communicate differently. 

Take the Conscientious style who tends to be analytical, methodical and private. Now imagine that he/she has to work closely with an Influencer style. The Influencer never knew a stranger, throws out new ideas every few minutes just to see if they’ll stick, and flies by the seat of his/her pants. These two different personality styles don’t understand why they each individually show up the way they do. And this leads to miscommunication. There are just no two ways around it. 

Collaboration Is A Soft Skill

Communication by itself is important, but the reality is it’s also a necessary component of collaboration. Today’s workplaces share people and data across many channels and groups. Individuals, teams and departments may operate independent of each other, but they’re often dependent upon one another. And again this is where personality differences can create problems. 

For example, let’s say you have a Dominant personality type who wants to win at any cost, and doesn’t have time for niceties. And this person needs a report ASAP. In the Dominant’s mind, this is top priority. The problem is that he’s demanding it from a Steady personality style who is often slow to respond because he/she really needs to think through things and has difficulty speaking his/her mind when challenged. You think this might cause some anger, frustration and hurt feelings? Absolutely!

Leadership Is A Soft Skill

The third soft skill that is lacking in many organizations today is leadership. People often get promoted to management positions because they were great in their previous role. But that doesn’t mean they know how to work well with other people. And this discrepancy becomes glaringly clear in a short amount of time, with the result being disgruntled employees. It’s extremely important for managers to understand their leadership shortcomings and to work to rectify them. This is why leaders should never stop learning. But also because being elevated to a leadership role inherently implies that you know how to lead! 

Of course, it’s not just managers who should be expected to lead well. Everyone, no matter where they fall on the org chart, has a responsibility to lead within their own role. All employees should understand how they show up at work, take responsibility for their actions and learn to work well with others. If everyone chose to do these things, work would feel a lot less like work.

Soft Skills Are Needed For Success

Like I stated in the beginning, most employers recognize the importance of soft skills in the workplace. The problem is there aren’t enough employers helping their employees develop these skills. This is a problem since the soft skills dilemma continues to worsen, and higher ed hasn’t stepped in to fill the gap. This means organizations have to step up if they want their employees to have the necessary skills to help them stay engaged, create positive company culture and increase production. Specifically, they need to focus on helping employees improve their communication, collaboration, and leadership abilities.

If your organization is ready to take on this challenge, get in touch with us today.

The Culture (R)evolution starts with you!

This was originally posted Oct. 18, 2018

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Humans are complex. We know this. Yet, organizations still assume that just putting a bunch of talented people together will ensure the success of that team. Unfortunately, it’s just not true. There’s a lot more to creating connected teams and a feeling of community in the workplace. 

A lot of employees believe the most important element of team connectedness is the buy-in of each employee to the company’s mission, vision, and values. Some would suggest it’s creating effective and efficient communication strategies across channels, so everyone knows what they need to know. And the really brave might even suggest that employees need to feel valued, heard and celebrated for their wins.

All of these are necessary on some level for team cohesion. That being said, at Brilliant People, we believe the three most important steps to creating team success are building trust, engaging in productive conflict, and strengthening connection in your teams.

Trust: the glue that holds a team together

Patrick Lencioni, author of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, once said:

There is probably no quality or characteristic that is as rare as trust.”

This is especially true in the workplace. And, employees and their organizations are suffering because of it.

The formal definition of trust is ‘the assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.’ But, when it comes to teams, trust is all about vulnerability. Team members who trust one another are comfortable sharing their failures, weaknesses and fears with their teammates.  We aren’t talking about touchy-feely stuff here. That’s not where we’re going with this. Connected teams have trust and are less likely to waste time slacking off or engaging in backbiting and office politics. And they have more motivation to do the work asked of them. In fact, increased trust in a team directly correlates to better job performance and increased employee engagement. The direct result being an increase in profitability.

We understand that an absence of trust is the #1 destroyer of teams. Because of this we offer The 5 Behaviors of a Cohesive Team to help individuals build trust with their teammates.  All other behaviors (conflict, commitment, accountability, and results) are important. However, trust is the foundation needed to create cohesive, collaborative, and productive teams (aka connected teams).

The Aftermath of Conflict

Conflicts that are ignored or mishandled fester within an organization, wreaking havoc on relationships and ultimately the company culture.

Ever see the movie Jaws? Or, any thriller/suspense movie where the music for a given scene induced feelings of intense anxiety, suspense, or fear? These same feelings are evoked when people have to deal with conflict. Conflict is most often associated with fighting, and confrontation, so more often than not, people try to steer clear of it.

Even so, the reality is that US employees spend approximately 2.8 hours each week involved in some level of conflict. That’s 140+ hours a year and almost  $359 billion in hours paid that are filled with and focused on conflict! And our clients tell us that it’s happening way more than this research shows.

Other important ramifications due to conflict in the workplace include: 

• Low team morale
• Negative impact on authority
• Increased number of personal clashes
• Low productivity and efficiency
• Low quality work

All of which equals a disengaged workforce.

Conflict: use it or diffuse it

Conflict is really just the natural result of putting a bunch of people together who have different personalities, talents, values, and backgrounds. So, why not channel all those differences into something positive and productive? Why not allow conflict to be used as an energy source for creativity, innovation, and transformation? That would be amazing, right? But to get there we need to develop methods to diffuse negative conflict so that we can use it productively.

When trust is developed within the organization, the ability to encourage and take part in productive conflict is greatly enhanced. Everyone at the table can then genuinely explore issues in a collaborative way. This is way better than each individual having a “save yourself” mentality.

Navigating conflict is tricky but everyone can learn to engage in it. We do this by offering training that provides the tools needed to make educated, non-emotional decisions about how to handle conflict appropriately. This allows for all involved to retain their integrity, which is critical to a cohesive team.

All For One & One For All

Having connected teams is integral to a team’s success. Feeling that connection and community within the team happens when there is an emphasis on implementing people-centric strategies. In plain English, teammates have to spend time getting to know each other. They need to know their own and each other’s priorities, motivators, and stressors. Recognizing our differences and working through them is an important tenet of a thriving company culture.

Creating a successful team is work and it doesn’t happen overnight.  It takes consistency and a commitment to the effort every day. Because of this, we’ve created a continual learning model that speaks to the value and power of a connected team.  Our training program provides applicable everyday strategies to bring teams and leaders closer together. And positive productive culture is the result. You spend a lot of time at work, so use your time wisely and focus on productivity, not negativity and unproductive conflict.

The culture (r)evolution starts with you. If you’re ready to create successful teams within your organization, contact us. We can show you the way.

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Personality affects how you show up to work. It’s what other people see because it determines how we behave. And each of the four major personality styles shows up differently because they have different priorities, motivations and emotional needs. We’ve probably all experienced the coworker with the constant negative vibe or the overly positive one. Or the teammate who never speaks up in meetings even when the topic is important to them. And what about the coworker who uses words and physicality to intimidate others? These types of behaviors can wear on your last nerve,  but have you ever considered why people behave the way they do? Most people don’t.  Instead, they make quick judgments about other people based on what they do, not why they do it. 

Research indicates that personality is influenced by genetics and life experiences, and that this combination accurately predicts behavior. Personality itself can’t be changed, but with the right tools, training, and practice, we can all learn to modify personality behaviors. When individuals understand their own personality as well as that of their coworkers, the result is better connection and community in the workplace. This is why personality development is the foundation of the Brilliant People continual learning model.

Personality Diversity at Work

Learning how to modify behaviors that are holding you back, and strengthen those that will propel you forward is the key to success in the workplace. That and learning to work with other personality styles. Diversity adds value to almost everything, and that includes a diversity of personality on your team and in your organization as a whole. But, it can be difficult to work with those that differ from us. We tend to fall into the belief that if other people operated like we do, things would be so much better.

So, let’s look at how this might play out. We’ll use the Dominant personality style as an example. This type tends to prioritize results, action & a fast pace. They’re also strong-willed and can be domineering, so the reality is that this office culture would live by the motto “it’s a dog eat dog world.” They’d be great at meeting deadlines and making their numbers because they’re highly competitive. However, in their rush to be first, they can be weak in planning and prioritizing. This often leads to mistakes. The Dominants also often run into trouble when soft skills like collaboration, empathy, or flexibility are required. In time, the result is a high stress, high stakes atmosphere with high burnout rates. 

If employee retention and customer satisfaction are top concerns for an organization, then hiring all Dominant personality types would be a disaster. Of course, this is true for any of the personality styles. Homogeneous grouping is not a recipe for success. Instead, it’s important to mix personality styles so that one personality style can fill another’s gaps. 

Communicating With Different Personalities

Once a diversity of personality exists, people need to learn to communicate with each other effectively. And the advances in technology over the last 20 years have actually made this more difficult. Smart phones, tablets and laptops have bred a collective impatience. We want what we want now, and so we choose the quick email or text over a face-to-face interaction or phone call. 

The problem is that a written message cannot accurately and effectively communicate our thoughts and feelings. Tone of voice, inflection, body language and facial expressions are significantly important to the art of communication. In fact, only 7% of communication is derived from the actual content of a message!

Personality adds an extra layer of complexity to the communication issue. If the different styles don’t understand why each of them shows up the way they do, they won’t know how to interact with each other nor come to any consensus. To communicate effectively with others, we need to know their priorities, motivations, and emotional needs. 

Bringing Personalities Together

To build a cohesive team, you need to bring a group of diverse personalities together and teach them to communicate with each other. They have to learn to speak the language of the other personality styles. This is totally possible because we are all capable of creating new habits and breaking old ones. This is a human superpower! You may not be able to fly or breathe underwater, but you can modify your behaviors to get the most from yourself and others at work. In today’s workplaces, this is a game-changer.  And at Brilliant People, it’s what we’re passionate about. 

Our proprietary personality programming is specifically targeted at three things; helping individuals understand why they show up the way they do, how to modify behaviors that are holding them back, and how to develop or strengthen behaviors that will propel them forward. Then we provide employees with the opportunity to take that knowledge and utilize it to improve communication abilities.

Get in touch with us to bring The Diversity of Personality and The Language of Personality to your workplace and start your own culture (r)evolution today!

Up Next: Part 4: Supercharge Your Workplace with Connected Teams

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Every workplace has a culture—but without intention, investment, and careful shepherding, that company culture can be more akin to chaos. 

Organizations do not start out with a mission statement that includes “strive for a terrible working environment.” But it happens. And it happens because smart, ambitious, excellent humans are thrown together on a team, expected to figure out how to navigate the dynamics, Survivor-style. When this happens, even the best-intentioned organizations begin to unravel. So what can companies do to keep this from happening? Focus on ways to infuse positive, long-lasting culture change and steer clear of slapping a hypothetical Band-Aid on issues that arise. The key to improvement is the ability to foster compassion and connection between employees, both vertically and horizontally speaking. This is of the utmost importance and begins when every individual understands this simple truth: how we show up matters. This is why Brilliant People chooses to shift the narrative around workplace culture and engaged employees to one of relationship.

Our passion for bringing teams together on a deeper level is at the heart of all that we do. It is what drives us. With that in mind, our goal is to first help our clients develop three things: self awareness, awareness of others, and a foundation of trust.  Next, we provide tools and tactics to decrease destructive conflict and instead engage in productive conflict.  Last, we incorporate training to encourage connected teams and leadership at all levels. Our continual learning model empowers employees to authentically and effectively connect with others whether they are coworkers, a manager, direct report or peer.

Our continual learning model is based on the following three steps: 

• Engagement
• Personalities
• Connected Teams

Cultural Evaluation

Our model addresses all levels of the employee relationship. First, it starts with insights into the current workplace dynamic (aka company culture!) because engagement is the glue that holds an organization together. This module is an expert-led deep dive into your team’s personalities, relationships, and interactions to identify root issues that may be creating friction within the organization. The results will be developed into a customized team solution and which can also include one-on-one coaching, where needed. This strategic approach allows you to skip expensive, ineffective cultural band-aids and instead offers recommendations for addressing the issues at their source. This is where an alignment of purpose and shared action from everyone involved becomes key. And, when we say everyone, that’s exactly what we mean: everyone from bottom to top and in between. After all, managers account for at least 70% of variance in employee engagement scores across business units. 1

Organizations are made up of people, each of which shows up in the world with different priorities, motivators and stressors. Those you work closely with get to experience these traits on a daily basis, for better or for worse. Think about it: we all have the ability to brighten a room. We either brighten it when we walk in, or when we walk out. 

What’s needed is pretty basic. Organizations must have: 

• A plan in place for how to contend with their “people” issue.
• Buy-in from said people to rally around a common cause of creating a place that people love to work. 

If you’re ready to get started, click here!

This brings us to our 2nd step: Personalities.

Any Strength Taken to Excess Becomes A Weakness

To add another level of complexity, it’s important to consider a common disconnect. It’s the difference in how we think we show up in the world and how others actually perceive us. There is almost always some level of difference between the two. Based on natural wiring, upbringing, cultural history, life experiences, and so on, we all look through a different lens. We might be looking through a leader lens, a follower lens, or even a victim lens. And that could all be before breakfast! Unfortunately, we probably aren’t even aware that we’re doing it. Worse yet, imagine how it feels for the people we work with on the daily. They’re forced to go through it with us. Talk about a situation ripe for frustration and angst. 

And, as I’m sure we would all agree: emotional stress can be both a cause and effect of workplace conflict. 2

No wonder we have workplace culture struggles. And, just to be clear, we believe there is no SUPERSTAR personality. There’s not one that’s better than another because every personality type has amazing strengths.  This is where the concept of diversity comes into play.

Diversity of Personality

We believe it’s extremely important to have diversity of personality within your organization. But, it doesn’t stop there. You need it in your teams as well because each type brings different strengths and perspectives. In addition employees need to understand how to speak the personality language of their coworkers.

Our second step is to provide individual insights. This in-depth look into the personalities on your team helps identify styles, which involve priorities, motivators and stressors.  Employees will discover both similarities and differences among other personality styles they work with. They’ll also learn ways to effectively communicate with each one.  This process provides a common language to facilitate empathy, collaboration and cohesion across the team and organization. The knowledge gives individuals tools needed so they can show up for coworkers in the way they need. The alternative is showing up in the way they’re most comfortable with, which doesn’t always work to everyone’s advantage and helps company culture take a nosedive if it goes unchecked. This is Step 3 of the process for establishing connected teams, which is foundational.

The Way We Team Matters

Our interactions with each other matter at work because throwing smart and talented people together doesn’t equal a successful team. Success comes when individuals learn the necessary skills to effectively communicate with the other personality types. 

People often fall into the trap of mistakenly believing that most other people share their views, opinions, attitudes, and traits. They also experience something called the ‘fundamental attribution error.’ This is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as “the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are”.⁴ In addition, if there’s a problem with a relationship at work, people assume that the problem is the other person.  They rarely consider their own role in the situation!

You Can’t Change People

All of the situations discussed above involve some form of miscommunication. It may seem simple but miscommunication can lead to all kinds of conflict, stress, and disengagement in the workplace.  And, spoiler alert! You can’t change other people – you can only change yourself. If you want a different outcome than what you are currently getting, figure out how to shift your perspective. This might help you show up differently and allow you to connect with others on the level they need. This can be really hard, but it’s a game changer both individually and collectively.

Our modules focused on Connected Teams combine in-person or virtual training focused on providing tools to help teams establish:

• a foundation of trust 
• a decrease in destructive conflict and the ability to engage in productive conflict
• the means to collaborate more effectively

All of these skills are essential to building a cohesive and engaged employee base which ultimately creates good company culture. We understand that in order to develop new productive habits, repeated practice is absolutely necessary. To that end, we offer bite-sized interactive learning opportunities as part of our continual learning model. 

If you’re ready, let’s get started!

We are Fierce Advocates For Awesome Workplace Culture

A “negative employee experience” is likely never in the business plan. Organizations and the people in them want to do right by their coworkers, their companies, and themselves. Again, I can’t stress enough that how we show up at work matters. When we understand that, embrace it, and take action, we can shift the narrative and perspective around people’s differences. We created Brilliant People because we think that people are actually brilliant. We know that given the right tools, organizations can empower their people to connect with each other internally. This internal connection then radiates out authentically and effectively to your consumer. Interested in how you change company culture for the better? Look no further. This is how you create a culture (r)evolution.

Contact us. We can help you create connection and community in your workplace. You know you want to. Let’s get this party started!

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Next Up: The Motor Called Employee Engagement – Part 2

Jump To:

• Personality and Its Affect on How You Show Up At Work – Part 3
• Supercharge Your Workplace with Connected Teams – Part 4
• Leadership At All Levels – Part 5

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