When we think about career development, most of us jump straight to the hard skills — the technical skills of our craft — needed for our favored career path. Of course, it stands to reason that we want to develop the skills necessary to become or stay competitive in a particular field. That’s what we’re hired for, right?
Software developers will naturally focus on learning and perfecting their usage of multiple coding languages, musicians will focus on their playing technique, video editors must learn the ins-and-outs of their video editing software, and so on. This makes perfect sense, we all want to perform as well as we can in our careers of choice.
Yet, this near-singular focus on hard skill development can sometimes leave blind spots, preventing growth opportunities for soft skills — the skills of forming and nurturing relationships with others — needed to fully thrive.
Many of us often get into the trap of thinking that our work, if mastered to a certain level, should do all the talking and is “good enough.” While that can be the case some of the time, a greater focus on soft skills can augment an already promising skillset, giving us a chance to build stronger connections with those around us while delivering ourselves better opportunities than we might otherwise receive.
Interpersonal Soft Skills
- Social Skills
Almost every field and career path requires at least some interaction with people, which means learning how to better communicate within your teams is vitally important. Typically, this involves developing the ability to ask better questions to build stronger rapport**.** Instead of invoking light weather-related chit chat or defaulting to “how is your day going?”, instead ask more specific and unexpected questions. This can be something as seemingly silly as “I ate X the other day and it was sooo spicy, how do you like spicy food?” (people love talking about spice tolerance) is a far more interesting question than “how was your weekend?”
- Improve Your Listening
Listening is a skill that we’re constantly developing, and depending on our mental state at any given time, our ability to effectively listen can fluctuate. Still, there are ways you can become a better active listener, which can help you become a better teammate. Avoid planning answers in your head as someone is speaking to you, but instead react in the moment. Try to give the speaker your undivided attention (beware of smartphones) and offer occasional feedback to show you’re listening, particularly statements that reflect the speaker’s feelings or intentions such as “You must be excited about that” or even “That sounds like a bummer”.
- Emotional Intelligence
Among the most difficult skills to cultivate, emotional intelligence is worth developing in order to deepen your connections with family, friends, and co-workers. Developing empathy - the ability to understand the feelings of other people - can bring more happiness and a sense of connection into your life. The better your emotional intelligence, the better you can anticipate the emotions and needs of your co-workers and the better you can collaborate using your well-honed hard skills. Meditation is one of the best ways you can improve your empathy.
Other Soft Skills
- Flexibility and Adaptability
How well you respond to change plays a sizable role in the success of your career development. Few career paths remain static, even if you’re exceptionally specialized. Between seismic changes at companies, shifts in technology, or an uptick in competition over time, adaptability is unquestionably essential for the modern careerist. High adaptability helps keep you proactive in looking for new strategies or methodologies that might set you apart in the long run.
- Growth Mindset
Remember that the learning process doesn’t stop after you graduate from school. Embracing a willingness to improve is a way of thinking that can propel your career well past what you initially believed possible. Perhaps the most difficult bit of this is understanding that you will face many, many failures. Learning to love failure, and seeing those failures as growth opportunities, is the true epitome of the growth mindset.
Balancing Skill Development
In light of the growth mindset, know that you will always be improving and failing, but embracing this fact can help accelerate your career. This is especially true when developing soft skills - you have to realize that you will fail and fail often. But by developing soft skills, especially those that can help foster stronger relationships, you
can sometimes make up for perceived gaps in hard skills.
Hard skills will naturally receive your focus, and the call to improve your interpersonal/personal soft skills is not a call to neglect your craft. Rather, this is a chance for you to find how better relationships and personal growth focuses can help you get where you want faster, even while you continue improving in your field.
If you know of some soft skills we didn’t mention, let us know in the comments!