The Soft Skills

Enhance professional performance also in the managerial and technical-sporting fields

Soft skills are currently considered very important skills in the workplace. Acquiring them and knowing how to highlight them helps in your work.

In general, soft skills are all those skills that are not specific to a job role and are considered as personality characteristics that highlight quality and specific individual attitudes such as social skills, communication and management and are complementary to technical skills, called hard skills.

The analysis of soft skills sees a greater development today, after at the beginning of the seventies, David McClelland, a labor psychologist highly appreciated for his studies on motivation, was asked to design a new modality for the selection of Foreign Service Information officers Officers (diplomats used to ensure that there is approval and consensus of American politics in the world) creating what is now called the Balance of Skills.

In each job, therefore, we study in particular which and how many skills you want to consider, in which areas and to which business processes these skills must be reported. Once you have established what is the model of skills that must be developed, ie. the model that must be consistent with the values ​​and professional goals that must be possessed to ensure the realization of expected performances and planned objectives, you can start to evaluate some fundamental aspects, with the aim of translating each competence into observable behaviors.

If you take the relationship skills as an example, it will turn out to be different depending on the role you have to manage (coach, swimming school coordinator, etc.).
A fundamental aspect is therefore linked to asking oneself what are the required skills and the expected behaviors to achieve an excellent performance in a given role. This allows you to build job descriptions, or map of skills, based on the wealth of knowledge, skills, ability and individual and collective behavior to allow the achievement of professional goals through, precisely the analysis of behaviors that are the only visible element and objectively verifiable.

From the analysis of job descriptions you can therefore have a first track for the identification of activities related to each role.
Normally this mapping, carried out through specific questionnaires, interviews and in our field, through observation and self-observation, allows to plan and organize not only the assessment (staff assessment) inside the structures, but also the training paths internally and particularly the curricular ones.

The studies on soft skills are many and all evaluate these “transversal skills”, ie. those skills that group personal qualities, work attitude in the workplace and knowledge in the field of interpersonal relationships, and tend to group them in large areas such as example leadership, relational effectiveness, team work, problem solving, etc. In any case all these are grouped into some large categories:

• Cognitive (ie as a reason: systemic vision, problem solving, analysis and synthesis …)
• Relational (how I relate to others: communication, management of interpersonal relationships, customer orientation, collaboration, team work, negotiation …)
• Implementation (how I translate into action what I thought, initiative, proactivity, result orientation, planning, organization, management of time and priorities, decision …)
• Managerially (who actually evaluates how to act, in the role of leader: leadership, management and motivation of employees, ability to delegate …)

Finally, some skills are more transversal, such as flexibility, tolerance to stress, tension to continuous improvement, the search for innovation.
What follows are the soft skills most used in the professional-work environment:

• Autonomy: Ability to activate and perform the assigned tasks without the need for continuous supervision by appealing to their own resources.
• Self-confidence: awareness of one’s worth, of one’s abilities and ideas independently of the opinions of others.
• Flexibility / Adaptability: knowing how to adapt to the various working contexts, being open to new things and being available to collaborate with people with points of view that are different from their own.
• Resistance to stress: ability to react positively to the work pressure while maintaining control, remaining focused on the priority without transferring to the others their own potential tensions.
• Ability to plan and organize: realize ideas, identifying goals