The Best Way to Teach Soft Skills
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.
I've been using Claude to quiz me and create practice problems for me to solve after reading non-fiction books. I recently finished Get to the Point by Joel Schwartzman (first couple of chapters were the best part of the book). After reading, I asked Claude to quiz me on the main points in the book. Claude asked me what I thought they were. Using active recall (much better than recognition) I typed out what I thought were the main points. Claude responded with yes on most, elaborated on the stuff I only got partially right, and reminded me of a few areas I completely forgot about. Then, I asked Claude to help me practice writing opening statements that lead with getting to the point. I thought I understood the concept, but after writing about a dozen statements and getting instant feedback from Claude on how I did, I'm realizing I'm not very good at it. It's not surprising. Why would I expect to be after reading a book and trying out a couple of times. If you really want to get good at something, it takes weeks and months of practice to get good at it. So, I'm working on creating a Project in Claude so that I can continue to practice writing 'get to the point' statements. I think after writing a couple of hundred I, things might start to stick.
In their book, The Daily Stoic, Ryan and Stephen provide a model of how to practice (page 392 in the fancy leather bound edition). They provide three levels of practice: 1) Study/Learn, 2) Practice, and 3) Hard Training. Most training and leader development programs stop at 2 - Practice. People attend, learn something, try things out, then go on about their way. I love the idea of holding clinics afterwards where they can come in and sharpen their skills. Definitely forwarding today's post to my team who's meeting tomorrow to build out something to address this issue. However, they're leaning toward offering more 1 and 2 - (which is fine), but I'm going to challenge them to add in a couple of 3) too. Thanks for the post.