I have worked over 25 years in finance, economics and in consulting and have dealt with my share of employee performance evaluations. Most evaluations measure hard skills as well as soft skills to ensure there is a thorough feedback on each and every employee.
I hate the term soft skills.
Soft skills are anything but soft. They are excruciatingly hard to achieve.
How do you ensure employees trust their leaders and their vision?
How clear do you communicate with your team?
How committed is your team?
How do you increase your teams innovation and creativity?
How do you increase the resilience of your team members so that they can bounce back from troubled times quickly?
At Moudus, we call soft skills CORE skills because we deem that without these core skills employees cannot run their post efficiently and their productivity cannot reach the levels their jobs truly require. We consider the follow 7 elements the core skills of any individual who truly wishes to reach insane levels of productivity in themselves and in others:
Trust and Awareness
Innovation and Resilience
Proactivity and Responsibility
Loyalty and Belonging
Conscious Communication
Commitment and Vision
Interdependence and Consciousness Building
In our daily experience with our very courageous clients, we have seen them able to dominate these skills little by little and witness the effects that these have on their work and on their team’s productivity.
Deliverables start coming in on time, processes start to flow. Documentation is more precise. People start making others accountable in an empathic but responsible manner. Rotation goes down. Managers stop carry work that’s not theirs and start delegating with less difficulty. People complain less. Stress is more manageable. Teams unite.
The key to this type of change starts by calling these abilities CORE skills. These skills define the manner in which each individual takes decisions in their jobs and the manner in which the work is done.
And guess what? At Moudus we have a patented system that measures core skills so that they are quantifiable. Again, we LOVE doing difficult things and we measure what, not long ago, seemed impossible because we believe that we can only improve on what can be measured. But that’s for another article.
You know what’s the most rewarding fact about seeing these CORE skills grow in individuals? To see each and every employee, at all levels, become aware of themselves, of their responsibility to society, to themselves, to their families. To grow aware of their unique contribution within their companies. Of their effect in the world and their importance. They become, dare I say, more conscious of themselves, with an increased self-esteem and hence happier.
It’s not magic. Its growth. It’s effort. Measured. Real.
By: Kirsten Jepsen