If you want to make more profit then do this

You’re in business, likely to make money, so when you look at the profit and loss charts it’s really easy to see what doesn’t give ROI and you cut it instantly. That’s good business sense, except when it isn’t.

The measurable ROI of so called ‘soft skills’ may not show immediately on a spreadsheet. You may never directly know which thing you did caused the difference, but I can tell you, it’s there. At The World Happiness Conference earlier this year, they quoted the stats that if a company puts employee welfare at the centre of it’s purpose, that they make 9 times the more profit that those that don’t.

If there was every motivation beyond care of your employees, that’s it. So many companies see soft skills as a waste of money, or certainly bottom of the food chain in terms of resources, the facts don’t align with that dinosaur thinking.

It frustrates me that we still call them soft skills. These are the skills that have evolved the human race. Without them, we are nothing. Even in the animal world, empathy can boost you to the top. Hard skills are those skills you can learn, anyone can learn them within reason. Soft skills can be taught somewhat but they need to come from within. Only Sociopaths can learn to fake these soft skills and we tend to be alert to something being wrong with them because we feel the falseness of their behaviour, they have peripheral friends and everyone is slightly on edge around them.

I’ve witnessed over and over again that when the leaders I work with go through my programme (this is not an advert!) and then boost their self-worth, develop a clearer mindset, feel happier and the myriad of other things that change, that it has a direct impact on their team. Suddenly they find the energy to change processes that haven’t been working, they become more efficient as they reduce the hours they work, doing more in less time. Their team relationships develop as they become a proper team not a handful of people struggling with an endless to do list. These teams are the ones that worked successfully through covid. They don’t buckle, they adjust.

When you have leaders that truly have excelled in their soft skills, your workforce is much more productive, efficient, innovative, they work harder, they come together as a community and support each other. Having a leader whose soft skills are on point, actually saves them and their team a lot of time which may have been wasted on worrying, being off sick, not wanting to ask questions etc etc.

So can we please stop devaluing soft skills, put them at the top of your resources allocation and let’s stop calling them that. There’s no such things as soft or hard skills.

There is being a happy human being, who has energy, motivation and time to be able to communicate more effectively.