Soft Skills Are Critical to Workplace Success

I must admit I had no idea why soft skills were important to my career success when I graduated from college.  I quickly realized at my first job with McKinsey & Company how my lack of some soft skills in the workplace was affecting my performance reviews.  Here are some examples of what soft skills I was missing at the time:

• Stress Management and People Management Skills – At 22 years old, I was assigned an assistant at McKinsey.  I treated her horribly when I was stressed and I was immature to think I have the right to do so since she worked for me.  Needless to say, she was NOT jumping in to help me all the time, which caused me to nearly miss deadlines.
• Confidence and Communication Skills – I was book smart and had great ideas on projects, but sometimes I was afraid to speak up when there were senior people in the room.  I had no idea how to structure my comments and I didn’t have the confidence to think they would care what I thought. McKinsey expected analysts to voice their opinions.  On one project, I only received average performance reviews as a result even though I built the core Excel model that drove our final recommendations.
• Resilience / Office Political Skills – I was blamed for something I didn’t do on a project.  It took me a few years to move on from this.  My manager succeeded in blaming me because he knew how to play office politics better than I did at the time.  I had no close support from any partners.  I didn’t realize that it was important to build relationships and allies outside of my immediate team.

In some ways, I was lucky to learn these critical soft skill lessons early in my career.  Since my experience at McKinsey, I became much more aware of the importance of soft skills in the workplace dedicating time and effort to practicing them over the last 15 years, and saw improving them had a direct impact on my work reputation and career advancement.  I also concluded three reasons why soft skills are critical to workplace success:

• Soft skills are the most difficult to master and will separate us from the masses. Almost anyone can learn basic professionalism and the necessary work attitude that are fundamental to career success.  Soft skills, on the other hand, can take years of practice and conscious effort.
• Soft skills are not taught well in school.  With hard skills, many schools have rigorous programs regarding how to develop specific hard skills.  As long as we’re smart and can study hard, we can master the hard skills.  Soft skill courses in school are often scarce or impractical since they may be taught by professors who’ve never worked in the business world.  We have to find ways to learn and practice soft skills at work to truly master them.
• Soft skills are what will get us promoted, especially to executive level (VP and above).  If we look at any executives we admire today, I would bet that the reasons they’ve advanced to that level is heavily due to their leadership skills, communication skills, or ability to inspire action and deliver results – all soft skills.  The secret to succeeding like an executive in any corporation is mastering these soft skills (people skills and self-management skills)

Besides all of these logical reasons, developing your soft skills can be empowering.  The more you can learn about how to be confident, manage upward, play politics, influence others, etc., the more control and inspired you’ll feel about your career progress and direction.  The working world is not always fair and we cannot change other’s behaviors or outside circumstances.  However, we can use our soft skills to control how we respond to adverse situations and take proactive action in our best interest.