Over the past year, I’ve spent thousands of hours teaching and training employees within organizations on how to work effectively in a hybrid and remote workplace.
While each employee and company is unique, there are some things that are a throughline in all of my work: Whether it’s a small or large company or a company in software or consumer packaged goods, human skills are critical to getting work done and successfully navigating an organization.
Today’s world of knowledge work is global, interconnected, and technology driven, which means the work you do usually requires you use a mix of technology, tools, and people to get things done. It’s hard to do something entirely by yourself, and without working with other humans.
Take an Account Executive in Sales, one job where you can directionally correlate a behavior (talking to a customer) with an outcome (a sale.)
If you talk to any seller in enterprise software, they will tell you how valuable it is to have teammates like a sales engineer, legal, deal desk rep, and customer success manager, and many deals involve multiple teams across the entire organization.
The upshot of this is that, in todays’ workplace, it means that working alongside, through, and with others to achieve your goals is critical to getting anything done.
For me though, what this underscores, is that even in a world that continues to increase its reliance on technology and innovation (Hello ChatGPT) business is still incredibly human.
So what does that mean for all of us? I think it means that if we focus on sharpening the things that we as humans uniquely do best, we’ll be in a good position to be successful and effective in our jobs.
I think this will also allow people to engage more deeply in their work, performing tasks, working on projects and working towards outcomes that align to their unique human strengths. Who doesn’t want that?
Furthermore, this also means that if we, as leaders, want our people to be successful by demonstrating these skills and behaviors, we have to more clearly enable and champion them when they are demonstrated, set up performance management systems that reward this work, and model them ourselves.
The term “soft skills” often is a catch all for what helps people get things done, get ahead, and succeed in the workplace. They are often using the implicit skills and behaviors that actually need to be made explicit. So how do we do this, and where do we start?
In Marketing 101, you are taught that you can compete essentially on two dimensions. price and differentiation. Competing on price is essentially a race to the bottom. In order to win that game, you have to scale and serve “better, faster, cheaper.” It’s a commodity game, and unless you have the scale, it’s hard to win.
Differentiation however, is exactly what it says – instead of trying to compete on price, you compete on what makes you uniquely you – your value proposition.
In today’s world of work, my argument is that there are more ways to win, when we design the workplace for humans, and humans lean into the HVP – the human value proposition, or the six elements that make us humans unique, and allow us to thrive and do our best work.
If you as an employee focus on developing and exhibiting these six skills and behaviors, you’ll position yourself for success:
The Human Value Proposition: 6 Skills
- Connection – The ability to intentionally and successfully build relationships with your peers, and organization
- Creativity – The ability to generate unique ideas and insights that drive solutions and solve problems
- Collaboration – The ability to co-create, lead, and work through and with others to achieve a desired goal or outcome
- Communication – The ability to understand your audience, and speak, write, or talk in a way that resonates with diverse groups of people
- Candor – The ability to share, speak, and communicate feedback in an honest, direct, and respectful way
- Care – The ability to demonstrate empathy and compassion for others you work with in a way that makes them feel acknowledged and seen
So what do we do with these human skills? Train people, train managers? Train leaders? Well, all of the above!
This really does apply to all people within an organization. For example:
- Individual Employees – If you focus on these elements, you will find yourself with plenty of opportunities to contribute and make an impact in your role
- People Managers – If you focus on coaching, training and mentoring your direct reports on these elements, you’ll be able to help your team achieve outcomes faster
- Leaders – If you focus on skilling your organization on these skills, you’ll create a culture where humans can thrive, and people feel engaged, productive and excited about their work
Nobody wants to go to work and do a bad job, but there’s a lot of things that get in the way of being able to do a great one. And while I think many people would agree that the 6 C’s are important, many of us are never taught or modeled on how to do these effectively in the modern workplace, and they are not always rewarded.
My hope is that we can change this by creating organizations around the human value proposition, and reward and model these human skills and behaviors. We’ll design a workplace that sets people up for success, allows them to contribute to the world of work today, and enables them to thrive.
Are you looking for help in upskilling your employees to thrive in the hybrid workplace? Contact Us to chat about Professional Development Programs to Improve Employee Productivity and Engagement!