Soft skills are personality-based qualities rather than the types of skills that people learn at college.
Employees who have good soft skills, such as self-management, can communicate, solve problems, and lead teams better.
Therefore, it is a good idea to actively help your employees to develop their soft skills. Here are some great ways to go about it.
Examples of Soft Skills
In addition to self-management, soft skills include:
- Excellent communication.
- A high level of organization.
- A positive can-do attitude.
- Effective teamwork.
- Critical thinking.
- Creativity.
- Dependability.
- Problem-solving.
- Adaptability.
- The ability to resolve conflicts.
By identifying the soft skills that are most important for your workforce to have, you can focus on helping your employees develop those skills; which will benefit them and your company.
How to Help Your Employees Develop Self-management
Employee self-management skills are about workers controlling their behaviors and thoughts in the workplace so that they can do things like work well with others, acquire better functional expertise, and deliver better results.
Workers with self-management skills are able to understand whether what they are doing works or whether they need to make adjustments to gain better results.
Therefore, effective self-management strategies can enhance efficiency and productivity as well as end results for specific projects and day-to-day operations.
Take a look at this insightful article to learn more about the importance of self-management for productivity.
Seeing as many companies now provide their employees with the opportunity to work remotely, self-management in business is more important than ever.
There are various ways in which you can help your employees develop their self-management skills.
Here are three effective strategies.
Forget Control and Focus on Enablement
Providing employees with the skills and knowledge to complete tasks themselves is one of the best things you can do to help your workers develop self-management skills. Rather than controlling employees, enable them.
Create Clear Objectives and Expectations
The clearer you are to your employees about your objectives and expectations, the easier it will be for them to develop strong self-management skills and deliver the results you are after.
Put Psychological Safety at the Heart of Your Company Culture
When employees work in a psychologically safe environment, they are more likely to develop their self-management skills and take small risks to achieve better results.
Methods for Developing Soft Skills at the Workplace
You can use other methods to help your employees develop their self-management skills and other soft skills.
Here are some ideas you should embrace.
Take an Immersive Approach
The more you connect with your employees regularly, the more you can empower them and ensure they develop their soft skills.
So, take an immersive approach, such as holding weekly one-on-one coaching sessions and listening to feedback from individual workers to come up with personalized development strategies.
Provide Feedback
You should also provide regular feedback to your employees about how they are doing with their soft-skill development.
Two-way communication is crucial for helping workers to develop their soft skills.
If you want to learn more about assessing management skills effectively, you can check out Proaction’s guide. You’re not just limited to providing verbal feedback!
Provide Coaching Sessions for Multiple Employees
While you should embrace one-on-one training to help your employees develop their soft skills, you should also hold coaching sessions for multiple employees.
Doing so will enable workers to talk among themselves about their soft-skills development as well as learn together in a positive environment.
So, utilize both individual coaching sessions and sessions for groups of employees.
Set a Good Example
When you actively use soft skills well yourself, your employees are much more likely to develop their own soft skills.
So, set a good example.
