Enhancing your Soft Skills

The podcast explains the difference between hard skills and soft skills and emphasizes why soft skills are essential for success in modern organizations, including businesses, nonprofits, and ministries.

Hard skills are technical, job-specific abilities that people list on their résumés—such as certifications, academic degrees, and professional experience. These skills often help individuals get hired.

Soft skills, on the other hand, are interpersonal abilities such as communication, listening, adaptability, empathy, and critical thinking. These skills are less tangible but extremely valuable because they help people work effectively with others and maintain their roles over time.

As organizations become more global and diverse, employees often work with colleagues from different cultures, age groups, and backgrounds. Because of this diversity, companies increasingly need leaders who can integrate teams, resolve conflicts, and create collaborative environments. Many organizations struggle with highly intelligent professionals who have strong technical expertise but lack the interpersonal skills needed to lead and collaborate effectively.

The podcast highlights conflict resolution as an especially important soft skill, since teams frequently have differing opinions and perspectives. When handled with empathy, communication, and respect, these differences can lead to stronger solutions and stronger team relationships.

The speaker offers three key recommendations for developing soft skills:

1. Practice humility and gratitude
   Leaders should remember their role is to serve their team, not to elevate their personal status. Humility builds trust and encourages teamwork.
2. Develop interpersonal relationships
   Leaders should be approachable, authentic, and open to dialogue. Encouraging participation and listening to team members helps people feel valued and allows their talents to contribute to the group.
3. Adapt to new situations
   Effective leaders remain flexible and open to change. By listening to different perspectives, showing empathy, and facilitating solutions during conflicts, leaders can maintain trust and keep projects moving forward.

The overall message is that technical ability alone is not enough for effective leadership. Communication, empathy, adaptability, and teamwork are the skills that allow leaders to inspire others, resolve challenges, and help organizations succeed.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Daniel Badijo Podcast. Welcome to the Forge by Design Podcast. This is your host, Daniel Badijo. In this episode, we'll be talking about enhancing your soft skills. I would say that soft skills play a vital role in how individuals communicate on how we collaborate with one another and navigate those difficult challenges in the workplace. Understanding and developing these interpersonal abilities can significantly improve teamwork, leadership effectiveness, leadership teamwork. It can enhance your overall organizational performance. I would say that growth-minded companies and growth-minded nonprofits are steadily hiring people from across the country and around the world. Corporations and nonprofits with a global imprint, they tend to transfer employees from one company to another, maybe a nonprofit campus to many campuses across the globe. And this national and global interface presents a very unique challenge to all these employers and nonprofits in so many ways, especially in the management techniques and human resources operations. This is because integrating employees from diverse cultural backgrounds into a well-established organization requires more than moral and technical support. Integrating employees requires a higher level of soft skills and supervisory experience. Now we know that forward-focused employers, they recruit professional employees based only on their hard skills, initially on their hard skills. And when we think about it, that's something that we have in common as professionals. We love to embellish our hard skills in a resume. We love to so eloquently uh enumerate and bullet point all those amazing hard skills through indeed, perhaps, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, Monster, Zip Recruiter. As professionals, we quantify our experiences, we embellish them, we use those industry buzzwords to describe our skills and list our managerial and academic abilities. We do this in the attempt to demonstrate that we are indeed the best candidate for that position, for that role, for that title. However, with time, we soon realize that our hard skills got us the job, but our soft skills help us keep the job. In his book, Let's Get Real 42 Tips for Stuck Manager. For a stuck manager, Binard Shankar said the following, which is a very impressive quote. He said, soft skills are taken for granted. They are mostly intangible and not tangible technical stuff that you can pick up from a specific course or qualification. Paradoxically, it's the soft skills that are the most valuable and transferable. Likewise, we soon realize that these soft skills is not only essential in the company's overall success, but also in our interpersonal relationships we have with our team members. And we see that day-to-day in the way we communicate, in the tone that we use, in the boundaries that we set, on how open we are to one another, on how cautious we are, even selecting uh the words that we like to convey. We are very articulate in the manner in which we communicate because we're always gauging that atmosphere or creating an atmosphere of collaboration, of transparency, so we can have mutual respect to one another and once again have that opportunity within the workplace to be successful. So I want to give you an example of what happened to me just recently this weekend. I had to uh mail some some books uh to another state, and I went to the post office. And as I was in the post office, there were several people in front of me uh as customary. Uh it was always a busy Saturday morning. And I was noticing the the person uh across the counter how uh she was so attentive to each customer. I was noticing her tone and how uh smooth she was talking, helping the customers with their packaging, with the taping, uh, with the the label, the labeling. Even in the transaction, she was very courteous uh with the uh with the customers. And those were great soft skills to have. Everybody was having a good experience, a good transactional experience, sending off their packages or getting their mail, etc., because the person was very engaging and the person had amazing soft skills. Likewise, I was uh after that, I went to the local car wash that automated process of car wash, and believe me, I was stuck with my uh my debit card uh attempting to get that basic package to wash my car, and I was having trouble doing so. There was something that I was doing wrong as I was pressing that uh that control panel. And this lady approached, and she was so uh helpful, uh, great service, um great attitude. Uh even though it was hot, it was a bit humid. I understand she looked like she was had a very busy morning with customers, but she extended that courtesy, she extended great service, great communication skills, and made the entire experience very uh very pleasing. That's why in this episode, I want to make a basic distinction between hard skills and soft skills. And second, I want to provide, of course, always advice, counsel as to the importance of every leader to develop soft skills within their organization, within the nonprofit, in your interactions with your employees, because you will have great success. As defined, soft skills are interpersonal skills or qualities that do not require technical knowledge. Some examples of soft skills include good verbal communication, good listening, flexibility, adaptability, and strong critical thinking. And I think you and I have experienced this in our community where we are engaged with people in our community or maybe service, and we notice those beautiful qualities that they possess, how they're able to set the mood, set the atmosphere, and make everything so pleasing. Personally, one of my focus areas when working on soft skills is uh conflict resolution. Over time, I have learned to be very diplomatic, I have learned to be more calm, I have learned to be more objective. And this is because you you work with different people from different cultures, have different age groups, you have different socioeconomic backgrounds, people with different perspectives and dissimilar academic and experience levels. So when you throw that monkey wrench into the mix, so to speak, you have to be engaging, you have to be calm, collective, you have to be objective, and you have to be uh an active listener that can is able to not only give their perspective or my perspective, but also give everyone the opportunity to engage in a bilateral communication. So being able to come together under one roof and have this group brainstorm and discuss their perspective and dissimilar viewpoints allows every member to address sensitive matters. And when you resolve sensitive subject subject matters, there are really no words that can articulate the kind of triumph and victory that you have in that present moment when you're dealing with conflict resolution. So now that I have uh defined soft skills, let's define hard skills. As defined, hard skills are more job-specific skills, such as those responsibilities listed in a job title or a job description. If you have a quality management system, one of the things that are very important is to be able to provide a job description. So those are the job descriptions that recruiters also place in their websites and trying to get the best candidate for that role. But primarily, again, they focus on hard skills. And at the bottom, perhaps at that of your resume, or in that as you're filling out that job application, they like to for you to list some other skills, and that's where we take advantage of that area and we place a great communicator or great interpersonal skills and so forth, which is also uh a paramount and essential to the job. So having hard skills sometimes requires an accreditation of sorts, sometimes a certification or a diploma in a specific job area. The problem that we see in organizations and businesses across the nation, and it's safe to say maybe across the world, is that we have smart, intelligent, skilled, academically proficient professionals who are very proficient and have a wealth of industry experience, but they lack soft skills. And I know if you are thinking about uh a person right now, you can say, well, I know of ex-individual that has that's that is in this department that has amazing technical skills and business acumen and has uh dexterity and and uh specific subject matter. But you may think about think about every time you interact with that person, they are so abrasive. Every time you interact with that person, you you you leave that conference room or that office feeling a bit uneasy because your interaction with that person was not the best. So, in other words, they are they are not people oriented and they are not people friendly. We look across the corporate landscape and we see brilliant individuals who instead of drawing people in, push people out because they lack teamwork skills, they lack compassion, they lack empathy for their team members, they lack those important soft skills. When it comes to hard skills, they are without parallel, but they are socially insensitive and have poor personal traits. They are indifferent and do not allow themselves to be more effective leaders in the marketplace. So, for this reason, I would like to provide only three advice, always three counsels, as to how to develop better soft skills and better interpersonal skills that will allow you to succeed in the marketplace and in that place of worship or in that nonprofit organization. And most importantly, in life, we have to treat each other with courtesy, with respect, with empathy. We have to think before we speak. We have to allow people to engage and sometimes uh sit in the back burner and have others the opportunity to contribute to the cause. My first advice for acquiring soft skills is to practice humility and gratitude. Practice humility and gratitude. Always remember that you are granted an opportunity, a platform, a position, a title, not to overindulge in your own persona or image or ego, but to be of service to your co-workers, to your peers, and to your superiors. You must exercise this privilege uh unpretentiously and with great sense of gratitude to your employer. You are granted an opportunity to serve, you are granted a position, a title to contribute to the overall success of the organization. I say this because no matter how smart, no matter how gifted, no matter how talented we think we are, the truth of the matter is that we can all be replaced at any moment in time. There's always someone waiting in the wings, waiting in in the lobby, eager to modestly join the organization. So we must not take this opportunity for granted. You know, I have a personal quote of mine that says the level of our platforms does not serve us to increase our notoriety, but rather to put a greater demand on our service. Let me repeat that again. The level of our platforms does not serve us to increase our own notoriety or our notoriety, but rather to make a greater demand on our service. At the end of the day, we must ask ourselves, did I win? Speaking singularly, or did the team win? We must ask ourselves, did we make an effort to try to point out and demonstrate that we were correct, or whether we were genuinely helping our team members to succeed? In other words, it's not about us, it's about the team. It's about a collective success of the organization. So we must treat that position with great humility, knowing that we were given an opportunity to serve. So my first advice for acquiring soft skills is to practice humility and practice gratitude. We when serving people as a group, it allows us to bond with them. And if you're able to genuinely bond with your team members, you become more trustworthy and they will work towards the tasks and endeavors you have placed before them with greater participation. Remember that our soft skills open the doors where we can be of greater service to our team, our business, and also our organization. So, once again, practice humility, practice gratitude, and always be people focused. When they notice that about you, it shows a great human trait that you're willing and able to adjust to those environments where your focus on team wins and not only on promoting uh your position or your image or taking credit for others' hard work. My second piece of advice for acquiring soft skills is to develop interpersonal skills with your team. Ashish Patella has an amazing quote that says, be yourself. Don't try to fabricate your personality in this in guise of impressing others or in disguise of impressing others. If you alienate yourself because you think that you're the smartest, that you're the most gifted and the most talented person in the room, you will have serious difficulties implementing change and being accepted. So in a nutshell, stop pretending, stop disguising, stop the technical masquerade, and just be yourself. Help others, be transparent. When you know something, you know something. When you don't know something, ask for advice, ask for collaboration, learn how to delegate because at the end of the day, it's all about organizational win, nonprofit wins. So be yourself, do not alienate yourself thinking that you are uh the smartest, that you are the most gifted and the most talented. If you have a closed door policy with uh a my way or the highway type of mentality, no one will trust you enough to share personal information with you. Developing your interpersonal skills allows you to engage in active listening. It allows you to engage in bilateral conversation with people, and it also grants you permission to hone in on your team member strength and on their weaknesses. So when you're doing that SWOT analysis, your strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats on your soft skills, you have to evaluate what are these opportunities that I have on a personal basis? What are what is it that how are people reacting to to my conversations or to my persona on a yearly basis? Do they feel that I am welcoming? Do they feel that I'm engaging? Do they feel that I am not uh a person that uh uh is condescending or is trying to belittle others? Does your interaction with people uplift them? Do they feel happier? Do they feel more involved? Do they feel that you are listening? Do they feel that you are cooperating? That is why you have to be yourself and you have to develop those important interpersonal skills with your team. So you need to become welcoming. And by becoming welcoming, you make people feel important, you make people feel that they have a voice, that they can contribute with their talents and their abilities. You they feel that within the group that they they can honestly come to you with maybe a constructive criticism, maybe with a different viewpoint, and they know that at least their information will be taken into consideration. My third advice for developing soft skills is to allow yourself to adapt to new situations. Allow yourself to adapt to new situations. Think about an A D corrective action or a corrective action. So imagine that you have a group of people in a conference room. They're they have tech different technical backgrounds. You probably brought brought a lead operator, a plant manager, uh somebody from the laboratory, maybe somebody from supply chain, andor any other department. So you have people with different skill sets, different titles, different roles and responsibilities within the organization, and you're going to implement a corrective action based on a customer complaint. So these different individuals are going to have a different perspective on what could potentially be causing the problem, right? That's why you do what's called a fishbone analysis, uh fishbone diagram, a 5Y, andor any other uh uh root cause analysis technique. But the point here is that you have people with different perspectives, with different uh viewpoints that can contribute with an idea that's outside of the box or a solution that's outside of the box and hopefully not costly. So you have to, as a as a leader practicing soft skills, you have to communicate calmly and respectfully, right? You have to give everybody an opportunity to be heard, to put that sticky note on the dry erase board or on the on the wall as you are attempting to find the culprit of what's causing the failure mode. You have to also have active listening, you have to listen carefully. Carefully to your employees and understand their viewpoints and their concerns. You have to show empathy when and where needed. You have to be facilitating a solution, creating an atmosphere where everyone is engaged. And you have to be able to understand that there will be disagreements. But that doesn't mean that hostility has to arise. Simply that if someone else has a different opinion, has a different perspective, and we're there in the room simply collecting information to get to that root cause. So when you practice effective communication, effective emotional intelligence, and conflict conflict resolution skills, you'll notice that everyone is more engaged because they're more eager to place uh different uh failure modes on the sticky board or on the sticky note and the dry erase board, and they're more engaged and so forth because everyone is working toward finding that culprit and finding a solution that will prevent and or eliminate that failure mode. So, you know, you you cannot enter being judgmental, you cannot enter that session or that activity being the only voice in the room. You have to enhance your soft skills and your interpersonal skills. You know, often people see and judge things from their own grandfather's perspective. And what do I mean by this? Is that you know, tribal knowledge. People have been in organizations for five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, right? And they they'll say, I've seen it all, and I've heard it all, and I've and there's nothing that um I haven't seen or heard or or participated in. But those are the individuals that also need to provide this new generation with the opportunity to troubleshoot and the have delegated authority to bring new solutions to the table. So many times these grandfathered employees uh they resist change because they fear being left behind for whatever reason. However, in order to attain a team win, you must become a team player. This is worth repeating. In order to attain a team win, you must become a team player. If you desire to increase your scope of influence, you must lower your guard by becoming more flexible in understanding your team's overall needs. The um Steve Wang, who served as a uh lecturer at Harvard Law School, said something that was very impactful as I was researching this topic of soft skills, and one of the quotes that uh stayed uh in my heart, in my mind, says as following. It says, No matter what job you have in life, your success will be determined five percent by your academic credentials, fifteen percent by your professional experience, and eighty percent by your communication skills. Isn't that impressive? When you start to think about five percent of your academic credentials, that's uh that's your diploma, certifications, all those beautiful things we love to hang on the walls or promote through our our social media platforms. 15% by your professional experience. So think if you if you've been on the job for 20, 20 years, 15 years, and and you know the process and and you know the machines and and you know the the systems and you know the software, that's only 15% of your professional experience. However, 80% comes from your communication skills. So you may have all the knowledge, all the know-how, uh, all the insights, but if you are unable to communicate effectively, there are going to be some serious, serious setbacks. So that in itself uh was an eye-opener for me. I had to conduct an introspective examination because I have to ask myself, and hopefully you are asking yourself, am I communicating effectively? Is my message being comprehended? Are my uh instructions or work instructions or my directives or the action items that I have uh employed or delegated, are are they fully understood? Is is my attitude getting in the way? Is my gestures, my facial gestures getting in the way? Is my mannerism getting in the way? Is my ego, is my uh whether it be arrogance or or something else getting in the way? So we must evaluate whether we are communicating effectively because that is a large part of what we do day in, day out with our customers, with our suppliers, with our co-workers, with our peers, with our superiors. It's all about our communication skills. So adapting to new challenges allows the spirit of creativity to flourish and ultimately help you achieve your organizational goals. So let me summarize this by saying that the first advice that I provided you in this episode is to practice humility and gratitude. Know that you are in a position of service. Know that you were granted an opportunity amongst many candidates. Now you're in that role, you have that responsibility, but that platform is to provide a greater level of service. Remember that you were granted that opportunity to serve your coworkers, to serve your peers. Do this humbly, demonstrating gratitude toward your organization. Remember that you were placed there to serve and to be of value, to have an influence on your team members and amongst every supplier visit, every customer visit, every interaction you have with different levels of your organization, your great communication skills and your great soft skills must be manifested and reflected. My second advice is to develop into personal skills. And by this I mean that you cannot alienate yourself from the group. Remember that you have to allow people to contribute with their talents and with their unique abilities. That's why they were hired. That's why we have different titles and different job functions because everybody brings their subject matter expertise to the table. And as a unit and as a team, as an organization, if we do so, we will win. Last but not least, you have to adapt to new situations. You have to uh allow yourself the opportunity to grow and the opportunity to acquire new skills and new abilities. But you can only do that if you're humble enough to be trained, humble enough to receive constructive criticism, humble enough to say, you know, there's still many areas in my career, in my profession that I can learn from. I'm always learning software, right? That's one of the things that when I come across that I don't know the formula to input uh uh or the graph on how to merge certain graphs, whatnot, you know, I will ask. You know, and and this that's just a simple example, but I can give you many where I'm not a know-it-all. You know, I can't memorize everything. Standards change, uh, supplier quality manuals change, customer-specific requirements change, uh once again, the technical data sheets and and or any other information, blueprints, uh you name it. There's a lot of change in the industry, and we're constantly learning, we're constantly researching, we're constantly asking for guidance. So we have to allow ourselves the opportunity to learn new skills, to learn new abilities that are brought uh about from our peers. They are the bridge to our new education, and when we learn those skills, we are more efficient in the workplace. Leadership depends on a lot of people's skills. Good leaders know how to encourage their team, know how to use those soft skills, they know to how to handle disagreements, give helpful feedback, and build trust among their group. Without soft skills, even someone who is highly knowledgeable or technically skilled may struggle to inspire or guide their team effectively, and that's a very buzzword right there. We need to be influential, we need to be inspirational. But if we do not have soft skills and we simply want to rub our hard skills on people, and I've done this and I have so many degrees and I have so many titles and in this organization, I used to be this and I used to be that, and look what I've done, and it's all about you being the center of it all, of your own universe, then that's not practicing effective soft skills. So allow yourself the opportunity to see things from a different perspective because ultimately you want the team to win and to succeed. You want to see others flourish, you want to see others achieve their career goals and aspirations. So if you want your organization to achieve its goals and its objectives, and if you want them to achieve all these beautiful aspirations, apply these three soft skills that I have enumerated in this episode and enhance your skills portfolio, and you'll have the opportunity to flourish and grow with all your peers and all your organizations, and I assure you that the future looks bright and looks successful. So, this is Daniel. I will see you in the next episode. Have a great week.