I had a request last week to develop a virtual workshop focusing on ‘soft skills’.
As a measure of how far I’ve come in the last few months, the most troubling part of that request was not the concept of delivering a relationship building and difficult conversations workshop virtually. The description of the objectives for the workshop ‘to improve the soft skills of our managers’ was more troubling.
Amusingly, as I type this, even MS Word isn’t happy – it reckons there’s a ‘grammar correction required’ – the dreaded blue squiggly line has appeared under ‘skills’.
With so much focus on technical skills as people progress in their careers and the misnomer of people/relationship/emotional intelligence skills as ‘soft’ – no wonder many people find it challenging to deliver their senior roles where success demands more of the latter and less of the former.
So, I am looking forward to designing and delivering the virtual workshop. It’s just going to be very unlike marshmallow!
