Tony Harrington, in 2006, as CEO of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Australia, made an important comment, when accepting the BRW Client Choice Award for best large accounting firm. He said:

"We are hearing from clients that it is not good enough just to be technically proficient. It was good enough 10 years ago and it still is in some professional service firms, but at PWCs you have to be technically proficient and people oriented. The people skills have become just as important."

 

This is true not just for accountants. In recent times, it has become increasingly important for all professional service firms.

In fact, it has become important for all organizations and businesses who want to provide excellent service to their clients. These are also the skills that organizations need to attract and retain talented people.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are the people skills, interpersonal skills and communication skills that enable us

• to motivate and empower our people,
• to engage their commitment, loyalty and enthusiasm,
• to value and appreciate them and therefore bring out the best in them,
• to inspire and build productive and efficient teams,
• to give feed-back that generates increased commitment to your organization and to your peoples' professional development.

They are qualities people develop, as much as they are skills - qualities like self-awareness, emotional intelligence and maturity, resilience, integrity, pro-activity and conflict management, for example.

So who should attend this workshop?

• Leaders, managers, teams leaders, supervisors, co-ordinators,

• People aspiring to leadership and management,

• People in professional service firms,

• People who have been appointed to positions of leadership and management because of their excellent technical skills, but whose soft skills are limiting their ability to lead and manage.

What the workshop aims to do?

• It will talk about why soft skills are so important today and what brought about this change.

• It will show how good soft skills can influence and change organizational culture.

• It will show how good soft skills can impact positively on business outcomes.

• It will give many examples for how individuals and organizations can begin to develop and enhance their soft skills.

• It will highly motivate you to want to take soft skills seriously for your own professional development and to ensure that your organization becomes an employer of choice for talented people.

• It will recommend and explore resources that you can use to further develop your own soft skills - self-assessment, coaching, mentoring, profiling, MasterMind groups, vision and goals groups, professional self-development.

What the workshop won't do? You won't leave the workshop with highly developed soft skills. That takes time and this is only a four hour workshop. It is a starting point, but it will show you where to go next.

When we do not have good technical skills, we can be trained to develop them.

Developing good soft skills is not as easy. How well we communicate and interact with others is very connected to who we are as a person. It has been affected by our upbringing, our socialization, where we fit in our family, our personality, our previous life experiences both personally and professionally, how other people have communicated with us, the people who have shaped our lives, our education, age, sex, race and culture. The workshop will not explore these issues, but it will assist you to discover the significant influences on your career growth and development.

Self-awareness then becomes the first soft skill that both individuals and organizations need to develop. Everything grows from there. The workshop will focus on why self-awareness is so important and why all good leadership and management courses now include it. It will also talk about what happens in our work if we do not have it and how both individuals and organisations can develop or enhance it. It will show how self-awareness highlights the strengths we have to build our professional selves and our organizations, as well as what, within ourselves, is likely to challenge and threaten our professional success.

The workshop will also highlight other key soft skills and talk about why they are important and what we need to do to develop or enhance them in ourselves. Further workshops will be held in the future on the development of these soft skills.

Richard Barrett, whose approach has been a significant influence on the development of the ANZ bank's Breakout program of cultural transformation, has written and spoken extensively on the importance of the "soft stuff".

What has been labeled the "soft stuff" by diehard scientificmanagement theorists is about to become the next arena for corporate change. In the next century, the soft stuff will join ranks with the hard stuff in management theories. Managers and leaders will have to become comfortable discussing their values and behaviours....... - Liberating the Corporate Soul (1998)

That was 1998. Ten years on it is happening and if we are not part of it we are risking much.