Professional Development - The importance of soft skills

Every year, billions of dollars are spent on professional development and training across various industries.  Training ranges from the development and mastery of hard skills and subject matter expertise to soft skills that support better productivity and create stress-free environments in the workplace. While technical skills across industries are easily assessable, the impact and measurement of soft skills is a relatively hard topic to address. A recent surge in awareness around this area has resulted in research that shows the staggering impacts of soft skills training. Skills such as time-management, problem solving, teamwork, conflict resolution, and communication have a direct impact on a company’s bottom-line by improving teamwork, increasing employee engagement and reducing absenteeism to name a few. More importantly, soft skills are transferable across industries, making the return on investment (ROI) on such training very significant for both the company and the individual learners who invest in it.
 
Let’s begin with a popular example of a soft skill - active listening. Active listening involves paying close attention to a person, people, or event with a view to hearing, interpreting, and understanding the entirety of the message being communicated. Human parity in speech recognition is estimated to be roughly 95% (i.e. a native speakers understand 95 out of every 100 words they hear in that language). I plan to address more about this statistic and it’s impact in relation to Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing  in future blogs. While the human parity number is remarkable, research suggests that we remember only about 25 - 50 percent of what we hear.  What if we were able to increase this percentage ? For a passive task such as watching a movie the additional information gleaned may allow us to better understand the underlying plot or director’s motives. For an active task such as one that involves a discussion among colleagues or teams, we would have more information to process, allowing us craft a better reciprocal response. By increasing the amount of information absorbed and disseminated thoughtfully, we create a feedback cycle that multiplies productivity.

Active listening creates a feedback cycle for productive conversations.

Often, professional development or adult learning around soft skills tends to involve components that are rule-governed. A quick Google search will reveal that behavioral traits such as nodding or shaking your head in agreement, making eye contact, smiling etc. are all recommended to help establish rapport and engage with counterparts during conversation. There is a fundamental problem with this approach. We developed body language and gestures as a means of communication far before the power of speech evolved in us. On one of my visits to meet with Sandy Pentland at MIT (an advisor to us at Mursion), we began discussing how computers through machine learning / deep learning were capable of analyzing human conversation and predicting outcomes. If we think about the purpose of gestures and body language on an evolutionary timeline, we begin to see that they are an attempt by humans at turn-taking. They acknowledge to the other person(s) that the information presented is being absorbed, and specific gestures convey that we are ready to contribute to the conversation. Put in the context of active listening, it follows that these signals are subconscious in nature and are causal i.e. the body language or gestures occur because we are actively listening and not vice versa.
 
Sandy, in his book Honest Signals, presents very powerful scientific and data-driven evidence of how non-verbals can be analyzed to very successfully predict outcomes in human conversation. He goes on to explain how understanding and measuring these “signals” can help create a very successful and productive workforce. Understanding such signals however requires training of the conscious and subconscious mind. And it is only with continuous practice that we begin to build the relevant skills that are necessary for this task. Measuring performance while building soft skills and receiving feedback in the moment are critical aspects that allow positive behavioral change. Both of these are difficult to do in real life, since situations do not lend themselves to scientific measurement and providing constructive/tough feedback in the middle of a conversation (another soft skill !) is not easy to do without practice. It is here that we can harness the power of virtual reality and simulations - the premise of our work at Mursion. If you’re interested in soft skills development, pick up a copy of Honest Signals and come see us at Mursion to see how we create authentic and powerful Virtual Reality simulations for various soft skills and measure human performance to help professionals master their craft.