Communications Ain't No F**N Soft Skill

The Swear Jar

The verdict is in: Every survey asking leaders which skills they consider essential to success and/or growth sees “communications skills” called out in the top five responses --- and often, within the top three.

And yet, organizations all too often neglect, minimize or worse, discredit communications skills. Contributing to this unfortunate reality is the branding of communications as “soft skills”. So, Elizabeth and I unpack the “soft skills” label and identify actions that communications professionals can take to essentially re-brand communications.

Hey, if you’re not sure if this is happening in your organization, here are three questions that can help you determine --- and demonstrate to your supervisors --- whether communications skills are getting the attention they need to meet their demand for great communicators:

· Is the request for great communications skills from job seekers relegated to the “nice to have” section in your company’s job descriptions?

· Are communications skills omitted from the performance evaluation of leaders and/or front-line managers?

· Is the budget for building communications skills limited to preparing PowerPoint presentations and/or speaking publicly?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should listen to this episode of The Swear Jar podcast where we tackle something that is both a contributing cause, and a symptom of, communications skills being considered an organizational after-thought.

Specifically, Elizabeth and I go head-to-head to tackle the labelling, and perception, of communications as a “soft skill”. While we may not agree wholly on this topic, during our lively discussion, we provide some practical suggestions that you can take if communications is getting short-changed in your organization.

Topics we touched upon include:

• The Communications Fallacy
• The Practice of Excuse and Evasion
• Getting away from the hard vs soft discussion
• Expanding/redefining communications