Soft skills key to innovation

In a recent study West Monroe polled more than 600 HR and recruiting professionals about the importance of soft skills for hiring technology employees and 650 business professionals on how they work with their technology teams.  

The results highlight how soft skills are still often not being nurtured sufficiently amongst IT professionals, leading to suboptimal business performance. 

They identified three main issues that are preventing technology projects from having a bigger business impact:

• Collaboration-based issues
• Under-developed leadership potential
• Lack of training

Ineffective collaboration impacts projects’ efficiency

Over 71 percent of the respondents said that projects were delayed by ineffective collaboration, and over 40 percent said it impacted the quality of the work.

Clear communications, time management, people management and conflict management are all critical factors to any project. Every person within an organisation should master these to achieve your business’ highest potential.

Leadership potential not being emphasised

Almost four in ten HR professionals see leadership as the least important soft skill for technology candidates. This means that technology people’s leadership skills are generally less developed and that they are often not involved in decision making processes.

Technology is rapidly becoming one of the most important areas of any organisation so making sure you have technologists that can take up leadership roles will become ever more important for business success.

Lack of soft skills development

Almost 80% of businesses include soft skills in the performance review of their IT people, yet less than 60% provide any form of training. Businesses are talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

With soft skills being acknowledged as a critical success factor for innovation projects, businesses need to invest more in soft skills training for employees in all teams, from IT to administration.

Risks of falling behind

In a world where technological innovation often equals competitive advantage, businesses cannot afford to stay behind when it comes to soft skills development.

Bad communication, continuous friction, weak leadership, etc. are having a negative impact on your technology projects and hence on your business as a whole.

By putting soft skills at the heart of your training, you are sowing the seeds for an efficient and effective business that is ready to get ahead of the curve.

Thomas Buus Madsen is the COO and co-founder of Bookboon, the world’s largest e-book publisher for employee effectiveness and soft skills. By making its platform incredibly easy to use and only publishing industry-leading experts, Bookboon boasts some of the highest usage rates in the digital learning sector.  

Would you like to read more about the power of soft skills? Download our free eBook.