Samhita Jayanti and Jamie Kosmar discuss the importance of soft skills in life. What are soft skills? Why are they important? Can they be learned? Soft skills are important in both professional and personal life. Learn about the research and evidence on why these skills are critical to how we interact with people and build relationships. This eye-opening episode will inform, challenge and help you identify areas for your own learning and development.
Episode Transcript:
Samhaita Jayanti [00:00:03] Welcome to Idea Mixed Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve your personal and professional goals. Faster. Hi, it’s Sam Jayanti, co-founder and CEO of ideamix coaching. Coaching has played an important role in my life. It’s helped me through my journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. ideamix coaches, help you increase your self-awareness, improve your problem solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals. All things I’m grateful to have learned and done through my own coaching journey are easy. One minute assessment matches you with an ideamix coach that best fits your needs and values. Each ideamix coaches vetted and experienced. It helps clients map and achieve their wellness, professional, and business goals. If you or someone you know could benefit from coaching, visit our website at www.theideamix.com we also know that not everyone can invest in coaching right now, and that’s why we provide free coaching in our Coach Shorts episodes. If you think someone you know would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Welcome to this episode of the ideamix podcast. We’re excited today to be chatting about soft skills, what they are, why they’re important, how people develop them, and why they’re increasingly relevant for each individual at every stage of their lives.
Jamie Kosmar [00:01:34] Okay. Shall we get started?
Samhaita Jayanti [00:01:36] Let’s dive in.
Jamie Kosmar [00:01:38] So, our first question is, to sort of lay the landscape. I always like to start with a definition of how we’re thinking about these things. So let’s discuss what what are soft skills?
Samhaita Jayanti [00:01:53] I think two words that are core to the idea of soft skills, in my view. And I think this shows up a lot in the research as well, are empathy and persuasion. Right. And when you think of anybody in an interactive context, you know, definitely at work, but just in life in general, if we’re not able to exhibit those two qualities of being able to connect with other people, relate to what they’re actually telling us, the empathy piece, and if we’re not able to persuade them as to our point of view or to do something that we want them to do, it’s pretty hard to navigate the world without those two qualities.
Jamie Kosmar [00:02:44] Yeah. It’s the way basically those are very critical skills for how we interact with other people. I also like to maybe broaden our definition a little bit. And it’s also about how we self-manage in the sense of in order to be able to practice empathy, we have to also be able to identify what feelings we feel in a situation and how then we respond or don’t respond to a certain situation or, certain behavior pattern of somebody else.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:03:28] I think that’s a great point, right? This sort of idea of self-awareness and being able to unpack and understand and analyze our own thought process and reactions to understand how we’re feeling, what we’re feeling, or why we’re doing what we’re doing.
Jamie Kosmar [00:03:47] Yeah absolutely. And I think it’s really you know obviously if you reading in the literature out there, soft skills can cover a much broader array of what people talk about communication and leadership and collaboration. You know all basically skills in the way we think of them. Where as you’re saying, empathy, persuasion and self-management are critical to how how they unfold. Basically. But, you know, I always like to differentiate skills from, you know, okay, these are soft skills, what is not a soft skill. So we think of, maybe a software developer or doing programing, for example. That is not a soft skill, right? You can probably take an online course and learn kind of program or learning a foreign language. You know, you’re learning a vocabulary, you’re learning phrases, you’re learning very concrete information.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:04:43] Technical knowledge.
Jamie Kosmar [00:04:43] Yes. Exactly. Yeah. That doesn’t need change, but not really. Whereas soft skills require a level of adaptive behavior, to the situation.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:04:56] Totally, totally agree with you. I mean, the analogy, it’s sort of brought up in my mind Jamie as you were explaining this idea is why do we, as parents, encourage our children to play a team sport? One of the reasons is that it forces them to develop these skills of empathy and persuasion, right? Because without the ability to communicate effectively with, relate to, work collaboratively with the other members of that team, the you know, their skills don’t become better. The game doesn’t work as well. The team doesn’t win there’s so many knock on effects. And similarly, in in a professional context, the most valuable work in organizations and so much of the business research bears this out happens in teams. It does not happen with single individuals, right? Of course, they’re very talented single individuals. But the really valuable work in a in a business endeavor happens when teams come together and then learn to do something very well.
Jamie Kosmar [00:06:12] And collaborate. Yeah. To solve a problem. Rise to the challenge. Whatever it is that you’re trying to solve. Yeah. And I think, I think that really gets at sort of why our soft skills now increasingly more important. And then in fact in the, at the in the there’s a World Economic Forum labor report about, you know, what are the most in-demand skills for the workforce for 2025. And we see soft skills showing up in many of the top 15 that they that they have identified, you know, adaptability, flexibility, you know, creative thinking, problem solving, communication, you know, all these things that, you know, typically when you are a student in a traditional school environment or even at university, you’re not necessarily learning.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:07:09] So that’s a great question. Do we feel our educational system teaches these soft skills?
Jamie Kosmar [00:07:19] I, I mean, no, I know I would land on no.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:07:23] I like that very much.
Jamie Kosmar [00:07:24] I would land on no here and you know, the moral the the I have understood the world of coaching and the benefits of coaching. And, you know, it’s clear to me that there is this gap in what we call education around what we say we value and then what we actually then, ask our students to do in a traditional school environment. And, you know, I mean, I think this gets at sort of one of the challenges with soft skills is how do you measure them? So in a traditional academic environment, you know, we’ve got test kids get scores. They can they can know how much knowledge of X, Y, and Z they have by how they performed on a quiz or on tests. But then how do you measure how much empathy a child has? I mean, I don’t know, I don’t have an answer to that.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:08:20] So maybe the contrast, which is interesting, is that in a professional context and in the world of coaching, in much of the work that we do, we use a series of assessment tools, whether that’s 360’s, whether it’s assessments that that focus on emotional intelligence, that are a framework for helping to measure or at least develop some quantifiable barometer of a person’s soft skills, right relative to their peers, relative to their team, relative to similar individuals, and in that kind of role. And that’s deeply useful, right, in an academic context. We never measure those things, right? We say it all day long that we want our children, you know, to be a certain way and so on. Right. But it’s never rewarded. Right. And when something is neither measured nor concrete concretely rewarded, I think it’s very hard to transmit that it should be near the top of the list in terms of the types of skills that our children are trying to acquire.
Jamie Kosmar [00:09:33] Yeah. Your point about the incentive structure that exist is quite important. And I was listening to this other podcast the other day that talked about how, you know, oftentimes in, organizational psychologists talk about, the awareness behavior gap and the reason why a certain leader may pound the table about doing a certain thing and then not do it themselves is because they’re at the end of the day, there’s no reward in doing it. Which is quite interesting. So that’s a systematic, like systemic problem, right? We have to change that and how we reward people if we want them to actually focus on developing these skills. You know, competition gets rewarded with first place with the, you know, straight A’s with, all this stuff, and then it then gets externalized and people get praised, and you’re smart, you’re this, that, you know, nobody gets praised for being empathetic. Right, right. You don’t ever hear anybody talking about, like, how straight a for empathy, right?
Samhaita Jayanti [00:10:43] Right. It’s just not measured for valuation.
Jamie Kosmar [00:10:45] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There’s no reward system actually, whether it’s in school. And quite frankly, I almost feel in even in the work environment today, you know, people particularly in certain industries, they get paid based on their productivity, right? And their output not on. Did they? Were they a team player? Did they help? Were they collaborative? A lot of organizations just don’t measure that stuff when they’re thinking about bonuses.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:11:17] I think this is why, right in our business, we’ve seen such an increase in the need and demand for coaching at companies because I think, as you were just saying, from from the starting point of, from the lowest kind of entry level job in an organization to the point when someone is actually managing a team, what’s being measured and what’s being rewarded is technical skills, right? In finance, did they build the model right? You know, do they understand the financial complexity of a transaction, whatever that is. And it’s only once an individual is put into a position of managing a team, that then these soft skills come so much to the fore, because now they’re not doing the work themselves, but they’re actually trying to persuade a set of people to do these things in whatever way they want to do them. And if they’re not empathetic towards the members of that team, it’s very hard to get anywhere.
Jamie Kosmar [00:12:26] Yeah, right. Yeah.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:12:27] And I think the other piece is that these skills are absolutely teachable. We built an educational system that is entirely geared to teach technical skills, which totally made sense in a kind of industrializing society. And now in this post-industrial world, we’re still in that old educational system, but in this new world, we’re not focused on teaching these soft skills. So people aren’t coming into the workforce having acquired them. They some of them have them naturally, and that stands them in very good stead. But for the vast majority of people, you know, learning is a lifelong thing and we all need an assist with furthering our learning. That starts with self-awareness and then moves on to development and change.
Jamie Kosmar [00:13:23] Absolutely. I just want I want to go back to the idea of the assessment here and how assessments I think can be really helpful in that development process. You know, I think the way that I think about specific assessments that sort of assess personality in particular and what it looks, what they look at is how do you show up naturally? What is your innate ability in a certain circumstance or in a certain situation? That being said, even if you’re natural ability in a specific situation is X, it does not mean that you can’t learn to bring something else to the table, because in actuality, all of us are made up. We’re very complex, human beings are very complex, and we actually have the capability of, you know, being X in one situation, in Y different situation where we’re actually really reactive in that to situations and people. Yeah. And the whole idea behind these assessments is to say this is where you this is your innate ability. This is where you typically how you typically show up, what you typically do, what you’re typically motivated by. But then it’s like, okay, but certain circumstances require this. So then how can we with a coach practice getting this skill and making this become in these particular circumstances when you need them? How can you help that skill show up? And I the when I think when I think about this I often think about competition is really useful in certain situations. But knowing when competition is appropriate, we don’t teach our kids that. And I feel like you have a lot of kids because we come out of a traditional school school environment where it is super competitive. They just always show up competitive because that’s what they’ve been taught to do, when in fact there are situations where being collaborative is how you’re going to get the best outcome. But we’re not teaching our.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:15:29] Kids that every nail does not require a.
Jamie Kosmar [00:15:31] Hammer. Yeah, exactly.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:15:32] Yeah. I also think there’s a really interesting study. It was a 2020 Yale University study, and what it found was that when leaders of teams, no matter how small or large, are emotionally intelligent, to go back to that empathy and persuasion point, they were number one themselves happier, more innovative, more creative individuals in their work. But number two, that 70% of the team members who worked with those individuals when they were short on emotional intelligence were unhappy and negative about their work. Right. It was. It’s such a sort of cancerous thing that transmits throughout a team when the leader is not able to illustrate and manifest empathy and persuasion in their work. And and I mean, those numbers are sort of fascinating, right?
Jamie Kosmar [00:16:37] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, so much of what happens in terms of soft skill learning now is through mentorship and through modeling. Right, right. And.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:16:50] But that’s very idiosyncratic, right. And not a repeatable system in the way that coaching is.
Jamie Kosmar [00:16:55] Absolutely, absolutely. And then you think in, in a hybrid or remote working environment, how much more challenging that mentorship piece, that modeling piece becomes? Yeah. Because you’re not in the office all the time and there’s not there’s not a lot of sort of natural interactions that you’re right or not replicable. Not happening. Yeah. So I think it’s, you know, we’re going to even we see a much more of a need for leaders who know how who are very, you know, have a very high level of soft skills. Right. And then can translate those soft skills through, you know, video chat. Yeah. And, and to a model where not everybody is in the office all the time. But and you know, I believe you had you’ve always had a little bit of this because we have had global organizations for a while. But not to the extent that we’re seeing now.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:17:51] Yeah. And I think for, for young professionals who have entered the workforce over this last, you know, sort of post-pandemic period, right, or even even before that, when they were in remote and hybrid work environments, which are popular because of the obvious convenience, the lack of those in-person interactions has really hampered their development on this soft skills piece, which is sort of essential. Right? In, in as I was thinking about getting ready for this podcast, Jamie, I came across a woman who’s a futurist and she’s a writer, and she talked about this idea of career durability. And the idea was that if someone does not develop the ability to learn the knowledge, the skills, the mindset that’s required to remain an engaged and productive member of a team, then they sort of hit a wall, right? Because when you’re a young professional and you don’t develop that muscle memory, you are sort of depriving yourself of a resource to enable yourself to adapt to a new job, a new team, a new situation, a crisis, whatever that is. Super interesting.
Jamie Kosmar [00:19:19] I mean, it’s also just think about how much you learn when you approach an individual with curiosity and as each individual having a story behind what you see on the outside, just think about like the growth and learning that comes from those interactions. Right. And you basically if you’re if you don’t have that curiosity and you don’t find the way to connect with people in a team environment, I do think it just stuns your growth effectively as a as a contributing member. I mean, in the reality is, is it is, you know, we’ve become culturally much more specialized, right? There’s a lot of emphasis on specialty, specialty, specialty. But we really still need the bridges to bring the specialties together to actually be solving problems. Right. And that’s where this sort of team mentality and interpersonal skills and collaboration really become valuable, particularly, I think, to organizations. Yeah. I mean, it’s all now, I think I’ve sort of feel like we’ve we’re exhausting the, you know, shipping and production overseas and, you know, where cost is the, you know, we race to the bottom with cost. It’s actually the people and how they function together for organizations that’s going to make a difference.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:20:39] Totally. Well, one of the dirty little secrets of offshoring has been that the process of trying to manage offshore teams has been incredibly hard. The process of trying to train the managers locally who are managing those offshore teams has been incredibly hard, right, and proven expensive, thereby sort of undermining the cost raised to the lowest cost analysis that drove a lot of those decisions. And so, you know, I always feel this is true of so many. Things in life cycle. Beware of the unintended consequences, right? The unintended consequence of a young professional working mostly remotely is the lack of development of these soft skills that come from the people interactions. Yeah, the unintended consequences of the offshoring is, hey, it turns out it’s really hard to manage someone who’s sitting in the Philippines from New York, you know.
Jamie Kosmar [00:21:34] And also has a very completely different cultural context. Right, as well. Right?
Samhaita Jayanti [00:21:39] Totally, totally.
Jamie Kosmar [00:21:41] I find it actually really interesting. You had mentioned, you would read an article by a futurist. Yeah. One of my favorite futurist is, Yuval Harari. Yeah. Who, you know, I’m not sure, for those of you out there, if you’ve read any of his books, but he’s well known for sapiens. Yeah. At homo dais, which actually actually is the one that I read. And, you know, I as we were thinking about the Scott soft skill piece, I remembered, in his book, how he talks about the reason his theory for why humans became dominant was because our ability, the dominant animal, the dominant species. Right, is if because of our ability to collaborate. Right. And, you know, so I think that it really this soft skills piece is really going to be the sort of the, the way to become the dominant companies and get the wins, is to figure out how to put the pieces of people together and make them the center of the organization and the culture.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:22:50] You know, that’s so true. I mean, I, I often when we think and talk about coaching, I always my mind always goes to sports. Right? And when you think about creating, like, I don’t know, a basketball dream team, right. Which do you think performs better? Is it a team comprised of five star players who are all amazing individually, and whatever set of skills are required? Or is the team that has complementary skills, communicates well, and knows how to collaborate the more successful one and time after time, right? The answer is always the more collaborative team and across every sport, in every discipline, this model as well. If we just put a bunch of stars in the room like they’ll get it done has been tried and it’s never actually worked.
Jamie Kosmar [00:23:44] Yeah, I’m actually remembering. I don’t know if you watch Ted Lasso or anybody out there, it’s Ted Lasso, but that’s the ultimate example is how highly criticized he was for not having the technical background of the game. And his whole approach was getting the team to work together as a team, which did bring them to victory. Yeah.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:24:05] Absolutely. Well, I think, maybe as it as an end note, something that’s worth highlighting is there’s a ton of ongoing research on this topic of soft skills. Some of what it’s revealed is that while companies realize that in the recruitment of individuals who are capable of leading teams, soft skills are super important, right? But what hasn’t yet happened is that the recruiting function hasn’t found a data driven, repeatable process in terms of how to recruit these leaders. So much of the work that we do also focuses on this, right? Like how do you make a relative assessment between a few candidates that, on paper are all equally qualified for the job? What is the distinguishing feature? It becomes the soft skills.
Jamie Kosmar [00:25:06] Yes.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:25:06] Time off.
Jamie Kosmar [00:25:06] Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:25:09] And it is possible to get at those soft skills through the variety of, you know, robust industry standard assessment tools that are now out there. And so it’s, you know, we’re very much at the beginning of that process of evolution, I think of companies understanding how to assess soft skills and then recruit based on that.
Jamie Kosmar [00:25:31] Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s just going to be more and more important. So from, you know, having the lay of the landscape is going to be really crucial. Again, for your organizational success. Yeah.
Samhaita Jayanti [00:25:46] Thank you for being with us today.
Narrator [00:25:49] Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave us a review. Find your ideal coach at www.theideamix.com. Special thanks to our producer, Martin Milewski and singer songwriter Doug Allen.