People are at the centre of teams and interaction, which is why, for example, soft skills should actually be called Human Skills. Human Skills enable smart collaborations and effective communication in any situation; you understand different abilities, diverse strengths, and how they work best in different situations. Human Skills at their best are openness and empathy, also continuous learning and experimentation.
Human Skills excel in human contacts
Human Skills are measured by how collaboration really works. If the organization's well-being survey or pulse shows feedback on poor communication, weak management, or difficult collaboration, it is often a sign of a need to urgently strengthen Human Skills.
Human Skills only emerge when people meet people. That's why, for example, in organizations leaning towards siloing, its humans don't even have the opportunity to practice, let alone develop their Human Skills. Unfortunately, this materialized significantly when we were all only working remotely, and it is still important to patch up the consequences.
Four Human Skills
With four fundamental Human Skills, openness, empathy, continuous learning, and experimentation, an organization’s culture enables open communication that considers different types of communicators. This is how the message is understood and even perceived as clear. Communication is also co-created, and is not only one-way, for example from management to staff, but a true dialogue. It is this co-creation and dialogue that strengthen cohesion, team spirit, and thus also an inspiring organizational culture.
The four Human Skills, openness, empathy, continuous learning, and experimentation, sound simple, so why are they so difficult to achieve?
Too often the focus is only on, for example, technical or other expert skills, leaving out team and communication skills. It actually means that expertise is also minimized as it is the team and communication skills that influence how colleagues relate to each other and each other's expertise, how expertise is acquired and made visible, and even how one's own expertise can be promoted within the organization, to create new types of collaboration opportunities.
When communication, culture, and real results are created together, we also better commit to them. Working together enables the teams to get to know each other and to better identify each other's areas of expertise and strengths. This way, everyone's unique talents are also utilized ever more sensibly and sustainably. Working together also creates a desire to participate in joint activities, both in work projects and recreational days.
Where to begin strengthening Human Skills?
The best mindset shift is sustainable, which means that upskilling Human Skills should be promoted in the everyday life of the entire organization. The idea of the importance of human contacts should be integrated as an obvious part of the organizational culture. Here are four things you can do right away to get started:
1. Create a safe environment, demonstrate its existence, and actively communicate about it: Repeat often what your organization's safe environment consists of, what it requires and how personnel are expected to behave in it. For example: openly, empathetically, constantly learning, and through experimenting. In a safe environment, we dare to share our opinions and act according to our own reason without fear of embarrassment or shame. In a safe environment, people feel that their decision-making and operational abilities are trusted and they always have support available when it is needed. Support can come from a manager, a team, or an external party, such as a coach. When everyone feels safe, conversations leading to new ideas emerge, development essential to the company's operations grows, and important risk management is ensured when many perspectives come together.
2. Enable genuine diversity and inclusion by creating opportunities where the entire organization meets itself and departments, teams, and working pairs mix. These can be quarterly meetings, at least summer gatherings and events of the festive season. Joint events expand people’s openness to new inputs, perspectives, opinions, and activities. This openness increases empathy throughout the organization when, for example, the backgrounds of certain operations are understood. This empathy, in turn, helps to learn more and more about other ways of doing things and their backgrounds, which in turn often leads to trying out different ways of doing things. The most effective of these experiments remain and become new operating methods, and thus the organization, its humans, and results have again been taken to a next level.
3. Practice, practice, practice. Offer training, coaching, and well-planned team activities, where people get the opportunity to focus on the team and exchange of ideas.
These conditions provide the basis for learning and improvement and invite you to be continuously aware of your Human Skills and seek out situations where you can continue improving them.
You will improve these skills with our completely new teambuilding program, Human Skills! Teams dig deeper into Human Skills, such as empathy, decision-making, and trust, through introductions by top experts in a GPS-led treasure hunt that offers fantastic team challenges.
4. Encourage you to face challenges. Even a well-functioning organisational machinery faces challenges at some point. Make the most of them! They are great opportunities to encourage staff to face challenges, explore, create solutions, and try them out. In the face of challenges, Human Skills grow on the test track of real life, as challenges are overcome by being open to developing new things, practicing empathy towards different parties, and continuous learning and experimentation in connection with the exploration of solutions. These will yield results and, in the end, overcoming the challenge stronger than ever. Most importantly, humans get to succeed together! Solutions are successes that your team has been able to develop under pressure. Therefore, all solutions are worth celebrating.
We help upskilling humans!
When you want to develop and inspire your teams with top-notch teambuilding, contact us! We plan the content of the activity according to the goals and needs of your event and your team.
You can also find all Catalyst team experiences in our Event Search.
