The way you interact with people, how you treat them and how your behaviour is towards them is crucial and determines the results of everything that you do in your life, both in professional workplace as well as in personal life, in every activity and in every relationship that you develop.
These skill sets become the foundations or basic individual skills that you must understand, imbibe and develop for building a successful career or a successful and happy relationships in life.
In every conceivable situation, in each and every stage of your career and each and every day, meeting, interacting and dealing with people is inevitable. These could be your subordinates, they could be younger or junior to you, maybe part of your team, reporting to you or otherwise. They could be senior to you, whom you report to. They could be intrinsic or extrinsic to the organisation and with the increased dependence on remote workplaces, these could be diverse people across geographies, cultures, languages, gender and regions.
These countless types of people and countless types of situations, combine in huge number of permutations and along with complex contextual settings, present themselves to you in uniquely different ways every day and every moment. Whether you are successful in these situations or a desired result for you is achieved, would be dependant on how good your people skills are.
I have seen highly qualified and technically astute employees make a mess of tasks assigned based on poor people skills, organisations and teams failing miserably and repeatedly so, for want of focus on developing these skills. In one of my client firms, one of the Directors was especially very poor at such skills (given the position, being part of the family). The person was in charge of a critical function that was central to the organisations success and they kept on suffering due to his lack of performance. This went on for a few years, till the time at my insistence they brought in a capable deputy Project Manager (de facto in charge) to turn things around.
If you want to create a sustainable organisation and ensure achievement of your organisational objectives, development of people skills in individuals and teams must be inculcated and encouraged at all levels. You could do it through means like activity based training capsules, incorporating appropriate columns in performance evaluation forms, through code of conduct, setting up an honour committee etc. Some of the important components of these skills that I feel are essential for you are shortlisted below:-
Fluency in Verbal Communication – Your ability to clearly articulate and convey your work, opinions and point of view and expectations or while giving accurate feedback etc. In the Indian context and depending on the industry this would be particularly so in English.
Positive Body Language – Correct use of eye contact, gestures, open and balanced stance / posture and correct norms of space and haptics.
Active and Genuine Listening – without bias whether in agreement or not, with positive cues and relevant suggestions and questions.
Empathy and Respect – Every individual, irrespective of level or designation deserves to keep his or her dignity and also to be heard and understood as to what his side of the story is. Respect for other’s time and space demands highest standards of workplace ethics and manners of speech and action. You must exhibit the best standards while demanding the best standards from others as well.
Integrity – as in knowing and always doing the correct and right things in the interest of the organisation including high level of personal honesty and avoid fraudulent / inappropriate activity or behaviour.
Transparency and Fairness. – Avoid playing favourites and maintain transparency in all the dealings through timely and appropriate means of communication. Prepare detailed policies and SOPs for people processes and ensure they are implemented fairly without bias.
Firm but Flexible – Remember people are complex resources where everyone is unique and different and has to be handled accordingly even while you remain firm in implementing policies in a fair manner.
In addition to these some other specialised or enhanced people skills like negotiation (internal or external) conflict resolving skills etc are also important and special training should be organised for concerned individuals and may not be applicable to all employees.
A lot of these people skill components are inherently present in young entry level executives if they have had a decent upbringing. In fact, at the time of recruiting, I’ve always insisted on identifying candidates having those traits that could later enable the individual to develop good people skills. As they join the company, you could assign them under high performing individuals with demonstrated good people skills as role models. The expectations on good people skills could also be included in induction training or part of a formal declared workplace ethics document etc.
Constant monitoring by the HR and immediate reporting mangers, regarding people skills aspect in each individual must be done and remarks on same should be endorsed in a person’s dossier. Specific high performing individuals who are identified as possible pipeline for promotion to managers and further senior echelons, must be given opportunity to further work out these aspects as part of their personal development and even undergo counselling sessions on areas where they would need to work on.
Conversely, if you are ambitious and are keen to reach top echelons in your corporate organisations (or even other government / semi government organisations ) you should understand what these skills entail and internalise what each component means and how you can slowly imbibe and practice these in your daily professional (even personal) lives.