It’s easy to teach someone how to perform an SEO audit or how to build a Paid Media campaign or how to write a content brief for a copywriter.
Okay, maybe it’s not easy. But it’s relatively easy compared to teaching someone hard skills such as how to give feedback or how to handle a client or stakeholder who is unhappy about their performance.
I think that teaching people these soft skills is just as, if not more, important than the hard skills. Particularly as your team becomes more senior and experienced.
Let’s take a look at how you can do this as a manager.
The two types of knowledge that we learn
One of the first books that I read when I first became a manager was First, Break All The Rules by Marcus Buckingham. In the book, Marcus talks about how there are two broad ways in which we absorb knowledge: factual knowledge and experiential knowledge.
Here is a visual that shows each one and the types of learning that can fall into each one.
To break it down a bit further, we can say that factual knowledge is essentially content and learning methods that are very tangible:
- We read a book.
- We enrol in a course (like this one).
- We watch a video.
You get the idea.
Naturally, we push our teams towards these types of learning because it’s not usually very difficult to find them for their chosen discipline.
Now, if we look at experiential knowledge, the learning methods can include things such as:
- We are put on the spot and asked a hard question during a meeting.
- We lead a meeting with senior stakeholders for the first time.
- We receive a tough (but fair) piece of feedback about our performance.
Immediately, you should see that these learning experiences are nowhere near as tangible as the previous ones. We can’t just sit someone down and tell them to learn the lessons from these experiences.
The thing is, these experiences lead to us building skills such as:
- Developing our active listening skills.
- Becoming more empathetic.
- Increasing our emotional intelligence.
And these skills are just as, if not more important, than the hard skills that we learn with factual knowledge. Particularly when it comes to roles within digital agencies when a big part of someone’s role is to deal with clients, these skills matter more and more as someone becomes more senior.
Why it’s hard to teach soft skills
As touched upon above, soft skills come from experiences, which make them hard to teach consistently. Not to mention, you don’t just “learn” these skills one time. They usually need refinement over time and more experience.
We can visualise the learning curves for each type of knowledge in the following way:
With factual knowledge, it can build very quickly because we can literally sit and absorb books, videos, training etc as quickly as we can. Whereas with experiential learning, it takes longer because when we’re a newbie, we may be exposed to the types of situations and environments where we can do it.
In fact, with lots of soft skills, I’d argue that you’re probably never at a point where you can say you’ve fully mastered them, even when you’ve started to peak and spent lots of time learning them.
For example, I’ve been giving and receiving feedback for close to 20 years, 15 of those as a manager. But I’m still learning each and every time that I give and receive feedback now. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say that I know it all!
If you’re trying to teach your team how to handle a difficult situation with a client or stakeholder, you can’t just tell them how to do it and that’s it. Sure, you can guide and coach them, but these situations can be unpredictable. Even if they do a good job and learn some valuable skills, these may not be fully applicable to the next time that this happens.
Sidenote: this longer learning curve for soft skills can often lead to people becoming frustrated at not being promoted to more senior positions quicker. They don’t always understand that soft skills can’t just be “ticked off” and learned overnight. Even if they do handle a hard situation well and demonstrate their soft skills, you need to see evidence of this on a consistent basis before promoting them – which can naturally take time.
Tactics for teaching soft skills
So, how do we actually teach soft skills? Let’s take a look at a few practical examples of what you can do as a manager to teach these skills.
Expose your team to challenging situations
You need to be very deliberate about exposing your team to situations whereby they can learn these softer skills. I’m not saying that you need to throw them into the deep end! What I’m saying is that even small levels of exposure can help them learn, even if it’s being one of several people involved in a challenging meeting with a client or stakeholder.
Avoid wrapping your team in cotton wool
I’ve made this mistake in the past and protected my team too much. I’ve taken the brunt of a challenging situation, worked through the solution and then brought them into it when things are a bit easier.
This wasn’t good for them at all. My intention was to protect them which is a good thing, but I was overly protective which led to them being held back. Not to mention that it put an unsustainable amount of pressure on me as well!
Proactively look for low-risk situations
Having said the above, you should also ensure that you proactively look for situations where you can expose your team to hard problems that are relatively low risk. This means that even if they struggle a little or need extra support from you, it’s not going to lead to bigger problems.
For example, you wouldn’t want to put your team member into a situation where if they don’t handle it well, you could lose a client or a project could completely fail.
But you should look for smaller, less risky opportunities for them to step up and be there to help them along the way.
Be clear about what you’re coaching them on
When you’re teaching someone something that is naturally quite intangible, you need to provide clarity on what you’re doing. It’s not the same as giving someone a video that shows them how to create an Instagram Ad or send them on a course that teaches them SEO.
With both of these hard skills, it’s pretty obvious what someone is learning.
With soft skills, it may not be as obvious and there may actually be multiple soft skills that someone is learning at the same time.
For example, you could tell someone that you’re going to take them into a meeting with a difficult client so that they can observe how you handle the conversation and how you approach it. This will help them look out for the right things and actively listen to the relevant parts of the conversation that they can learn from.
Don’t jump in with the answers
Finally, when you’re working on difficult problems and you’re trying to help your team learn, there are going to be times when you probably know what the answer is.
When this happens, my best advice is to be quiet! Bite your lip!
Not only are you preventing a learning experience, but if you jump in too quickly with the answers, you’ll end up conditioning your team to rely on you when hard problems arise. So instead of trying to work out the solution for themselves, they’ll just look at you because they know you’ll do it for them.
