How To Develop Non-Technical Skills To Make Your Business Successful

Studying a career is important, there is no doubt about that. Fundamental, I would say. It is practically taken for granted. If you have not completed a degree or have many years of experience behind you, you greatly limit your chances of being successful in a business because you lack the necessary knowledge.

Of course, having a career is not enough if you want to stand out. You should stay up to date and, if possible, periodically take specialized courses, perhaps even a master’s degree.

You are, therefore, a highly qualified professional with a good idea. Unfortunately, like so many highly qualified professionals with good ideas you are going to compete within the market. Your success is by no means assured.

What are Soft Skills?

Just as there are various types of intelligence, there are various types of abilities. We all have in our heads the example of the classic scholar who is terrible at relating to others or that extroverted person who everyone likes but who is very disorganized.

I realized a long time ago that having technical skills is not enough, and that something more was needed. Those skills that we all know are there but it is never very clear what they are or how they are learned.

I’m talking about Soft Skills or management skills, which you have probably started to hear about in recent years and which you will keep in mind if you are reading these lines: personal productivity, the ability to adapt to change or leadership, so fashionable. lately.

There is still some confusion about what a soft skill is, but there is a fairly broad consensus in defining them as skills that are not part of academic training and that allow you to do your work more effectively in several areas :

• Communication skills
• Negotiation skills
• Business analysis and management skills
• Teamwork skills
• Management skills

Do you prefer that a middle manager be technically better than you or have skills that make him or her a good manager? Would you like to have a very capable co-worker with whom it is impossible to talk?

This is why more and more companies are choosing to hire and promote people with better non-technical skills because they make their business stronger. That’s why they make us psychotechnicians in job interviews.

What non-technical skills should you develop?

Within the wide range of skills of this type that exist, from my point of view, the most important are the skills that allow you to relate to others effectively, either as a colleague or as a client/supplier. At the top of my ranking are communication, negotiation, and teamwork skills.

If we have a more managerial or team coordination profile, we must undoubtedly develop our leadership, our ability to resolve conflicts, and our ability to motivate others.

If we have our own business, skills such as basic financial analysis, business vision, or personal productivity are always useful.

How do I acquire a non-technical skill?

As I said, the problem with these skills is that they are not normally taught within the academic field or developed in companies. You are either innately good at relating to others or not, or you are good at negotiating or good luck. We have to look for this training outside the usual channels.

The first way to approach soft skills is by reading. There are a wide variety of books that can help us learn the skills we need, many of them famous, such as the famous Organize Effectively by David Allen or How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. These types of books came out of the self-help section a long time ago and became popular as a form of not only personal development but also business development. Today you will find a wide variety of books related to these topics.

Blogs on this topic have also become popular, many written by true experts in their respective fields. From my point of view, it is an excellent starting point to realize what we need and how we can achieve it before delving deeper into the matter.

The second easy way to develop these skills is to practice on our own. Stop doing what you always do, get out of your comfort zone, and start experimenting with new ways of doing things. It can be something as simple as changing our posture when talking to other people, avoiding saying “no” or “I” when we have a conversation… In any case, it is best to do it after having certain notions of what we should change. It doesn’t hurt to read a couple of books before or after.

The third way is through online training. We have endless resources at our disposal to learn anything we need without leaving our homes. Online courses that are only theoretical are fine, but I never liked them very much and I don’t see the advantages compared to reading. There is the interesting option of receiving training through a webinar or by attending streaming conferences or even business schools. There are also really good online courses that mix theory and practice to develop management skills and that I know give very good results because, in the end, these types of skills need to be trained.

The fourth is by hiring the services of a consultant or attending an in-person course. The advantage of this type of training is that it is very intense and, if it is well planned, it is very interactive and inspiring. The disadvantage is that it is very limited in duration. As long as we can maintain the momentum and not allow what we have learned to fall into oblivion, it is a highly recommended method, although we must complement it with practice and readings.

And where do I start?

Simple: with a sincere desire to improve. We have to be able to examine ourselves and the way we work to see what aspects could work better than they do.

Changing the way we have always done things is scary, it can be uncomfortable and we will not always be convinced that we were doing something wrong before, but it is the only way to become better professionals and, why not say it, better people.