Soft skills

Some soft skills are very important to our career. I’ve chosen three of them to focus on my last cycle: effective communication, facilitation, and collaboration. The goal was to balance technical skills with beliefs that they would impact not only the interactions with the team and other stakeholders but improve the confidence and performance.

1 Effective Communication

This is an important skill for all areas you wish to actuate and can be a support for others skills. That makes possible you pass your message and makes match between what you want to say and what people understand. When these two points converge to the same understanding, then the discussion and results are much more efficient. It is not simply the act of passing information but to create an understanding with good arguments and logic of thought.

You know that you achieve efficiency on it when the audience is engaged and they can remember what you communicate. To achieve that, we have to pay attention to the structure and logic that we create to communicate. The use of stories can be useful for it. As well, coming up with a topic from the point of view of the audience is a good way to catch the attention. To be effective, the individual needs to manage the language and communicate in an easy way to follow. The audience should hear and not process a lot to get the point.

For a presentation or a meeting, we have to think about what and how we want to say and what that audience expects to hear. Furthermore, the presentation or meeting has to be connected with their reality and their language, avoiding translating the meaning or adding ambiguity. The slides must be clean and easy to get information (page number, labels, legends). If the slide doesn’t have value, remove it.

If the message is successfully delivered, received, and understood, then we achieve our goal. The process is simple: Producer sends the message, audience receives it and sends back a reaction.

As a perfect combination, the good message follows the 7 Cs: clear, correct, complete, concrete, concise, consideration, and caution. [5 Game-Changing Communication Hacks You've Never Heard Of!].

In numbers, the communication has this distribution: [7-38-55 Rule]

First impression: 7-20 seconds
Average listening attention: 5 minutes
7-38-55: 7% verbal communication (content), 38% voice (tone), 55% body language

The nonverbal communication involves: sounds, body language, touch, smell, etc. So we have to pay attention to all of these skills: Listening, Speaking, Writing, Presentation, Body Language.

This article shows a simple way to focus on effective communication: Simplify, Focus on Problem, Identify Benefits or Solutions, and Practice Your Pitch [EFFECTIVELY COMMUNICATE COMPLEX INFORMATION]

Here there is a good discussion about other types of communication [What Email, IM, and the Phone Are Each Good For].

2 Facilitation

The facilitation is the process of making something possible or easier. In terms of work context, it is a skill to guide and improve a group of people to collaborate to achieve the outcomes. It engages the participants for discovering and insights. It’s not a presentation where someone talk about one theme to a group. Facilitation involves questions, moderates discussions. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. An effective communication impact directly on that.

The facilitator is someone that support the structure to make the discussion more productive. They can use some structure to organize the toughs:

PREP: Point | Reason | Example | Point
PER: Point | Example | Relevance
What | So What | Now What
Past | Present | Future

Facilitators must plan time-box, guarantee that everyone can be hear, taking notes, assign actions and owner, summarizing the discussion. That person doesn’t need to be an expert of the subject, but understand the process, plan and guide the group to focus on solving the problems. The Facilitator has to pay attention to introduce theirselves and the communication. Every detail can impact: voice (volume, pauses, tone), eye contact, confident posture, inclusive gesture, purposeful movement. Also must be attentive to audience communication. They have to be a good listening, read body language and visual cues. They are focus on encouraging people to collaborate and feel comfortable to discuss. The facilitator is attentive to put participants in the same page. The facilitator achieve their goals when the individuals collaborate, are respectful and they are open to the controversy.

“Facilitators are unbiased and put their egos aside”

In the middle of the audience is possible to identify some types of challenges that the facilitator with good Facilitation skills has to pay attention to overcome: participants that dominate the discussion or that don’t contribute, the participant hesitates that never make a decision or that do a decision without weighting the pos and cons. [7], [8].

Here are Top 11 Skills for a facilitator: 1. You are prepared for anything 2. You know who is in the room 3. You are able to create an inclusive environment 4. You effectively set guidelines 5. You are mastered the Art of giving clear instructions 6. Active listening is a favorite workout 7. You manage the time like a referee 8. You are the facilitation version of Mary Poppins - icebreakers, energizers, and team building activities 9. You are an energy gauger - energizer activities 10. You are flexible and able to adapt on the fly 11. neutral vs with agenda

An important point to raise up here is that there are different style of facilitator. Any of them are right or wrong. The facilitator can be a motivator, or someone that follow steps. The facilitator can be a questioner (listen, analyze, question). You just need to know yourself. Try navigate a bit among them, but be confortable.

Meethings

There are different meetings like daily, retrospective, brainstorming, planning, and they need to be facilitated a bit different to have a better result. For an effective retrospective, for instance, is necessary to have appropriate time to each moment, everyone in the team has to contribute, everyone has to have fun. Also, everyone has to be part of the prioritizing actions and decisions. Everyone has to be in the same page about the reasons and how the actions will be done.

When the facilitator is planning a meeting they must thing in some point: before, begin, divergence and convergence, closing, after.

Before the meeting is necessary to understand the audience, goals, structure it, and schedule it
The beginning is the moment of connection among facilitator, participants and the subject. At this moment they can establishing some trust. Here is the moment to have fun (ice break) and explain rules about the meeting. Should be clear what will happen and show the Agenda is very helpful. Some techniques that can help on this are: IDOARRT, Finger Rules, Parking Lot.
During the meeting is necessary to have attention on time box, cover important itens and review some previous decisions or actions. If it is a meeting of discovery is necessary stimulate the discussions to brings up insights. For that, the facilitator can use resources for it like diagrams, questions. It will stimulate divergences that is very helpful to the discussion. In this point, the facilitator has to bring people to a convergent point. It can be done clustering the ideas and vote, prioritize, or even a matrix of values vs effort / frequency vs impact. Some techniques that can help on this are: Brainwriting, One, Two, Four, SWOT Analysis, Six Thinking Hats, Dot-voting, Start, Stop, Continue, Finger Rules, Parking Lot.
To close the meeting, the facilitator should summarize, remind the actions and owners, and what will happen next. Some techniques that can help on this are: One Breath Feedback, Letter to Myself, Finger Rules, Parking Lot
After meeting, if necessary an Email Summary could be good (depending on the type of audience)

3 Collaboration

The collaboration skill involves work together with others to achieve a common goal. Who is collaborative use to recognize when help and give contribution on discussion of support the work in different ways and level. The collaboration is more effective when all members are available to work together, when all opinion has value, people can see purpose on that discussion, people trust each other and they have sense of responsibility.

The collaborator needs somehow to have a good emotional intelligence to support disagreements and has empathy with different agreement. Also, the individuals has to be the sense the effort to into something will generate results to feel motivated to collaborate.

The collaborator has to have attitude, abilities of observations and explanations. The collaboration is more trustable when people have honesty and competencies. It can be calculated as (Credibility x Reliability x Intimacy) / Self-Interest.

A facilitator can be faced with some challenges to extract the best of the audience when invite wrong people, people is not comfortable to speak, someone dominate the discussion, conflicts, Misunderstanding, people don’t listen and audience feel that opinion has no value, unclear goal, poor planning, distraction.

It's possible to identify three levels of collaboration:

LOW: Uncoordinated action
Medium: Some kind of coordinated individual efforts and process
High: Concerted team effort. All team members work together to achieve the team goal

Here are some examples of tools: DiSC, StrenghtsFinder, Emotional Intelligence, Myers-Briggs, Culture Mapping, Predictive Index, Enneagram Assessment.

Conclusion

Soft skills are a great resource to improve our confidance and performance. It impact directly on the technical skills because your confidance makes you be prepared to challenges and brave to make mistakes.

So, when possible, it's a good practices try to balance our growth with soft and technical skills.