What are interpersonal skills? What are the skills every leader should have in order to be a leader? getting the most out of it of your valuable staff? These are the two big questions that we look at in depth in today's article. Will you join us?
The words interpersonal skills They appear in a multitude of articles and forums on productivity, leadership, performance... But what exactly are these skills? Let's clarify.
We define interpersonal skills as that capacity that has a person of interacting with other people. When considered in a corporate and leadership context, we would say a professional has interpersonal skills when they are able to interacting effectively and efficiently with the rest of economic actors: other managers, their own employees, their direct or indirect clients, their suppliers, etc.
Have interpersonal skills are vital for any manager who leads human teams for a very simple reason: that ability to relate is fundamental for Improve internal communication and, therefore, get employees to feel comfortable, safe, motivated, and happy. The result of improving our interpersonal skills? Making employees more effective, productive, and profitable.
There are many interpersonal skills, but there are some particularly important ones since the point of view of the leadership, competitiveness and productivity. These “vital” skills or capacities would be self-knowledge and, above all, empathy. Let's look at them in detail.
If we don't know ourselves, our personal and professional motivations, our limitations, our deepest desires, our communication skills and, of course, our emotional deficiencies We will hardly manage to convince, persuade, seduce, and “win over.”.
Thus, the first interpersonal skill to improve is actually a “personal” skill: the ability to Step out of our comfort zone for some self-reflection realistic portrayal of our personality as assertive, effective, and empathetic leaders.
The second of the interpersonal skills every leader should have it's called empathy and it is, according to RAE, the “ability to identify with someone and share their feelings”.
A manager who is unable to understand their employees, their needs, their problems or their demands will be completely incapable of seducing them, to convince them and get them committed to the group's economic objectives.
The problem is that Some people are more and less empathetic than others., women and men who are born with the ability to put themselves in the place of their interlocutor and others who, on the other hand, are absolutely incapable of doing so. That is the flip side of the coin. The upside is that Empathy is a social skill And as such, it can be improved with practice.
A few tips to improve our ability to identify with the feelings, opinions and emotions of our employees:
Control your own body language. The way you are sitting, the direction of your gaze, the posture of your hands... it says a lot about your ability to listen actively and react emotionally to the message you are hearing. Practice open body language and let the message flow unhindered, and you will gradually begin to feel emotions similar to those of the person in front of you.
