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 appear in a multitude of articles and forums on productivity, leadership, performance... But what exactly are these skills? Let's clarify it.
We define interpersonal skills as that capacity that has a person of interacting with other people. Taken to the corporate and leadership level, we will say that a professional has interpersonal skills when he/she is capable of interacting effectively and efficiently with the rest of the economic actors: other managers, their own employees, their direct or indirect customers, their suppliers, etc.
Have interpersonal skills are vital for any manager who leads teams for a very simple reason: this relational ability is fundamental to the ability to improving internal communication and, in this way, make employees feel that they can comfortable, confident, 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 abilities would be self-awareness 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 succeed in convincing, persuading, seducing and “falling in love”.
Thus, the first interpersonal skill to be improved is actually a “personal” skill: the ability to to go out of our comfort zone to do a self-analysis We need to be realistic about our personality as assertive, effective and empathetic leaders.
The second of the interpersonal skills that every leader should have it's called empathy and is, according to the RAE, the “ability to identify with someone and share their feelings”.
A manager who is incapable of understanding his employees, their needs, their problems or their demands will be completely incapable of seducing them, convince them and get them to commit 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 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 to react emotionally to the message you are hearing. Practice open body gestures and let the message flow unhindered, and you will see how you will gradually feel emotions similar to those of the person in front of you.
