The Invaluable Significance Of Soft Skills To Company

Sometimes we can spend our whole lives studying, preparing and equipping ourselves for the rigors of a competitive work environment and the comforts of a good life. And the pursuit of hard work in academics certainly plays a significant role in accomplishing that. But time and time again, experience tends to show us that all the education and intellectual credentials in the world don’t quite prepare us for dealing with a specific type of situation or a specific individual at a given moment. The nuances of education, string of degrees and depot of knowledge don’t seem to help in navigating through the challenging waters of dealing with people who are as complex as the patterns we see through a kaleidoscope.  And this is where relational or behavioral skills, popularly called ‘soft skills’ come into play. There are several types of soft skills that not only enable better relationships at the workplace but also simply make you a better person overall.

While there are numerous soft skill topics, knowing the fundamentals of how to meet and greet people, engage in a polite discussion with them, follow certain codes of conduct and simply carry oneself in a given social situation, all go a long ways in demonstrating one’s ‘personalization’ abilities but also one’s professionalism at the work place. There are certain fundamental modes of etiquette that are just considered polite, courteous, respectful and professional that makes an employee more personable with his fellow workers. These people are not only easy to work with but are also fun to be around in that their mannerisms are constantly engaged in the harmony and well-being of people around them.

Soft skills can go a long ways in improving the quality of not only the work but also the working environment at any given place. It sets the appropriate tone for working in a professional manner but also cultivates and fosters good habits and behaviors from everyone involved in working together as one cohesive unit. It is no wonder than that companies these days invests so heavily on such professional development training.

Soft skills Training is a crucially important edge that every employee must have in order to function harmoniously alongside their colleagues, While hard skills might enable an employee to get the job it is ultimately their soft skills that equip them to thrive in that job and work alongside their peers.

MMM Training Solutions conducts Soft Skills Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Leadership – The Ability to See Challenges as Opportunities

“Life is really simple but we insist on making it complicated!” -Confucius

A brilliant quote, the efficacy of which I would like to demonstrate further by using two real-life business situations.

Situation 1: A famous cosmetics company in Japan received a complaint from one of its customers that the soapbox he purchased from there was an empty one. Immediately the authorities got together to discuss the origination of the issue. They realised that the problem was with the assembly line the work of which was to transport all the packaged soap boxes to the delivery department. The Management asked their highly qualified technical experts to solve the problem. They worked hard on it and came up with an expensive X ray machine with high resolution monitors. This machine was to be manned by 2 people who would watch all the soapboxes to ensure that none was empty.

At the same time, a small company faced a similar issue. The owner did not have the highly educated and paid engineers. Nor did he have the huge budgets. Faced with these constraints, he devised a simple solution. He bought a powerful industrial electric fan and showed it at the assembly line. All that the fan did was it simple blew the empty soap boxes out of the line.

Situation 2: There is another curious case that happened when NASA started launching astronauts into space. They found that the pens used by them wouldn't work at zero gravity because ink would not move down to the writing surface. To solve this problem, it took them almost a decade and an exorbitant amount. Ultimately they developed a pen that could work at zero gravity and that would write on any surface. However the Russians came up with a simple solution to this complicated problem -they used a pencil instead of a pen.

A key leadership quality of the 21^st century is to be able to see challenges as opportunities and not as constraints. The leadership skill of being able to think ‘out of a box’ is second to none in this fast-paced, competitive world in which the word ‘stagnancy’ is obsolete. 

Leadership Training programs that focus on developing these leadership competencies are greatly sought after by corporates. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts  Leadership Training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad.

Communication Skills Of A Good Leader

Every employee has a story of working with someone who was just a poor communicator. I have my own story too. The person I worked under was, by all polite standards, a mystery. He wasn’t clear about his expectations, his feedback (whether positive or negative) was always vague and his instructions were very arbitrary to say the least. Simply put, he had terrible communication skills. This caused problems in many areas of his job – poor relationships with his subordinates, lack of camaraderie with his peers and animosity with his superiors. Surprisingly his job with the company somehow lasted longer than it should have. Truth eventually won the battle and he was terminated. But his departure left such a huge ‘crater’ of confusion that the entire company revamped its method, mode and policy for communication across the board. In the aftermath, the new communication policy was much clearer than before!

So what type of communication skills should a good leader have? What makes a good communicator? Leaders carry a great deal of responsibility on their shoulders with respect to their job responsibilities, manage production output and quality service, marshalling his or her personnel and resources and all the while keeping the whole process within the satisfactory limits of the company’s watchful gaze. 

Lets look at a few aspects of good communication that a leader should keep in mind: 

1. Leaders with good communication skills must make sure to be very clear about their goals, expectations and vision. 
2. They must give clear and consistent feedback through the whole process of execution so that the required demands of performance or quality are adhered to with minimum margin of error.
3. They communicate any progress or deficiency clearly to higher levels of authority so appropriate decisions can be made accordance with the needs.
4. Lastly, regardless of how the job plays out, they make sure to give ample motivation and inspiration to the team on a job done with excellence, inspiring a spirit of perfection for the next project.

Communication Skills Training is a vital component of enhancing correspondence within the organization regardless of their size or business. Such training programs equip the people that matter with the skills that matter even more. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts communication skills training, corporate training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. 

The Team Building Traits of Outbound Training

Throughout history, great men and sages will tell you that it was at the their darkest and deepest moments in life that they learnt some of their greatest lessons. Sometimes a lifetime worth of lessons can only be learnt through the twists, turns, challenges, and obstacles of life. While certain skills like planning, organizing and scheduling can be taught in a formal or controlled environment, other intangible and more valuable qualities like leadership, character, perseverance and courage can only be learnt through the storms of life that one goes through over a period of time. It is precisely these qualities that outbound training seeks to train people in by simulating experiences in controlled environments albeit natural and slightly unpredictable ones. They can immensely help foster the following:

·         Situational leadership skills rise to the surface. The old adage, ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’ is proven true. outbound training environments create the necessity of having to step up and take charge to cohesively lead the rest.

·         Teamwork and partnering is crucial, as certain situations will bring about challenging situations for anyone to overcome by himself or herself. This helps develop social skills and teamwork.

·         Working cohesively as a unit in such an environment also helps with communication, efficient management of resources and trouble-shooting skills. This of course requires every member of the team to be on the ‘same page’ with a binding vision that unites instead of trying to accomplish things as an individual.

Outbound Training is a valuable program that companies use everyday to help cultivate such intangible traits in their employees that can never be learnt in the safe and cosy environment of a corporate office.

MMM Training Solutions are experts in the filed of outbound training, corporate training, leadership training, leadership skills training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and many more for corporates in India and abroad.

For more information visit us at http://www.mmmts.com/ 

Childlike Curiosity in Leadership

Recently I watched a video on YouTube of a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on ‘Do schools kill creativity?’ The most fascinating part of the talk was a small little story, which he told about a 6 year old restless kid in a drawing lesson. This little kid hardly ever paid attention, but in a drawing lesson she did. The teacher was pretty surprised and went up to her and asked her “What are you drawing?”

“I am drawing a picture of God”, replied the little girl.

A baffled teacher said, “But nobody knows, what God looks like.”

Pat came the reply, “They will, in a minute.”

The little girl had absolutely no fear of being proved wrong. She was trying to do something that not many have done in the past. However she had no qualms of venturing into unexplored paths. In our Leadership Training Program, we encourage our participants to create a path for themselves rather than follow the conventional safe route.

As a child, we are open to new and innovative ideas and risk is seen as an opportunity. As we grow up, we become increasingly risk averse. We start classifying situations as good or bad, possible or impossible prompted by multiple factors - past experiences, fear of failure or complacency. What a tragedy!

When a toddler starts learning to walk, he falls multiple times. Each time he falls down, he picks himself up and starts trying again. He is undeterred by failure or pain. He is driven by instinct to walk. What happens to mankind as we grow up? We lose the ability to see each situation for what it is. No two situations are similar; hence we should have varied approaches for each one. But we start to store our past experiences and use the same approaches to similar situations thus losing our ability to innovate.

“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” ― Walt Disney Company

When we are able to see situation as unique, we are able to generate new passion and novel strategies. This does not mean that we will not experience failures. But mistakes can be our best friend, and failures can be our best teacher. So stay hungry and stay foolish!

I leave you with a quote from Plutarch that magnificently summarizes what I have written: “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.”

The Courtesy of Customer Service

After living in India for nearly 15 years, moving to the West was an eye-opening experience, especially in the field of business and customer service. While India is known and celebrated for many glorious things, unfortunately customer services is not one of them and I’ve experienced more than a decade worth of bad experiences to come to that conclusion. The US was a breath of fresh air in comparison. Businesses would go out of their ways to make customers feel comfortable and cared for here in the West. Mistakes are owned up to and responsibility taken for any errors committed by the business.  Here the customer ultimately called the shots and is truly the ‘king’.

But what is the cause for this disparity? My illustration above might deceivingly give the impression that this is a cultural phenomenon. While culture may be a dynamic it is not the whole picture. It ultimately comes down to an ethical business understanding of customer values. And that has more to do with corporate culture than national culture. Customer experience is a highly valued tenet for businesses and translating that from mere external furnishings and interior decor to one on one relational dynamics is an entirely different enterprise. There are many aspects of customer service that makes a difference to the customer. But the most important of them – Courtesy.

Professional courtesy deals with anticipating the customers’ needs ahead of time, creating a conducive environment that caters to the customer’s shopping experience and servicing the numerous needs of the customer through multiple options. While customers are generally satisfied with the bare minimum that business services offer, the real deal-clincher is when businesses go above and beyond their ‘call of duty’ in order to please the customer or make his life easy. The old adage, “No one cares what you know unless they know that you care”, certainly rings true in the world of business!

Customer Service Training is a specific type of program that businesses these days expect their employees to participate in to train them in appropriate standards of business courtesy that suits the needs of the customer. 
MMM Training Solutions are experts in the field of customer service training, corporate training, leadership skills training, soft skills training, cross cultural training and many more, for corporates in India and abroad. 

The Role of Emotions in a Leader's Life

“Emotional Intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.” – Daniel Goleman

Recently I conducted training on Performance Dialogues for the executive team of a world-renowned pharmaceutical company. As emotions are a key part of our relationship with people, one of key areas that we focus on in this training is on Emotional Intelligence.

The theme for one of the role-plays was a manager giving feedback to a team member about his not-upto-the-mark performance. The team member played the role of a defiant team member. Within minutes they forgot that it was role-play and played out a real life situation. The manager resorted to the style of coercion that he was used to. The team member displayed anger and frustration about not being heard. The role-play was discontinued and feedback was given. The role-play was then rerun and the participants showed dramatic improvement.

At the end of the two-day workshop, one of the key people of the executive team made two significant remarks:  

• Why was there so much emphasis on emotions? 
• Why did we have to do role-plays? 

Emotions are not encouraged nor talked about enough in the work place today.  There is no cohesiveness in a team if there are no emotions. Emotions are not bad. They serve a purpose when used at the right time - for example; fear saves us from dangerous situations. Emotional Intelligence simply means to be intelligent about the use of your emotions.

I leave you with something to ponder about – “How effective do you think the participant is in managing his team?”

Emotional Intelligence Training plays a crucial role in shaping the emotional awareness and understanding in every individual and promotes a sense of confidence and strength within the team. 

MMM Training Solutions conducts emotional intelligence training, corporate training, soft skills training, leadership training, cross cultural training and more for corporates in India and abroad.