Communication as a Top Skill in the Business World
We learn to write in middle school; how to get our own ideas out of our heads and onto the page. In college, we learn to add adjectives and extra words as “fluff” to fill space on the page. By the time we get to our careers, most people are still using the skills that they acquired as younger, less qualified versions of the people they are now.
It’s fine, we may say to ourselves, if we even think about it at all. At this point in our careers, we have the hard skills that we need to accomplish the duties of the job. If we are engineers, we know the specific formulas and theories of the discipline. If we are CEOs or work in large corporations, we know how to crunch numbers, market our specific products, or build lasting connections with clients. These hard skills are the job, not our ability to communicate through writing, so we tell ourselves. Google, however, conducted two research studies that poke some serious holes in what we may be telling ourselves. In fact, the study that Google conducted found that soft skills are more important than the skills specific to the job, with written communication being the number two most important skill.
The article detailing the research and discussing the results explains that, “Cathy N. Davidson, CUNY professor and author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, recently highlighted the research at Google and other studies that stress the importance of ‘soft skills’—communications, equality, generosity, empathy, emotional intelligence, and others—as critical to success in the workplace” (CultureFeed). She basically goes on to explain that while Google initially hired employees through recruiting computer science students with top grades and from top universities, they realized that STEM expertise was the least important quality amongst top employees (The Washington Post).
In fact, the top characteristics have little to do with technical skills, but rather are “soft skills” like
1) Being a good coach
2) Communicating and listening well
3) Possessing insights into others (including others’ different values and points of view)
4) Having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues
5) Being a good critical thinker and problem solver
6) Being able to make connections across complex ideas
Google has gone on to do further research, publishing Project Aristotle in Spring of 2018, and the results further support the importance of soft skills: “‘Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety,’ writes Davidson” (Strauss).
What this research and recruitment initiatives show us is that the job skills aren’t enough. More important to being a part of a successful, team-driven company are the skills that we first learned in middle school and last thought about in college.
Appendance, Inc. understands the integral importance of communication in successful workplaces; we train employees in the habits and strategies that make business writing better.
As writing experts and teachers, we have crafted seminars to help business writers become more effective communicators through specific behaviors and strategies that make the writing process easier, faster, more adaptable, and, most importantly, more effective.
If you want to improve your soft skills, we can help!