How many of us have heard that “soft skills”, “communication”, “teamwork” and the like are “critical”, “the most important thing”, or “just as important as your technical skills”? Or perhaps from management you’ve heard that “people are our most important resource”, “we want everyone to flourish”, and “bring your whole self to work”? I suspect nearly all of us. Now, look around and count up all the time your peers, management, and company spends having well informed discussion and training on skills really meant to address/advance these goals. I bet that number is much smaller than you’d expect for something that is “the most important thing”. So, why the disconnect and what would we do if we actually wanted this to be true? My thoughts around these questions are what I’ll be discussing in this “Interpersonal Skills” series.

Interpersonal Skills

Before I get into the nature of the disconnect between what is said about and what is done about interpersonal skills, let me define what I mean by the term. In some respects the meaning is self-evident: the abilities and practices (skills) used when people are working together (interpersonal). Straightforward, right? Where I believe things get difficult is that when we think “skills” we think of things which can be learnt and trained. However, when we think of the things that are hard when working with others (e.g., trust, empathy, grace, vulnerability, cognitive biases) we often don’t think of those as trainable/practicable - you either have it or you don’t. This is incorrect. The entire fields of psychology and sociology exist to study these traits and help inform our practice of these skills. And the rest of this series of posts will be my thoughts on these topics.

Why The Disconnect?

So, getting back to the topic at hand, why the disconnect between what companies say and what they do in the area of interpersonal skills? I think the unfortunate truth is simply that they don’t, in actuality, care. A more generous view may be that they want to care but it’s so far down on the list that it gets effectively no attention. If your company, for example, has individuals attend maybe a personality survey^* class, maybe one or two “how to manage people” classes, and does a “how are you feeling” survey once or twice a year then I think it falls into this camp. But for the sake of discussion lets assume that the company suddenly does want to take the idea of interpersonal skills improvement seriously. What might get in the way of that?

Probably the first thing is going to be ignorance; outside a psychologist’s office these skills just aren’t discussed that much. I’m not an anthropologist with some broad knowledge on cultures but it’s definitely clear to me that in “western culture” talking about “touchy-feely stuff” is viewed poorly. So, when individuals, groups, companies want to have such conversations they don’t even know where to start. And the discomfort compounds as you go up the chain. An individual doesn’t know where to start for themselves but as a manager they may be asked to do it for a group. A group of managers doesn’t know where to start for their own group but they need to figure it out for a department. And so on. Each layer adding another helping of discomfort onto the people who need to participate.

This blind-leading-the-blind situation gives way to the next thing: fear of being seen as a hypocrite or uneducated. People, generally, know that they don’t always act like they themselves would wish or how they would want others to act. If we are then asked to train others in a particular skill (e.g., trust, empathy) we might fear that someone will either call us out on one of the times we fell short or ask us a question we just aren’t prepared to answer. This adds yet more discomfort to the pile.

Another, related, issue might be that some of the things you would need to talk about touch on some areas in your life that are particularly difficult for you. Perhaps you’re a manager and want to talk to your team about conflict resolution but in your personal life you had a blow up with a child, sibling, or parent that has kept you estranged from them for years. “What if I’m talking to my team and these painful memories come up and it shows?”, you might think to yourself. All of these things, and more, can lead people and, through them, groups and companies to just want to walk away from working on these skills in a meaningful manner.

Are Such Skills Actually Important

So, given the above I think a valid question to ask would be: should I, my team, my company be spending time and effort on this? I believe the answer is yes. For individuals I think it’s important because it leads to less negative interactions with people and thus less negative interactions in your life. That, in turn, leads to be more well-being. For companies I think it’s important because it leads to better results. Regardless of your views on capitalism, that’s the regime most of the companies we work for are operating under - their job is to offer stuff people want so that they can make the most money for their shareholders. Having the people that make up the company be able to work together in the most efficient and productive manner is good for the bottom line.

If you agree that working on these skills are important then the next question might be: how do I work on and get better at these things? That’s what the rest of the posts in this series are going to be about. The next one will be on how to identify some things you want to work on individually. Subsequent posts will be about my thoughts on specific interpersonal skills, how to work on them individually, and how to work on them in groups.

One More Thing

Those that know me know that I try to be pretty scientifically grounded; if I believe something I want it to be backed up with data whenever possible. As such, in my posts in this series I’ll be referencing the work of various academics and professionals who are generally in the area of psychology and sociology (with a few philosophers thrown in here and there). If you’ve spent even a few hours, over the last decade, looking seriously into these fields you’ll likely have run across something called “the replication crisis”. The TL;DR is that a bunch of experiments have failed to give the same results when tried by other scientists. You can read the section specifically about psychology for some hypotheses about why this might be true.

This “crisis” has been used by some individuals to argue, basically, that all research should be treated as mere opinion and is thus safely ignored. This is, in my own opinion, the wrong take away. Leaving aside the cases of outright fraud, what this crisis says to me is two things. First, we should understand that human behavior is an incredibly complex system composed of a vast number of variables and testing any part of it in isolation is a very difficult task. Second, it then follows that when encountering new material we should critically evaluate the source and think about how we apply/act on what the material purports to tell us.

This critical thinking requirement is another reason why applying this material to ourselves and the groups and companies to which we belong is hard and, I think, neglected. It reminds me of On The Media’s Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook: Fake News Edition. Their checklist applies just as much here as when evaluating the news, in my opinion.

^* Bonus question, if the personality survey they have you take isn’t the Big Five this is another problem indicator. The Big Five is the only personality trait testing that has shown any predictive accuracy (and even then not a whole lot). If you’ve done anything else, next time, the company should save itself some cash and just have you take the first BuzzFeed quiz they can find or just grab the day’s horoscopes and bring it into class.