By Linda O’Connor (linda@bossanovaconsulting.com) and
Andrea Howe (andrea@bossanovaconsulting.com)

In the professional services industries, social skills are paramount to both individual and organizational success. Clients expect us to have expertise in our industry or field –that’s a given. But it’s our ability to collaborate, be a solid team player, manage conflict, and influence others – to name a few – that earns us the “trusted advisor” designation. And as the authors of The Trusted Advisor point out, clients who put us in this category are more likely to call us first when a new opportunity arises, sole-source business to us, listen to us, and take our phone calls ¹.

But do professional services firms know how to develop the social skills that are so critically needed? In our collective experience, the answer is a loud and clear ‘no.’ Historically, training in cognitive skills has been much more effective than training in social skills. At a global technology consulting firm where many BossaNova associates once worked, we saw first-hand how training new liberal arts graduates in computer programming was far easier and produced more immediate returns than attempting to teach experienced consulting staff how to influence their clients!

This begs the question: Why is it so challenging to effectively teach social skills in a way that leads to real behavior change and business results? Because social skills have a large emotional component and the development of emotional intelligence (EI) has been a missing dimension in training efforts. Developing EI is generally not a part of human capital development strategies and cost-effective techniques to build EI are not widely available. Furthermore, EI connotes a “touchy feely” approach so we can expect resistance to it.

This article addresses some of these challenges by showing how to modify common training techniques to create an encouraging culture for EI development and build the core EI competency of emotional self-awareness – an essential pre-requisite for social skill development.

WHERE TRAINING USUALLY FALLS SHORT

Why is it so difficult to teach social skills such as collaboration, influence, and building relationships? One key reason is these skills are “high order skills” that require fundamental capabilities that are rarely the focus of formal, integrated development. Daniel Goleman, in his best seller Working with Emotional Intelligence, presents a framework for understanding the dependence of social skills on more fundamental capabilities. Goleman’s latest framework employs four quadrants of competencies (see Figure A). At its core is emotional self-awareness (upper left quadrant), which supports the ability to manage our emotions (self-management quadrant). Self-awareness also provides the platform for understanding others’ emotions (social awareness quadrant). Both self-management and social awareness are used to manage emotions in others (social skills quadrant). In other words, ease with social skills requires a foundation in the other three quadrants and is emotional in nature.

Consider, as an example, the challenge of teaching a subject matter expert how to be influential with his clients. Traditional influence training might offer techniques for appealing to and aligning with an audience and developing win-win solutions in a collaborative fashion. Great. But here are some examples of what’s missing:

• Without organizational awareness, he may waste effort on influencing the wrong person.
• Without transparency, he may not be able to establish trust.
• Without self-confidence, he may not even attempt to influence despite his newly learned techniques!

7 WAYS TO MORE BANG FOR YOUR TRAINING BUCK

Given that self-awareness is the fundamental building block for developing social skills, we have developed seven cost-effective ways to modify your existing learning curricula for a significantly better ROI. Each technique supports the goal of having participants recognize that emotions affect our own and others’ behavior and to effectively work with those emotions.

1. Stretch out social skills training. Usually social skills training is delievered in intense multi-day sessions. Instead, deliver them in shorter modules that are staggered. End each session with participants identifying 2 or 3 upcoming on-the-job situations where they can practice the learning between sessions. Have them practice, reflect on their experience, and journal their experience and result before returning to the classroom.


2. Deepen role-plays. Role-playing is a common training approach and an effective way of surfacing personal emotional issues that may interfere with participants; ability to apply their learning on-the-job. Modify the debriefs of role-plays to include such questions as:


• What were you thinking as you did this exercise?
• What specific emotions did you feel?
• How did you act?
• Was this effective?


3. Integrate group processes into cognitive skill training. Include group processes such as assigning a problem or case to a group of participants to solve. After the group presents their solution, have each group reflect on the group interactions, their effectiveness and the role of emotions in their interactions and team effectiveness.


4. Require individual reflection. Require participants to reflect on their overall learning experience and journal their key learnings about themselves. Journaling should focus on participants’ personal reactions to the course content.


5. Include structured self-disclosures. Asking each participant to say a few words about how they are at the beginning of a class provides a more relaxed atmosphere for expressing their feelings and also prompt participants to become emotionally aware. Consistently using simple check-ins (and check-outs at the end) for training classes promotes a habit of identifying emotions and their impact on performance.


6. Add practice and reporting. At the conclusion of classes involving social skills, require participants to pick an upcoming on the job situation where they can practice their skills. When travel costs prohibit stretching out social skills training to cover multiple sessions, this is one way to ensure some experiential learning and building of emotional intelligence. Require participants to report on their experience in a short paper that includes reflection on their inner world of feelings and how these feelings affected their performance.


7. Employ action learning with coaching. Action learning provides a way to combine tactical problem solving with more strategic organizational and individual learning. Use a coach (either internal or external) to facilitate the session and do some personal coaching before and between sessions.

Good trainers and coaches are critical to the success of these techniques. They must be emotionally intelligent themselves, understand the principles of EI development and have a facility for working with emotions and creating safe spaces for this work.

These techniques do not constitute an EI program, but they do start building emotional and social awareness. The more participants attend such types of training the more capable they will become at developing emotional intelligence on their own. We also believe that these tactics will help build individual and organizational readiness for more explicit approaches to EI and overcome some of the resistance to the notion that emotions don’t have a role in the workplace. Because emotions are, in fact, the pathway to more productive and profitable client relationships.

¹The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford, is a must for anyone in professional services!