Stop saying SOFT skills

Empathy in the workplace. I'll show you what it looks like because. And by the way, please stop saying soft skills. We talk about hard skills and there's nothing soft about them. Number one and number two, hard and soft are opposites. And I would hate to think that hard skills and soft skills are working against each other. It's hard skills and human skills. And for somebody to truly perform, I'm going to teach you hard skills, which are the skills you need to do your job. And I'm going to teach you human skills, which are the skills you need to be a better human. And if you can master both of those, you will thrive at this organization.

And I think that we need to double down on those human skills. So what does empathy look like in the workplace? Again, nothing soft about it. Incredibly human. So the old system prior a non empathetic scenario, fairly normal. You walk into someone's office and say your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don't know what's going to happen. That's a fairly normal scenario. Here's what empathy looks like. Your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've talked about this before. Are you okay? What's going on? I'm worried about you.

And the injection of humanity in a human enterprise pays dividends. And this is the thing that's, I think so fascinating about leadership in general is we actually don't know the things that we say or do that actually have an impact, positive or negative, I might add. You know, and they're moments of truth. Like every single one of us has had an experience.

That we've done to someone or someone's done to us that we thought that was so innocuous we didn't even realize it. For example, you know, somebody did that. Somebody asked me how I was, how I was doing. They thought nothing of it, went about their day, and 10 years later, we still carry that gratitude to that person and that loyalty.

And I think we forget, you know, just, just how important. Showing up in our messy, imperfect human way, trying to be a version of our best selves amongst each other every single day. And by the way, all the talents and skills you teach at work about good leadership, the active listening, the how to have difficult conversations, all these things, every single one of those will translate back home. You'll see marriages, the quality of marriages improve. You'll see the quality of relationships between parents and their children improve. Because of the skills that the office is teaching them, how to better interact with clients and colleagues. It's how to interact with human beings. And so all of the companies that I know that teach these skills, the number one feedback they get is, my marriage is better and my relationship with my kids is better.