You know what soft skills are and why they are important, but how can you develop your soft skills?
You have attended workshops and seminars and you have read books but you are having trouble applying these skills to the work you do. And that is because soft skills are learnt through experiences.
You don’t learn to ride a bike by watching a video; you learn to ride a bike by riding a bike! Ideally you start with training wheels, and then you fall off, consider what to do differently, and try again. Same for soft skills: you learn to lead and adapt by leading and adapting.
V-teamwork has developed an online simulation where teams can interact with each other in a multi-user gaming environment. This allows teams the unique opportunity to practice real-life situations in a safe immersive environment, where they receive real-time feedback from colleagues and expert coaches.
Users develop soft skills such as communication, collaboration, critical thinking, team work, listening, interaction and problem solving. After using these skills, participants can immediately transfer them to their work.
Have you ever noticed that fundamental teamwork skills, like effective communication, fast collaboration, trust and accountability, are really hard to teach? If you’re the proactive, optimistic type, you might have already gone to great lengths enrolling your team in courses, but find that sooner or later the results wear off and everyone is back to the way they were. Or you might be a bit more skeptical and you’ve decided that teamwork skills can’t be taught anyway.
We’ll let you in on a secret.
They can be taught – in fact we permanently transform clients all the time. Just not in the way you might think.
While we refer to the qualities of good teamwork as skills, they are actually a combination of skills – knowing how to take action, and dispositions – your mindset towards what actions you take.
People are frequently trained in teamwork-related skills, such as how to solve problems or how to take action when they want to build trust. But they are rarely trained in developing the dispositions for effective teamwork, such as a mindset for listening effectively, or an inclination to take the actions that build trust.
Have you ever been to a two-day leadership workshop, got a lot of useful strategies from it, then stopped using them all within a few months? You would have learned some great skills, but without the disposition to use those skills, we can quickly slip back into old ways of doing things quite quickly.
Unfortunately, because of the nature of dispositions, they can’t be taught directly, and so it is impossible to be trained in dispositions at a workshop or regular training program. Dispositions can only be developed through experience.
Over decades of work in the coaching and consulting fields, we have sought out the solution for training people in both the dispositions and skills that produce breakthrough results in their teamwork and leadership. And based on the results of our program, we know we’ve got it right.
People need to engage in these key practices, all of which foster self-awareness: