Technical Skills are Less Effective Without Soft Skills

Source: Practical Accountant

Practical Accountant’s interviews of experts offer some valuable insights such as:

• Why soft skills?
  • People are your most important assets and need to be fully developed. Generations X and Y are particularly short on soft skills.
  • Soft skills are what distinguish one firm from another.
  • If you don’t help your people grow, they will not have the capacity to properly contribute to your bottom line.
  • Without a program to develop soft skills, you will lose talent.
  • Mentoring programs are dependent on soft skills.
  • Because of technology and globalization, people are more interconnected.
  • Soft skills are becoming essential to the growth of the firm. The following, for example, are not inherent in traditional hard skill sets:
    • Ability to keep clients.
    • Enhancing client service.
    • Adding value rather than selling to clients.
• What are soft skills (here are just some)?
  • Building consensus—difficult to do with so many different personalities in the firm such as Generation Xers and Yers.
  • Expanding relationships—with clients and staff.
  • Communicating, including listening.
  • Mentoring.
  • Motivating.
  • Networking.
  • Supervising.
  • Delegating.
  • Leading.
  • Marketing and selling (including proposal writing).
  • Leading meetings.
  • Making presentations.
  • Negotiating.
  • Working in teams.
  • Goal setting.
  • Decision-making.
  • Empathizing.
  • Dealing with conflict.
  • Flexibility or adaptability.
  • Managing time.
  • Knowing how to give feedback.

Firms should hire people with these skills. It is easier to teach technical skills to them than to teach soft-skills to technicians.

But firms should also train their people in these skills. The use of outside training courses, facilitators, and consultants is a must for most small firms.

For the complete article, click here, select the July 20, 2008, issue, and click on the article "Closing the Soft Skills Gap."

Also see the preceding article, "Internal Training Programs That Provide Results: Firm Leaders Share Their Secrets To Success," from Inside Public Accounting, June 2008.

From Practical Accountant, July 2008, SourceMedia Inc., One State Street Plaza, 27th Floor, New York, NY 10004, 800-221-1809.

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