Day 10: Core Skills for 21st Century Teams

We are 23 years into the 21st century and lots of things are different in offices and workplaces than in years (and in my case decades) gone past. When I started work in 1986 there were no computers on desks, a few people had green screen terminals and some had an ashtray on their desk.

As new entrants to the workplace we underwent induction training including what was called ‘soft skills’ training. Some of these sessions were particularly effective and are still useful to me to this day.

These Core Skills as I prefer to call them, are the glue which help us to work together, for example communication skills, assertiveness, and influencing skills.

Does this still happen? People are often trained in the detail of their role and might have some systems training, however it appears that they are expected to come to the workplace as fully formed adult human beings.

To add to this challenge, since the pandemic, more and more people are working from home or part time from an office on different days from their peers and so some of these new employees are often left to their own devices without examples to learn from.

In addition, lots of organisations group people by function, call them a team but they do not work together on a shared outcome and people have individual targets. I contend that this makes it difficult to get the right things done and for the organisation to make progress.

What are your Core Skills? How did you learn them?

Over the next several days I will be thinking in the open about this challenge and would love to hear your opinions.

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