What is it about?
This article is about the increasingly important set of personal abilities known as soft skills. The primary focus is on how modern change management principles and practices can facilitate the development of soft skills, such as self-awareness, communication, collaboration, and leadership.
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Why is it important?
The article addresses several key questions: What are soft skills? How important are they to success in comparison to hard skills? Why are people who have good soft skills in such short supply? What is the best way to develop soft skills? How can knowledge of change management principles and practices help to facilitate the development of soft skills?
Perspectives
In this increasingly technology-driven era, the availability of individuals with good soft skills continues to decrease at the same time as the need for those skills increases, creating intractable problems that leaders and professionals must address, such as record high levels of employee disengagement and record low rates of project success. Developing soft skills to deal with these problems has become a high priority. Despite this critical focus, the results to date are unsatisfactory. I decided to write this article because I am familiar with these problems and how to develop the necessary soft skills to enable leaders and professionals to solve them as a result of my work over the years in leadership, OD, and change management.
Dr. Robert E. Levasseur
Walden University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: People Skills: Developing Soft Skills—A Change Management Perspective, INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics, December 2013, INFORMS,
DOI: 10.1287/inte.2013.0703.
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