As a business leader, if you’re focused on cultivating hard skills at the expense of soft skills and emotional IQ, you’re doing it wrong.
Identifying employees with the right soft skills is crucial to building a strong talent mix and setting your team up for success, and yet leaders are struggling to find and nurture these skills. In fact, LinkedIn’s 2016 Soft Skills Report found that 61 per cent of Canadian hiring managers feel that the lack of soft skills among candidates limits their company’s productivity.
Beyond compromising morale, there’s a financial risk to neglecting the right skills when building a team: bringing in – and having to let go of – the wrong person can cost you six to nine months of that employee’s salary to replace them, according to a study done by The Society for Human Resource Management. So which skills in particular should you be on the lookout for? Our research found that the most important soft skills for Canadian managers are teamwork, problem-solving and communications.
Here are three reasons why hiring for and cultivating these skills among your employees will pay dividends long-term:
