Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinto
I am hardly be influenced by soft skills when it comes to buying stuff. This might be attributed to typical non-skilled german sales personnel. But maybe I am just too technical with such decissions to let emotions influence me.
Of course I am not resistant to the emotions the product itself does trigger in me (for example a beautiful car).
In my regards soft skills are more important in your everyday life and whenever you have to engage in teamwork (be it work or hobby or sport).
People with good soft skills tend to take leader positions more easily, since they can in several ways communicate (verbal and non-verbal) things in a way that make others feel comfortable. This includes among other things, that such people have an aura of authority and decent hard skills.
Interestingly authority is primarily very much dependend on appearances, things that we would regard as rather superficial, like looks, vocal depth/strength/sexiness. Of course those superficial values alone wont work if the soft skills are inadequate, but soft skills alone only get you so far.
Having good soft skills but mediocre appearance you can still be an excellent team player, you are just not likely to gain any leadership position. You would need to have significantly better soft skills when you want to outpace someone with a far better appearance.
The next thing is, that soft skills need be sort of a natural talent (mere theory gets you nowhere since it doesn't communicate convincingly). Of course people with a nice appearance have it easier to socialize since they face smaller starting hurdles when interacting with others, this in turn gives them an adavantage in easily gaining/adapting new soft skills (however, the spectrum here covers the typical range of being a complete asshole to being a saintly socializer).
In school we were taught that primarily your hard skills (marks) decide how successful you are. But even before you leave school you will learn that reality is quite a different thing.
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You brought a point which I have seen rather often working as a part timer in many different jobs - leadership has declined much to a state where softskills have dominated so much that hardskills are lost.
No matter how much a leader can speak and encourage a team about a task, technicalities are still technicalities. "You want to try doing it yourself?" and "Got a plan B if XXX happens to plan A?" has become a more common verbiage as I grow older facing clueless leadership who are great and charismatic talkers, but have no idea how things function down to the last detail, or have absolutely no interest in getting things done qualitatively - just benchmark, benchmark, benchmark.
And they still hawk customer service - sometimes working with such common-function leaders makes me feel glad that the consumer end is made up of largely lazy people or complete idiots who have no idea (or even bother to get one) that they are nothing but fund sources for my next paycheck.
It isn't just about improving the goddamn service, it is about improving the bloody product too - customer relations consist mainly of these two, with the other being beating the crap out of your competitors no-holds barred to make them look uglier.