Are soft skills simply personal attributes you're born with? Can they be learned?
If so, if we identify as bad communicators or weak negotiators, are we just doomed?
If you’re applying for a job or looking to advance your career, you'll need to update your resume to highlight your soft skills. These skills can include problem-solving, leadership, empathy, and communication.
The modern applicant can expect to see some of the usual suspects under the requirements section. If you're looking for a graphic design job, you'll be expected to have fluency in Adobe CS. If you're looking to become an in-house accountant, you can expect that you’ll need to be familiar with Quickbooks or complicated Excel spreadsheets.
What you might not be expecting is the importance of soft skills in the workplace. As healthy company culture becomes increasingly important, hiring managers are taking soft skills directly into account when hiring and promoting employees.
Pro Tip: Here is how to effectively include soft skills in your resume.
Table of Contents
- What Are Soft Skills?
- Work Ethic
- Communication
- Self-Motivation
- Problem-Solving
- Flexibility
- Critical Thinking
- Negotiation
- Creativity
- Empathy
- Time Management
- Organization
- Confidence
What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are also known as people skills, emotional skills, communication skills, and interpersonal skills. Typically, certain soft skills are inherent to a particular person, but soft skills can be learned.
While “hard skills" usually describe technical skills like the knowledge of CSS, a “soft skill” is something less quantifiable. However, soft skills are incredibly important, especially in your alternative office spaces or flexible work environments that are becoming increasingly commonplace.
For example, if a hiring manager is looking for a great Director of Marketing, there are plenty of hard skills that she will need to fulfill. These might include software knowledge, knowledge of paid advertising, a handle on market strategies, and brand strategy.
The 12 Top Soft Skills Needed in the Workplace
Soft skills are often the key to success in the workplace, especially as they relate to working with others and engaging effectively in the workplace with colleagues and in customer-facing roles.
Soft skills are typically adaptable to every workplace and every job function, making them some of the most lucrative transferable skills.
Here are examples of soft skills in the workplace and how these types of skills elevate the performance of every working professional.
1. Work Ethic
We normally herald communication as the most important set of skills in the workplace, but we want to give props to a healthy work ethic. This soft skill is not to be confused with overachieving, overworking, or losing your identity within your job.
Instead, the value of work ethic is an umbrella for other important workplace personality traits, like teamwork, reliability, and honesty.
An employee with a great work ethic keeps an eye on the parameters of their job. When there's a deadline, they can be trusted to meet it—or communicate when they can't (with an amended game plan ready to go, of course).
There is no quick way to success. Careers aren't born overnight. They are filled with hard work, focus, dedication, and a commitment to keeping yourself healthy through the process. Work ethic is important.
2. Communication Skills
Communication soft skills are the tools you use to clearly and effectively converse with others, set expectations, and collaborate on projects.
Communication skills are more than speaking or emailing. This umbrella set of interpersonal skills includes everything from collaboration to active listening.
Good communication skills are absolutely crucial to any successful workplace. As such, it's imperative that leadership masters and demonstrates good behaviors around communication, including nonverbal communication, body language, listening, and understanding.
We wrote much more on the importance of communication soft skills in the workplace and beyond.
3. Self-Motivation Skills
If you're looking for your first remote job, topics around working autonomously are going to come up in the interview process—and in the job itself.
As more organizations slide into fully-remote or flexible setups, self-motivation is an increasingly crucial set of skills to master.
Advice on building self-motivation is not one-size-fits-all. Knowing your greatest motivators requires knowing yourself.
4. Problem-Solving Skills
Even with perfect communication in place, problems always can arise in the workplace. As such, problem-solving dexterity is crucial at work.
Problem-solving skills are a set of soft skills to use in difficult, unexpected, or complicated matters that arise in the workplace. Whether you're an entry-level employee or a C-level executive, problem-solving skills will serve as an attractive asset to any employer.
Problem-solving skills include empathy-based skills like open-mindedness and communication-based skills like listening, creativity, research, and teamwork.
Learn more about problem-solving skills and how they're more than finding a "one-time solution" to one problem.
5. Flexibility
Hey there, we're back to talking about some of the soft skills that are particularly useful in a remote work situation.
Before we get into flexibility as a soft skill, we want to discuss the beauty of boundaries. Sometimes, especially in job descriptions, the word "flexibility" is used to describe a rather toxic situation where an employee is expected to be on-call 24/7.
We are not talking about that kind of flexibility.
We're talking about the type of flexibility that allows employees to use common sense to identify when something might not be working. The kind that allows you to be able to pivot and to welcome unexpected changes as positive, learning-based opportunities.
Flexible employees flawlessly embrace new tasks and challenges open-mindedly and without a big fuss.
Flexibility is patience in the face of problems—like a delayed deadline, an unexpected hiccup, or a colleague unexpectedly needing guidance or assistance.
6. Critical Thinking Skills
Critical thinking is using creativity and foresight to achieve tasks and reach goals in the most efficient ways.
Mastering critical thinking often requires a slowed-down pace, where an employee considers all parties involved and all possible outcomes before making a decision.
One of the best aspects of critical thinkers in the workplace is that they typically welcome change and improvement with open arms. Critical thinking is the key to keeping any workplace at the forefront of all that's happening—or about to happen.
Employers with advanced critical thinking soft skills are like a workplace crystal ball.
7. Negotiation Skills
Ask any two-year-old about negotiation skills and they'll regale you their tales of how they got their daily fruit snacks. Where did we all lose this negotiation energy?
So, no, great negotiation skills don't include a grown person throwing their body on the floor and yelling until they get what they want. However, you don't have to spend top dollar on an MBA to learn better negotiation skills or common negotiation tactics.
Negotiation is a discussion with the objective of reaching an agreement. This discussion involves strategy, persuasion, and give and take to resolve the issue at hand in a way that both parties find adequate.
The goal? All parties arrive at a compromise through a productive, educational conversation—ideally without conflict or tense argument.
Negotiation is a great soft skill because it requires nearly every other soft skill—like communication, understanding, empathy, creativity, and confidence.
You'll negotiate throughout your entire career. While the negotiations may vary in magnitude, you'll have plenty of time to practice and perfect your own negotiation tactics—while remaining true to yourself.
8. Creativity Skills
When you close your eyes and think about creativity, do you see the "before" Rachael Leigh Cook from She's All That—the one with the paint-splattered overalls and (gasp!) glasses?
You can ditch that image. Creativity comes from all places. Yes, graphic designers are often creative. Advertising account managers need to have creativity oozing from their every pore. But, every profession benefits from creativity.
Data Scientists are a great example of folks that use creativity in conjunction with math and analytics to create a job that is more STEAM than STEM. (The extra A is for Art!)
Bringing creativity to your work is a lot like bringing critical thinking or open-mindedness to it. What can be achieved differently? How can I approach this from a different angle? What happens if I try this like this?
Think of creativity at work like looking at your job through a multi-surface prism. How many ways can you see it?
9. Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
Remember how we said that work ethic or communication would be our #1 pick for the most important soft skill in the workplace?
Well, we may want to consider a three-way tie. Empathy, especially today, is of the utmost importance in the workplace.
In fact, without empathy, we're virtually unable to achieve any of the other soft skills we profiled so far. Creativity is basically nonexistent without empathy. Problem-solving is impossible without empathy as its guide. Diversity, inclusivity, and real belonging cannot exist without real empathy.
Empathy is the ability to sense and understand other people’s emotions—even when (and maybe especially so) it feels difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes. Empathy, in the workplace especially, is a superpower.
Empathetic workers can use open-mindedness and understanding to reach conflict resolution. They can give and receive meaningful feedback without blame or defensiveness, respectively.
At the end of the day, empathy is the key to working alongside your boss, your colleagues, your network, your employees, and your customers—all humans who require a humanity-first approach.
10. Time Management
As we live in the age of measurable data, time management can become, well, a bit of an obsession.
If you've ever worked alongside someone who flawlessly completes the same workload as you—only in half the time—you might be interested in developing this skill.
Like motivation, mastering time management skills requires knowing yourself, how you work, what boundaries to establish, when you're the most productive, and what you can bear to lose in order to move swiftly.
11. Organization
Have you ever opened the doors of a closet belonging to someone who is truly organized? It's a sight to behold.
The workplace equivalent might be an immaculate desktop with a folder that unfurls the most organized system of folders and files.
Great organization skills simply make it easier to take care of business. It's always knowing where things are because they're impeccably labeled and filed. It's having a work schedule in place that makes it nearly impossible to miss a beat.
Organization is an especially attractive skill in project management and data management roles.
Another huge benefit or organization? It allows any employee to CYA —to ensure that they are always meeting (and potentially exceeding) responsibilities.
Some organization items to work on can include:
- Communication
- Project management
- Timeline management
- Physical organization
- Digital organization
12. Confidence
Finally, the beautiful bow atop every crucial workplace soft skill is confidence. In fact, confidence is the key to believing that you can build any (and every!) soft skill out there.
Some confidence is inborn, but confidence can be built. In fact, there are proven methods to help you build your confidence from the ground up.
Confidence will always ebb and flow—it's simply a symptom of being human—but it can always be built, brick by brick.
If you're looking to build up your confidence starting right now, here are a few ideas:
- Practice positive mantras—and repeat them often.
- Identify and root out negative self-talk.
- Learn new skills—and teach them to others.
- Give your confidence a good crunch (you'll see what we mean).
