Unleash your potential with soft skills

It’s funny how sailing races provide powerful analogies that help better understand today’s challenges to business performance. Take the above picture for example.

To a sailboat, sails are like what the engine is to a car. They provide power and speed, both critical success factors in a race. Sails, however powerful and high-tech, can be made and purchased.

But what will make the real difference is how they are tuned and trimmed, in order to get the most out of the forces acting on them, in function of the weather conditions.

Fine tuning the sails is a subtle art, built on competence and experience, but most of all on an ability to feel, observe, listen and constantly adapt to an environment beyond the sailor’s control.

The soft skills making the difference to business performance are like these subtle sailing skills, turning competence and experience into value.

In business too, talent and technology can be acquired. But what will make the real difference is not just individual qualities or the technology used, it’s the crew or the way an organisation drives the way its members interact, collaborate and ultimately make and execute decisions.

The “soft “or rather “subtle” skills behind successful organisations stem from how things are done in their culture. Developing this culture, based on a leadership which fosters the delegation of authority, where decisions will have the biggest impact on value, favours collective intelligence, by creating a climate of mutual confidence and respect, encourages continuous improvement, by learning from mistakes is key to developing agility, resilience and anticipation, 3 of the most important performance levers.

Contrary to “hard” skills, the mindset, attitudes and behaviours enabling this culture to flourish in an organisation are best grown through practice. A particularly efficient way to learn and embed these practices is through serious games, exposing the participants to situations, in which they will experience how this performance culture influences the outcome of their actions and decisions.

Building on this approach and the integration acceleration capacity of sailing, ALL4ONE consulting has developed a serious game simulating the preparation and participation in a race around the world.  During the game, participants will test their collective intelligence. They will learn to recognise and experience the patterns of effective decision-making and transpose them afterwards in their work environment to measure their impact on the bottom line.

For more info about how this approach can make a difference for your organisation, visit our website or contact [email protected]