Hey Leaders, How “People Smart” Are You?

Today, I’m writing to all the leaders out there.

We need to be smarter about people . . . people KNOWLEDGE.

And we need to be better with people . . . people SKILLS.

Whatever else we may be good at as leaders—casting a vision, designing strategy, creating a budget, marketing, developing resources, managing projects—if we’re not good with people, in ALL the ways that we need to be, then all that other stuff (important as they are) only gets us so far.

You can be a genius in all the “non-people areas”, but if you’re not good with people, forget it. You’re at a huge competitive disadvantage.

And if your lack of people acumen is big enough, you’ll eventually have high turnover, low morale, a lot of grumbling and gossip, staff reacting out of fear and shrinking in their capacity rather than feeling free to unleash their skills and talents, and so forth.

Not only that, but you won’t be getting the very best from your people, so your company/organization/team will under-perform, operating below its potential.

“All this because of leadership’s deficiency in people skills and knowledge??”  Well, of course there are other factors to organizational/team/employee poor performance, but more often than not the leader’s people skills plays heavily into it.

Whatever your leadership position is, “people smarts” always wins.

Always.

Yet, I’m regularly amazed at what leaders do (though actually, I’m not amazed anymore), presumably in the service of moving their mission forward.

The irony is sad—gifted leaders in so many ways, really wanting to create excellence, but sabotaging their own efforts, tripping over themselves with the decisions they make and the reactions they display (but hey, I know it’s easy to be critical from afar—when you’re the one in the heat of the battle, the battlefield looks different than it does to those on the sidelines).

As a leader, in whatever capacity that may be, your most important skill set, by far, is your people skills.

It’s these “soft skills”, as they’re called, that will move you into another level of functioning and achievement altogether.

It’s always amusing to me when executive leadership scoffs at soft skills.  They obviously haven’t read the research (we’ll come back to this another time).  And wouldn’t you know it, those who protest most loudly against the importance of soft skills are typically the ones who are the worst at them!  Surprise.

We’ve all seen the hyper-left brain “brainiac” who has zero people skills, yet is ironically in charge of a team or a company (. . . of PEOPLE) because of his subject matter expertise or her industry-related skill. And succeed to a degree, they may, because of these strengths.

Yet what outsiders often don’t see (but insiders are well aware of) is how that leader’s lack of people skills really slows things down, at best, and at worst, creates a highly toxic environment, all by themselves, bringing the whole thing crashing down.

Now, if you’re a shepherd leading sheep, then you won’t need people skills—you’ll need sheep skills. 

But if you’re a leader of people, then yeah, those people skills are kind of important.  Another “Captain Obvious” moment.

For all leaders, people skills win:

  • Empathy wins.
  • Listening wins.
  • Assertively expressing your perspective wins (NOT passively or aggressively).
  • Respect wins.
  • Managing conflict skillfully wins.
  • Knowing how to have a difficult conversation wins.
  • Giving clear feedback with the right mix of support and challenge wins.
  • Facilitating teamwork wins.
  • Setting healthy boundaries wins (and respecting OTHER’S boundaries wins).
  • Setting clear expectations wins.
  • Exercising influence and persuasion without being controlling wins.
  • The art of dialogue wins.
  • Communicating vision in a compelling manner wins.
  • Making the complex understandable wins.
  • Being concrete wins.
  • Giving affirmation and validation wins.
  • Infusing your environment with positivity and optimism wins.
  • Telling the truth wins.
  • Giving the facts plainly wins.
  • Good timing wins (saying the right thing at the right time, and holding your tongue when you need to).
  • Creating motivation wins (and knowing what even motivates people).

We’ll be coming back to this. There’s much more for us to chew on.  In the meantime, if you’re a leader (and most of us are in leadership somewhere—e.g., as parents), consider if you have any people skills that need to be fortified and beefed-up.

Go lead, my friends.

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