Soft Skills Rule of 7: No 5. Action
Taking Action—utilizing those soft skills that are self-propelled (Work Ethic, Persistence, Observation)—is one of the more challenging Soft Skill applications. We’re busy people and there’s only so much “oomph” in a day. Why would we waste time taking care of problems before they become problems? Why aren’t we waiting until the house bursts into flames to worry about emergency exits? Why are we answering our own questions?
It can be very difficult to motivate ourselves to do excellent work—to invest time and money and energy—into tasks that provide no immediate emotional payoff. If you write the paper two weeks before it’s due, you “rob” yourself of the high of hitting the send button with 30 seconds until the deadline. What’s more, once we’re in a cycle of putting out the fires, it can be even harder to find the energy to invest in Action Soft Skills.
When you enter your customer’s data into your CRM, do you fill in all the information you have because you never know when it might be relevant? That’s an Action Soft Skill at work! Rather than wait to fix a problem (a useful skill set in its own right), you apply yourself from the beginning.
Are you regularly taking meetings with your individual team members regardless of how they’re doing? Not waiting to reach out to someone until they’re in trouble is an excellent application of Action Soft Skills in a managerial role.
Actions require your internal momentum to propel them forward, prepared for whatever next phase will bring. You build a report so the team can analyze it and build their next plan of attack. You write your draft copy well in advance, so your editor can get you notes that will strengthen the narrative. You plant your garden, but it takes months before the fall harvest. Action items are your good intentioned work toward the future; and the more solidly accomplished, the better the collaborations and harvests that will follow.
...It’s like that scene in Under the Tuscan Sun, when the depressed heroine, on the verge of hopelessness, is told the story of building the Semmering pass:
“...between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come.”
This is what you are doing.
With Action, you are laying the track - piece by piece - with faith that what will follow in communication and collaboration will yield what often seems like the impossible. He’ll plot the course, you’ll lay the track, she’ll build the train, we will pool all our individual talents and resources together and in the end -- scale the mountain to success!