I recently wrote an article for a national association of professionals. It was basically about various techniques for relating with an audience more effectively. I was astonished at the amount of feedback I received from readers. Consistently, they asked me to expound on more ways to connect with customers and clients. Other empirical data leads me to believe that there is a huge amount of need out there for training in, well, don’t know what else to call it, except, social skills.
Now this next item may seem like a non sequitur but it isn’t: I know this guy, a former colleague, and he is just the nicest guy. He never gets upset about anything. But one day I was talking to him about his kids, and he sounded somewhat vexed. I asked him what the problem was, he said, “I’m a little disturbed at how much homework they are giving my kids to do every night.” So I asked him, “how old is the kid, and how much homework?” He replied, she’s in the fourth grade, she’s got four hours of math homework every night.”
Every night? Now have to tell you, I’m not a big fan of homework in general, but between the two above paragraphs, I have had a bit of an epiphany: every moment spent on homework is a moment spent largely alone. And when a kid spends most of his time in structured environments, either a classroom or doing homework, that means they are spending that much less time experimenting and learning the rather complex task of interacting with other people, especiallywith people who have very different points of view. All too often, people fall into socializing with just one type of person, i.e., their family circle and people of similar economic class. They don’t interact with people of different backgrounds.
When I was a kid, I had a slightly different version of this problem: I lived on a farm far away from other kids, so my “social skills” never had a chance to properly develop. When I got to the big city, I had some major catching up to do, so I understand, on a social level, how it feels to be like Helen Keller before the big water pump scene.
Social skills– and by extension, management, sales, and client communication skills– all too often get taken for granted, as though there are a bunch of Ward and June Cleavers out there doing all this automatically. Social skills take practice, and if you’re in class all day and doing homework all night, when is that practice going to happen?
While I find people in upper managerial roles don’t usually have this issue, it is people in the middle– people who had to spend a lot of time learning a specific skill– that got behind in this area, and now they find themselves working in a decompartmentalized, sole proprietor world, where they can’t just be a cog, they have to wear many hats. They can’t function economically with just one single skill; they have to manage, they have to communicate, they have to sell . . . and they’re discovering that they never learned the necessary underlying basic communication skills. The rich kids, who seemed so lazy and were out partying all the time, they understood that having social skills is where the real money is.
One of my favorite consulting books preaches the maxim that “There is ALWAYS a tradeoff,” and when it comes to more homework, well, there are peope who simply assume that the more homework the better, but again . . . if a kid is doing homework, they are not doing social skill development work. Can we afford that imbalance any more?
© Justin Locke
