Listen carefully, the music has changed

THE LONG briefing session was coming to a close. The director had conducted it in his usual meticulous way. Suddenly he broke off from what he was saying and sighed wearily: "The problem nowadays is that being good at your job isn't good enough anymore. You've also got to let people know that you're good at it."

A glance at the recruitment pages confirms the truth of what he said. A recent survey of job adverts showed that on top of technical skills, just over half were looking for good communication or interpersonal skills from prospective managers.

And in a recent poll of top business leaders in the service sector, people skills - such as inspiring trust, motivating people, and listening - came out top of the list, replacing strategic thinking and entrepreneurial skills which headed the list in a similar survey taken in the 1980's.

The reasons for this are not hard to discover. With strategies going out of date almost before the ink is dry on the paper, senior managers find themselves in the position of dancers who take to the floor just as the music changes. What they need more than anything else is a workforce that can still stay in step. But co-ordinating their movements with those of their employees needs consistent and sustained communication.

Yet survey after survey has revealed a gap between managers' perceptions of the effectiveness of communication in their companies and their employees' perceptions.

One particular area where managers' "soft skills" fail them is in giving personal feedback to employees on their performance. People need information on how they are performing so that they can adapt their approach. Yet weaknesses in performance are often ignored by managers until things boil over. At that stage frustrations which have been slowly building up can erupt, resulting in criticism being given in the worst way. More conflict is generated on the job from inept criticism than from any other source.

Chris Harman, head of human resources with the Independent Television Commission, feels that too often managers avoid dealing with problems directly. "It's very difficult to get managers to give honest feedback. Managers are great at saying everything is going fine in an appraisal. When there is a problem with an individual's performance it often gets ignored until finally it reaches the point where the situation blows up. It's the pussyfoot and sledgehammer approach."

British managers seem to prefer taking a laissez-faire approach to employee relations and to work through negotiation rather than procedures to solve problems - yet they also value the more masculine traits of competition and assertiveness over values which would make negotiation and listening to others easier to achieve.

This means that difficult situations can become explosive, leading to disciplinary actions. Said Mr Harman: "I've seen the situation where you're thinking `Why are we sacking this person?' and then you discover he's been causing problems for two years which haven't been addressed and finally it's got to the point where the manager has picked on something and come in really hard."

Ask employees what they are looking for from their managers and the response is invariably the emotion-based values - such as openness, honesty, more trust, more listening. Yet many organisations pay only lip service to the need for soft skills while continuing to place greater value on "hard" technical knowledge.

At Sun Microsystems much of the work is done in project teams, which means there is greater emphasis on getting people to fit into a team where they can co-operate and contribute to both the work and the development of others. Suzanne Lamont, international human resources development manager based at the company's site in Linlithgow, West Lothian, said: "A more mature view is developing where we look for a balance between both the technical and non-technical [soft] skill sets. Increasingly we see evidence that higher value is being placed on the soft skills and that managers appreciate the important part they play in individual, team, and organisational success."

Part of the recruitment process involves exploring with potential employees their interpersonal capabilities, such as how they interact with other people, and how open and how self-aware they are.

"Managers take their responsibilities to communicate with their team much more seriously now. Sun Microsystems works in a team-based way and people are beginning to understand that to work effectively as a team they need to be able to form relationships and be able to work with different people," said Ms Lamont.

Effective soft skills are also important if today's managers want to keep their jobs. One study which examined reasons behind managers being fired discovered that lack of technical proficiency or academic knowledge wasn't behind a single sacking. They were fired for not controlling their emotions, being immature, not responding to change, poor employee relations, and not communicating effectively.

At Sun, training programmes on interpersonal effectiveness are well attended and developing feedback skills is part of the organisational culture. "Our appraisal process is a 360 degree process. Feedback comes in from your manager as well as people who report to you. We have training programmes for managers to help them develop feedback skills." said Ms Lamont.

Mr Harman also feels that training in giving feedback is an important part of learning to be an effective communicator. "Unless you're very skilled at interventions it's very difficult to get another person to see and understand their weaknesses. We try to deal with this through training."

With more organisations becoming loosely structured, with a changing membership, there will be a greater emphasis on emotion-based values, such as communication, to bind them together. So what qualities do good communicators have?

"One manager I worked withdidn't engage at the emotional level but he attended very carefully to what people said. The combination of these two things - being slightly distanced but really listening - produced some excellent results. In essence his ego wasn't standing in the way of the communication process." said Mr Harman.

But managers who are not naturally gifted as communicators can take comfort from the fact that in their employees' eyes their willingness to communicate is more important than their skills in communication. As one employee said of his boss "He's a stiff son-of-a-bitch but at least he's trying."

t The author is lecturer in communication and media at Falkirk College of Further and Higher Education.