The Ultimate Skill?

It's easy to miss the most obvious ideas when you're too close to a topic. While working on revising how I present people skills it occurred to me that the "ultimate" people skill can be described very simply as "helping and being helped" by others. When you're hired, essentially "helping" is the job description. Whether your primary role is to help customers, help co-workers, help your boss or suppliers, it's likely all of these come into play. You're hired to help.

The challenge is that adults don't actually like to be helped. They want to be in charge. In fact I often recommend that the best method for disciplinary situations is to tell the person you intend to help them - as in "I am going to help you improve your attendance. I think you need help." You can see that wouldn't be welcome news to most people. In fact, most will say they don't need help of that sort and can do it themselves, which is, of course, exactly what you hope in that situation.

So, how you help and how you offer it is clearly going to be an issue. Lot's of employees see ways they believe they can help their team, their boss or their company, but no one seems interested. This turns off so many people it should be almost a crime for managers to brush off suggestions. The other side is that the idea needs to be "on strategy" which implies that the company needs to have a strategy so it's obvious what's on or off base.

A key job of any manager should be to work with employees and their suggestions to get as many of them as possible "on strategy" and implemented in one form or another. It may well be that the idea has been thought of before and perhaps even tried, but chances are there is some way, some variation that would make it workable and see it adding value. If an employee really wants to help, has ideas and energy to work on them over and above their usual "boring" routine work, it's imperative to help them find ways to take things further. Managers who ignore these ideas will lose the best employees they have, the ones with ideas who want to grow. The best will try variations to get their manager interested, but will eventually pick up and go elsewhere to find some place more willing. The greatest reward is to see our ideas implemented and successful.

So, while helping is the core work skill, finding ways to make use of help is perhaps even more important.