The Importance of Soft skills in Corporate Life

In the fast changing world that we live in today, soft skills play a pivotal role in generating personal and professional success. No doubt, technical expertise is very important in every job but if you lack in soft skills, you will find it very difficult to climb up the corporate ladder.

The competitive and fast pace nature of our world presents us with very less time to make a lasting impact and generate success. So, communication skills have come to acquire a critical status. Also, we have tight deadlines on our plates that need us to be an expert at multi-tasking and delegating. We all need to understand, that we are all very unique and different and we need to value differences and be effective and efficient team players. All these skills contribute in personal and professional skills.

You need to connect emotionally, be empathetic, and understand others and their paradigms. You should know when to be assertive and when to be submissive; what this means is that we need to be more emotionally intelligent to succeed in life.

Someone rightly said “life is not about accumulation…life is about contribution”. By using niceties, you can make emotional deposits in the hearts and minds of your friends and colleagues, thus increasing and improving your network and your connections.
Simple words like “Sorry” and “Thank You” make a big difference. People might forget what you said to them or about them but they will not forget how you treated them, so it becomes very important to be nice to others , no matter what their status or position. Real leaders lead from the front and know that to succeed one needs to make others succeed as well.

Some years ago, the Times of India decided to supplement the small “i”  for the capital “I” symbolizing a less egoistic, less selfish approach. This is what we need to do in our lives as well. When you help others you are helping yourself too. Inclusiveness can make your life rich and worthwhile.

More than all using soft skills make you feel good about yourself and make others feel good about you as well. So, imbibe these soft skills and make yours and others lives rich and fruitful.

By:

Siddharth Anand

Faculty, INLEAD

Capacity Building in Hospitals: From Knowing to Doing!

Albert Einstein once rightly said, “Education is not the learning of the facts, but the training of the mind to think.” Learning is an ongoing process. One learns with all the experiences and people that they encounter on a daily basis.  The world today is advancing at such a supersonic speed that what was in trend yesterday becomes a stale news tomorrow.  Hence, there’s a continuous needs to innovate and reinvent yourself every day in order to survive.  Capacity Building is one such process which helps us to achieve this. 

Capacity Building in health is basically “the development of sustainable skills, organizational structures, resources and commitment to health improvement in health and other sectors, in order to prolong and multiply health gains many times over”. One of the main components of capacity building is Skills development, which entails creating and providing knowledge and training to professionals within the respective organizations.

Your staff might have a current level of competency and skill set which is at par with the current industry benchmarks but as the time progresses or as the industry sets its new yardsticks, the skills which were once sufficient and up to date become trivial by the then standards. So, the mantra is to continuously keep building your capacity. 

A study done in Two Intensive Care Units of a 500 Bedded multi-specialty hospital of Delhi NCR echoed the same thing. The report showed the significant positive impacts a particular training program can have  on improving the Knowledge and Practices of Critical care nurses.

During the study, a structured questionnaire was developed in consultation with   WHO Standard Precaution of infection control. The findings of the study showed that the majority of the nurses were females in the age group of 20-30 and had good (KAP 81-90%) Knowledge, Attitude and Practice related to Standard Precautions for Infection Control. The results further stated that there is a significant impact of Knowledge and Attitudes of critical care nurses on their self-reported practices. The study also analyzed the impact of a training intervention on the KAP Scores of Nurses and showed that training has a positive impact and significantly increases knowledge levels related to standard precautions of Infection Control.

The study thus concludes that as Knowledge and Attitude of the Critical care nurses significantly affects their practices for infection control, it becomes imperative for the hospitals to ensure that the nurses have a good level of knowledge and positive attitude for infection control. By implementing regular training programs we can ensure that the staff has sound knowledge and positive attitudes and hence we can inculcate an environment of patient safety. Skill development will not only help in building capacity of efficiently trained staff in healthcare organizations but will also safeguard the basic right of patients of having a safe and healthy environment during their stay at the hospital.

“Everyday is a learning process. Life is a marathon that needs a lot of perseverance.”

-Ginny Kaushal, 

 Faculty, INLEAD 

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