Today’s entrepreneurship environment is… complicated. Never before have you had access to such an immeasurable range of strategies, techniques, methods and ideas for growing your business. The landscape of technical skills in the business world is so overwhelming in its extensivity and complexity that it can inadvertently overshadow other, equally important skill areas. Technical skills, of course, are very important, but what about soft skills?

Also referred to as people skills, or emotional intelligence, soft skills are the innate qualities we possess as humans, such as creativity, communication, empathy etc. While soft skills can be more difficult to develop than hard (technical) skills – more quantifiable skills such as content marketing and user experience – without them, it is impossible to achieve or surpass the full potential of your business.

So, with this in mind you’d be mistaken if you concluded that soft skills held no relevance to your business. Chances are, you’ve already started to build and develop a toolkit of soft skills that you can apply directly into your own business. Understanding what they are and being able to identify which ones you need to develop in the future can be invaluable to furthering your business. Here are some of the top soft skills when it comes to entrepreneurship and why they are part of the solution to your success. 

Communication

Poor communication causes challenges in productivity. In today’s rapidly changing world, you need to be able to make decisions, take action and learn from results quickly in order to achieve full customer satisfaction. Without strong communication, this is impossible. Without communication, there can be no successful collaboration within a business or between clients and customers, deeming it an integral part of the recipe for organic growth. Remember, happy customers are key to entrepreneurial success! Good communication tools enable you to bridge the gap in client and customer interaction, increasing satisfaction in your customers or clients, leaving you a step ahead of your competitors.

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Empathy and Relationship Building

Empathy, the most potent skill when it comes to relationship building. It can create an emotional connection like nothing else. Empathy is a willingness to look at life through other people’s perspectives; to get inside their mind and try to understand their contextual emotions. The New York Times offers some insightful advice on how we can all learn to be more empathetic. These days, everyone loves to talk about themselves, creating confusion around responses that may sound empathetic– a response where a person’s feelings are acknowledged – but are actually a counterfeit. When practicing empathy, for example, in a situation where a person tells you that they are hurt or angry, it is important to ignore the natural response to try to fix the situation or offer advice. Instead, let them know that they are heard and that someone cares. When you let people speak honestly, and offer acceptance within your workplace, you will surprise yourself with your ability to invite vulnerability from others and your ability to build stronger emotional connections. This will not only positively affect you, but also your business as a whole.

Creativity

Creativity is a must have skill as an entrepreneur. As a crucial skill, creativity drives interesting processes and products. To summarise creativity in the role of an entrepreneur – creativity involves thinking broadly and freely, while still focusing on the main target of the business, the end product or the areas needing to be improved. Encouraging creativity will enable you to utilise full employee potential.  Tapping on employee creativities, may release an ocean of dormant ideas, in the form of financial strength, profitability and effective decision making. Exploring new ideas will lead to greater efficiency in your business, eventually giving you, as an entrepreneur, an edge over the competition.

Critical Thinking

All great business leaders have the ability to think critically. While utilizing creativity and allowing your own emotions to be involved in the business process is imperative for productivity, it is important that these intense emotions do not cloud critical thinking or important decisions. By thinking critically, you will be able to avoid costly mistakes in your business and generate further ideas, involving many perspectives, based on logical information. Start practicing critical thinking by solving problems in a process centered way, capitalizing on knowledge and objective evidence. In doing so, you will save your business costly resources, time and money.

Time Management

As an entrepreneur, you are your boss. Although to many this may sound like a dream come true, the reality is, unless you know how to manage resources effectively, this can quickly turn nightmarish. Arguably, the most important resource for an entrepreneur is time. Time is gold, and often it can feel like 24 hours a day is just not enough. Essentially, as an entrepreneur, you have to own every part of your business, understand which tasks should come first, how much time each task needs and who to delegate each task to in order to move the business forward. With this astonishing amount of pressure on your shoulders as an entrepreneur, it’s easy to become lost in the mindset of the glamorised ‘9-5 grind,’ when really what you should be focusing on, is balancing your tasks effectively, leaving you to work and play, as hard as you want.

At Hippo, we help business owners to systemise their business and manage their time better by outsourcing their extra work, picked up by our Virtual Assistants. Read more information about how Hippo can help you find balance in your life here. Your happiness deserves to come first.

Soft skills are important for every entrepreneur. Taking the time to reflect and acknowledge the areas in which you feel the weakest in and vice versa, will inevitably help you to drive your business to greater success!