The Dean of Harvard Business School, Jay O. Light, has written about the importance for leaders of having soft skills like self-awareness. CEO Magazine, Sept/Oct. 2008, p. 53, quotes Light: “Self-awareness, for example, is a very important leadership skill. To what extent can you teach self-awareness in a classroom?”

Also on p. 53, The Dean of Babson College F. W. Olin Graduate School of Business says: “The illusive softer skills in particular, such as listening, empathy, optimism, the ability to inspire, motivate and maintain personal relationships, are challenging to impart to students.”

The bad news is that MBA students don’t learn these softer skills very much. The good news is that I teach soft skills effectively in my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™.
I saw the need for this learning back when I was a student at Harvard Business School. I took all their courses in organizational behavior and then applied them myself as a manager.

Later, having experienced the usefulness of soft skills as a manager, I took more organizational behavior courses as a Ph.D. student in Baruch, the Business School of City University of NY City. I also taught organization behavior to MBA students at Fairleigh Dickenson University in N. J. In addition, I took several programs to improve my soft skills and to be able to train others to improve their soft skills. For example, I had months of training from NTL (National Training Labs).

I applied this training in my corporate work in leadership training. For example, in 1976 helped JCPenney’s open up the largest management training center in NY. Now I offer my years of experience and wisdom in my own Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop series,Leadership Communication™.

Why does this work? Because I allow participants to practice their soft skills during our sessions. Practice is the crucial ingredient. Then I ask them to practice during the week between our sessions and report back to our group next week on their progress. Spacing out the learning in weekly chunks makes the learning stick. Most leadership training is in workshops for 1-3 days. The participants have a hard time remembering their learning to apply it back on the job.

In my web conferencing approach to group coaching, participants only have to remember one hour of training and practice using that during the week. Also some participants in my Public Section also receive my individual executive coaching to help them apply the soft skills to their specific situations. This works very well.

Why not explore if my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop series, Leadership Communication™
might work for you and others in your company? Please call me at 919-419-9460 or contact me via the link above, “Contact Us,” http://www.eaglealliance.com/contact .