the majority of people who get promoted into leadership fail at people's skills they have fantastic technical skills because in most cases that's what got them promoted but their people skills are lacking and this can cause those ambitious leaders to not be able to communicate with their team well to not be able to connect with their team and in extreme cases to create a work environment that is full of employee dissatisfaction High turnover and substandard reputation there are a number of reasons as to why good leaders fail at people skills which I'll go into in a moment and at the end of this video I'm going to share the top three people skills that leaders need to develop for 2024 and Beyond the first reason why good leaders fail at people skills is because it's not taught in formal education if you look at the curriculum for most Business Schools the focus is on technical skills or hard skills as some people like to call them of course these are extremely important I mean you wouldn't hire a senior tax manager who didn't understand the tax rules or regulations of the country that they worked in would you so you absolutely need to have the relevant technical skills for the job that you are in but these Business Schools don't seem to put much importance if any on people's skills on soft skills in my opinion if these business schools had at least one subject on people's skills that covered a range of people's skills that were important or required in the office they would much better prepar they graduates for the corporate or for the leadership world and because people skills are non-existent in formal education people aren't assessed on them therefore they don't think they're very important it's only when they're in the corporate world and they start to get bad performance reviews that say something like you're not good at Teamwork or you're not good at listening that they're jolted awake and they start to realize that there are some non-technical skills that they need to learn maybe this is why 50 to % of Executives fail in the first 18 months of a new role it could also be that they are simply overwhelmed in their job and they don't have the time or the mental energy to learn or to develop their people's skills so they Rush conversations they don't listen to what their employees are telling them and when they give feedback they do it in an Abrupt or vague way people skills take time I know that leaders and Executives don't want to hear this but it takes time to invest in learning and developing ing your people skills and when you do that there will be much less friction in your team people will work together in a more fluid and harmonious way and you as a leader can put your time and energy onto focusing on the big picture if you dedicate just 15 to 30 minutes every day learning about people's skills and then taking the time to implement those people's skills that you learn the changes and the improvements that you make within a week will be noticeable and dramatic but if you've never witnessed a leader in action who has good people skills then you might think that they're not very important if mentors that you've had or other leaders you've looked up to have overlooked the importance of people's skills then it's possible that you overlook them too you might replicate the way that they behave and the way that they interact with other people in the office because you think well it's just the way that a leader should be so that is why it's important to expose yourself and to learn from a variety of leaders particularly successful leaders look for leaders who have a good reputation in their company leaders who are loved by people in their team leaders who produce good results for the company look at what they do how they lead how they interact with people in their team get a few tips and start to incorporate them into your leadership style probably one of the biggest reasons for lack of people skills in leaders or in people in general are the societal changes that have happened over the last 50 years or so think of people moving to larger cities where ironically they interact with people less and less smaller families where people quite often grow up as an only child social media where people prefer to see what their friends are doing on Facebook rather than over a coffee school or work from home culture which eliminates a lot of the group discussion and day-to-day interactions with co-workers text messages Slack or Google Docs where a lot of the communication with your co-workers is less personal I hope I don't sound too old saying this but there was a time when we relied a lot more heavily on human interaction and when we had a lot more opportunities to learn and to perfect our people skills but it's not all doom and gloom people skills don't have to become a lost art you can actually learn a lot about people skills from books like emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman or radical cander by Kim Scott I first discovered these books on short form which is a fantastic place to get powered up book summaries of books you're interested in reading and I decided that these two books definitely needed to be added to my leadership Library you can of course find these books on Amazon I'll put the links in the description below but you can also check them out on short form which is what I do every time I am thinking about buying a book I also have an affiliate link for a short form which I will put in the description below this affiliate link will give you 5 days free access to short form and 20% off the annual subscription fee I highly recommend it if you are somebody who loves to read books and you want to cut down the time that you waste deciding on whether a book is worth your time reading now we're on to the part of the video where I talk about the top three people skills that you need to build for 2024 and Beyond and the first people skill is empathy we've all heard this buzzword thrown around in simple terms empathy is awareness of other people it's about identifying with or understanding another person's situation or feelings keys to becoming more empathetic as a leader are to not assume that everyone is like you learn more about others individually try to understand why they do or think the way they do communication is the second important people skill for leaders and this includes the ability to write to speak and to listen well the key here is to understand that your ability to communicate will expand and evolve as you climb up the corporate ladder and as you gain more responsibility at the leadership level this means that you need to communicate in order to support and guide team members build trust encourage discussion share goals and strategic Vision motivate and Inspire the third important people skill for it leaders to develop is relationship building this includes relationship building with people in your team with your peers so with other managers and leaders at your level with SE site Executives so people higher than you and also with stakeholders or people external to your company how you build relationships with all of these people will be different but at the core you need to get to know these people talk with them find out about their background struggles and goals offer support and guidance ask for support and guidance all of this will build trust which in turn will help you to fuel your relationships further there are many other people's skills that you need to learn in order to become a successful leader like managing different performance levels like encouraging people in your team to share their ideas and building your inner confidence all of these issues I talk about in this video up here if you don't have time to watch it right now make sure you save it to your watch later list on YouTube thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you next week in another video