Interacting with other people in many areas and situations, on a personal and professional level, is inevitable. Interpersonal skills help us to have communication more beneficial to others, to better express what we need to say, and to understand what we want to communicate. Interpersonal skills are a set of behaviors and habits necessary to ensure adequate interaction, improve personal relationships and achieve the goals of communication, ie correctly transmit or receive a message or order information. In companies, they are increasingly important to build efficient work teams and improve the bases of internal communication.
How To Demonstrate Your Interpersonal Skills During A Job Interview?
While it is very easy to list a list of hard skills and produce evidence to attest to their existence, it is not so easy with soft skills. More than words, recruiters want to hear candidates support their words with examples from everyday life. Examples that really demonstrate these interpersonal skills. Therefore, before your interview, it may be a good idea to take the time to identify three or four scenarios in which your soft skills have allowed you to overcome challenges in your job.
If you have the right interpersonal skills, you can go to your job interview with confidence.
Why Interpersonal Skills Are Important
· Build trust
· Demonstrate social awareness
· Encourage empathy
· Help foster and maintain personal relationships
· Increase customer satisfaction
· Keep the feedback loop open
· Make you an effective leader
· Promote effective communication
How to Develop Interpersonal Skills?
To develop these skills you must first recognize the skills you possess and strive to improve them. Secondly, you need to understand what characteristics you are lacking, to know it is recommended to ask for feedback from trusted people.
That way you can understand what skills you will have to cultivate and work on. A good way to do this is through training and practices carried out inside or outside the company.
In addition to developing yourself, you can help your employees improve their interpersonal skills through people development.
Examples Of Interpersonal Skills In The Workplace
Communication
One of the most important interpersonal skills in any job is communication. Whether you work in IT (Information Technology), customer service, construction, or any other industry, you will need to be able to communicate clearly and effectively with others through oral and written communications. Some jobs also require effective public speaking skills.
In addition to being a basic tool in anyone's day-to-day life, the ability to communicate effectively can make a difference in your professional development. This not only implies knowing how to communicate both in writing and orally but also using the appropriate body language for each situation and knowing how to listen and interpret what others say
Conflict Management
Within a service company, as within any company, conflicts are possible, with customers or between employees. Being able to procrastinate, calm down quickly, and weigh the pros and cons of an argument is essential to teamwork.
This can allow you to help a colleague in difficulty, resolve a customer conflict, or justify yourself to your superiors.
Conflict management involves both the ability to ease tensions and identify the root of the problem that provoked the outbreak of said conflict. For that, it is necessary to show patience and fine psychology.
Listening Skills:
Listening is another of the most important interpersonal skills. In order to understand others, you must first actively listen to them, pay attention to them and make an effort to understand what say and why say it. Only in this way will we be able to identify what you really want to communicate, although for this we will have to overcome certain limitations, prejudices, and self-imposed fears.
Emotional Awareness.
Ability to become aware of your own emotions and the emotions of others, name them and use an emotional vocabulary appropriately, capture the emotional climate of a given context, and adequately interpret the interaction between emotion, cognition, and behavior.
Feeling Of Empathy
Being empathetic is a fundamental skill to develop good relationships with your peers in the professional environment. The act of putting yourself in the other's shoes is a differential, and it is related to the ability to listen to the opinions and statements made around you. The communication process is incomplete and fraught with flaws if the listener does not pay attention to what is being communicated to him.
Therefore, learning to listen to others is an important skill for all professionals, in all careers and positions. Giving space to dialogue and being attentive to the employees' notes is essential for managers to understand the company's demands. By listening to the other and talking horizontally, it is possible to have new ideas and seek efficient solutions as a team.
Having empathy also helps managers to understand the limitations and difficulties of their employees, enabling them to find answers to solve these issues and improve the work environment.
Team Work
As a manager, you should know that teamwork is essential for the smooth running of a company, after all, the success of a project depends not only on the leader but also on his collaborators.
That's why it's important to know how to act in a group, for that there needs to be good communication, so it's possible to pass on information in a positive way. To develop this skill you must also respect each person's personality and ideas, which will help improve the organizational climate and get better solutions than making decisions alone.
Leadership
Regardless of your specific job title or your position within the company hierarchy, leadership skills are absolutely essential in any role. You want your team to be motivated, driven, and goal-oriented, and you want to facilitate growth and development. Ensuring that each individual on the team has strong leadership skills gives you the confidence that you can trust anyone to take control.
When you bring a member to the team, you want to see them in your long-term business plans. Your desire is to have a team willing and ready to grow, with space and tools to do this.
A good leader, in addition to simply commanding, inspires and encourages his team and cares about those who work with and for him. Leadership is not reserved for bosses, managers, and supervisors, and a person with leadership skills can take the lead and maintain authority over even the smallest of projects or tasks.
Respect
A single disrespectful person can damage an entire organization. For example, a disrespectful boss alienates employees and lowers morale in the work environment. Disrespectful customer service employees hurt customer retention. A disrespectful colleague destroys team cohesion by angering others. When people respect the limits of others and maintain a friendly attitude, these kinds of problems are avoided. In extreme instances of disrespect, such as harassment or discrimination, it is the organization's responsibility to intervene and corner erratic behavior. As a consequence, employers who screen candidates try to screen out disrespectful people who could cause them massive problems later.