How leadership soft skills training builds emotional intelligence

If your goal to learn how to build emotional intelligence, you’ll find that leadership soft skills are one of the fastest ways known.

This is because soft skills, leadership skills and emotional intelligence all overlap to a certain degree.

Soft skills in general are said to be the basis for up to 70% of leadership skills. This applies to both functional and executive leadership.

Just as importantly, leadership soft skills support your job skills. So they are the foundation of your success in most any endeavor.

Just as management and leadership have overlaps, so do soft skills and emotional intelligence.

You’ll use basic soft skills to perform better at both your functional duties and hard skills. Use advanced soft skills such as leadership soft skills to better perform your executive leadership duties.

As an emotionally intelligent leader, it can be said that you are not actually managing people, you are managing emotions.

“An emotionally intelligent leader
does not really manage people,
they manage emotions.”

Larry’s leadership tips

Let’s examine the difference between soft skills and emotional intelligence.

But first let me tell you a bit a background and credentials:

About the Author and Course Creator

Larry LaFata is a talent development specialist and the founder of modernleadershipcenter.com and defineyourcareer.com.

He has a unique ability to synthesize research and innovation into organized, usable concepts. This provides clients with streamlined leadership skills training and employee development solutions they can implement quickly.

After 30 years experience working with Fortune 500 companies, Larry turned to his passion: leadership development and talent development. The core of his course creation approach is customized self-assessment and skills development templates. No personality tests, psychometric tests or psychology assessments are ever used.

Larry has authored: Employee Development Plans, Career Planning Programs, Employee Rewards Programs and now his new Leadership Development Program.

Larry’s mission is to better humanity through innovative talent development strategies. His continuing efforts in talent development keeps him in the forefront of thought leadership in the industry.

How soft skills and emotional intelligence overlap

The following Venn diagram illustrates how soft skills build emotional self management as well as management of others emotions.

Leadership soft skills and emotional intelligence use largely the same set of skills.

The way they differ is in their deployment to manage self and others.

• Self management: Soft skills are self development skills used to better manage yourself in order to improve your performance of functional duties and hard skills/technical skills.
• Emotional intelligence uses more abstract, intangible soft skills to better manage yourself – in order to be more capable in leading and managing others in your executive duties.

To a large extent, basic soft skills support functional leadership. The advanced spectrum of soft skills develop emotional intelligence habits.

Leadership soft skills fall into the advanced spectrum of soft skills, those that build emotional intelligence.

They are a key determinant of your effectiveness.

Soft skills examples

This diagram gives you some soft skills examples by category.

Note: Of course the human mind is too complex to isolate discrete individual skills or be tightly categorized.

You will find that most soft skills – like the emotions they represent – will overlap others.

For example, leadership soft skills span across almost every skill category: behavioral, organizational, cognitive and emotional intelligence.

This diagram is a general overview of soft skills for the purpose of showing how they contribute to building emotional intelligence.

Leadership soft skills and their role in emotional intelligence

As noted, certain skills are more abstract and intangible. These tend to be the soft skills that pertain to emotional intelligence.

For example, cognitive thinking and vision are leadership soft skills are abstract and intangible skills.

The application of the spectrum of soft skills are determined by whether your job title is functional or executive.

This Venn diagram illustrates functional, management and executive skillsets, and the type of leadership training required.

Functional soft skills for functional roles

For example, let’s say your job title is production assistant and you work on a bottling production line. You would want to develop functional soft skills, such as quality control, dependability and teamwork.

You probably wouldn’t need to prioritize advanced, abstract soft skills for managing others such as empathy, taking charge or critical thinking.

However if you are a manager or a senior executive leader who manages teams of employees, you’d need to utilize those advanced soft skills.

But do not lose sight that soft skills support your hard skills.

So even if you are in a functional job role, the better your soft skills, the better your job performance.

Executive soft skills for leadership

As a manger or executive in a leadership position, you have larger responsibilities than just functional duties.

So you need to employ advanced leadership soft skills that develop emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is one of the key executive skills that help you to more effectively manage the emotions of others.

These advanced leadership soft skills typically include:

• Taking charge
• Empathy
• Problem solving skills
• Leadership skills
• Communication skills
• Credibility
• Etc.

By developing these advanced emotion management skills, you vastly increase your leadership power.

Soft skills training using skills development templates

To help you best get a handle on assessing, selecting and training for soft skills development, I recommend skills development templates.

Skill development templates are at the center of both my employee development course and my leadership development program, because:

• Skills templates help you zero in and assess your current soft skill proficiencies, starting from where you are now
• Your can then select and prioritize the leadership soft skills you want to develop
• Your soft skill training then uses daily affirmation and daily hands-on use of the skill, so you can ingrain them as permanent emotional intelligence habits

The beauty of skills templates is that they work well for all levels of leadership, from employee development and management training to executive leadership training.

(Find out more about templates and the 3 phases of leadership training here)

The 3 phases of leadership training and development

Leadership soft skill development example templates

Here is a completed example of leadership soft skill proficiencies development.

I provide two individual development plan template examples for leadership soft skills.

• One is communications soft skill proficiencies from my Employee Development Plan. It includes employee self-evaluation.
• The other template is for soft skills that develop emotional intelligence. That is part of my leadership development plan.

In this employee development plan self-evaluation example, you can assess which skills are most important and prioritize those for the quarter. Manager can do so as well.

This allows you to select, rate and prioritize which leadership soft skills to develop.

This is a leadership soft skills example template from my leadership development program.

It also focuses on first assessing and then selecting leadership soft skills.

You then develop the skills as permanent emotional intelligence habits.

In this example you first choose a set of skills, then narrow them down to a prioritized few.

The absolute key to developing leadership traits and emotional intelligence is to turn your soft skills into HABITS. Then they become permanent and instinctual leadership traits.

Summary of how to use leadership soft skills to build emotional intelligence

Leadership soft skills build emotional intelligence habits by focusing on the communications, leadership, vision and other emotion management skills that executives and managers need to manage their teams.

Soft skills are known to be up to 70% of your job success. Leaders who use soft skills will better carry out their functional duties and hard skills.

I’ve found that using skill development templates is the best way to directly facilitate leadership soft skills development.

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