If I asked you the question, what is the hardest part about your work as a business owner, a manager, a collaborator, a creator, or a team member, what might your answer be?

My guess is while you might go straight to thinking about ‘hard skills’ like balancing a budget, creating a new design, working out a formula in excel (although don’t ask me a thing about pivot tables), reviewing a strategic plan, devising a sales funnel or drafting position descriptions, given a moment longer to respond your answer will be something different.

Time and time again people will say that the hardest thing at work is showing up in hard conversations with others. And yet having conversations, cultivating trust, risking vulnerability and building psychological safety at work are traditionally thought of as ‘soft skills’. 

The challenge of soft skills

The most challenging aspect of work is often the need to have difficult conversations and build positive relationships.

Remember how you felt when you were on the receiving end of critical feedback? 

Remember when you had to conduct a performance review with a disengaged employee? 

Remember when you didn’t understand what was expected from you, or when you made a mistake? 

Remember when you dared to speak up (or didn’t) when unethical decision-making was happening? 

Remember when your workload was unmanageable but you didn’t know how to push back or who would listen?

The need for psychological safety

When we show up as a full human being at work, we’re driven by an operating system that needs psychological safety in order to perform. 

Creating an environment where colleagues feel safe to address thse uncomfortable issues requires skills that are not easy to master. 

How do you manage the space inside your own head and heart when you’re required to interact with the heads and hearts of others? 

How do you learn the skills to have a constructive conversation about performance, risk putting a new idea out there, challenge the status quo, speak the unspoken and speak truth to power? 

Our ability to find our own moral courage, to develop the language, tools and relationship intelligence to be a fully formed, constructive human at work does not happen with conscious awareness, practice and skill building.

As we face a complex future, soft skills become increasingly important.

Facing collective challenges 

In recent years there has been a growing recognition of the importance of soft skills in the workplace and beyond it.

We’ve seen individual leadership failures from Australia’s leaders, like Scott Morrison’s lacklustre response to issues around climate and women’s safety. At a broader systemic level we’ve seen a failure of leadership and psychological safety leading to the sexual abuse of children, neglect in Aged Care and illegal behaviour in banking. 

We can’t afford poor leadership at this moment in history. 

Critically, effective climate action requires collaboration across sectors and stakeholders, even across nations, to build consensus and mobilise action. We need empathy and compassion to address the impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has also required us to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances, including remote work. Working remotely has presented a new context for communication, collaboration and time management. Employers have had to trust their employee’s self-motivation to ensure that work continues to get done. 

The pandemic has also brought significant emotional and mental health challenges. Some employers have been more empathetic, compassionate and trusting than others when supporting their employees’ well-being. Long-covid is one area where people report not feeling supported by employers while they recover. The unfamiliarity of the illness has perhaps led to a lack of compassion towards the sufferers.

So what kinds of leaders do we need today?

To navigate these complex challenges, we need leaders who will speak truth to power, who will defy, push back, break through and create new paths. 

Leaders who will do it through collaboration, diverse smarts, committed listening and inclusivity of perspectives. 

Leaders who are stubbornly optimistic, generous of heart, radically compassionate, deeply self-aware, who are willing to fall because they know how to rise, and who lead with an unwavering conviction of doing what is right for the world.

We can’t change the world, without changing how we work, lead, live and love. And we can’t do that without changing ourselves and digging into what it is to show up fully in our lives.

And that is the hardest work we’ll ever do.