Soft skills and leadership

and many leadership training programs train future leaders on organizational theory and funding, but they fail to focus on the people. Policies and plans shape change, but people make it happen. Leaders who lack the necessary soft skills to manage their teams fail and that failure has an enormous impact. Companies know this and US businesses spend $166 billion on leadership development annually, but nearly a quarter of business leaders fail to focus on engaging with their employees. 

Only 48% of employees view their company’s leadership as “high quality.” While 83% of organizations believe it’s important to develop leaders at every level, only 5% of the companies implement programming for all leaders. A lack of leadership quality leads to turnover. 79% of employees will quit due to a lack of appreciation.

Only 10% of people are natural leaders — another 20% show some qualities of basic managerial talent that can be cultivated into high-quality leadership. Without a strategic effort to upskill managers to leaders, retention, productivity and employee engagement data will remain stagnant or decline.

What’s the solution?

JAKAPA can help. Our program measures, trains and tracks 32 critical soft skills in five domains: self-management, innovation, social engagement, cooperation and emotional resilience. Leadership teams can gain valuable insights into their leadership skills using our self and peer assessments and examining discrepancies in the results. They can also understand the people they lead by reviewing staff assessment data. This data can help them better understand why some teams function well, some are more productive and some are more engaged. By triangulating other data, such as attendance, productivity and employee evaluations, JAKAPA data can provide insights into support needed to improve those data sets.