Podcast 3: The Most Important Soft Skill, Maybe

Today we are going to look at arguably what is one of the most
important soft skills, one that sets the stage for so many other
soft skills to appear. Will you agree or disagree with our
host?
Bob Graham ‘0:00’: Coming up, we are going to look at arguably what
is one of the most important soft skills, one that sets the stage
for so many other soft skills to appear. That’s coming up in just a
few seconds.
Graham ‘0:26’: Welcome to Episode 3 of Serious Soft Skills. I am
Bob Graham and with me, as always — well, it’s only our third
episode — is Dr. Tobin Porterfield. Hey, Toby?
Porterfield ‘0:36’: I am looking forward to this episode today
because I think the topic one that we don’t completely agree on. So
it will cause us to have some discussion over it and I think we are
going to hear some interesting responses from some of our
listeners.
Graham ‘0:55’: We’ll get to that in a few seconds. But first, let
me set up who we are for someone who might have come into this
cold. We each teach college, we collaborate on researching soft
skills, and we both have used and seen others use soft skills in
various jobs over our careers. We think our experience and
expertise give us a unique lens for looking at soft skills and
that’s what we are going to do right now.
The Most Important Soft Skill?
Graham ‘1:22’: I’m going to tell you — are you ready for this,
Toby?
Porterfield ‘1:29’: Let’s have it.
Graham ‘1:31’: I am going to make the bold pronouncement that
listening is the most important soft skill of the over 50 that we
catalogued. I have been working on our book project and I was
writing about listening and the more I wrote about listening, the
more I realized it is really the key soft skill. Do you want to
argue that right away or do you want me to make my case?
Porterfield ‘2:00’: I think I will start with a slight agreement in
that listening enables so many other soft skills — innovation,
teamwork. There are so many ways that listening is, I’ll use that
term, enabling that it’s an important one. I’ll give you that.
Let’s see what you have to say about listening.
Graham ‘2:23’: Okay, I was going to go with you just accepted my
case. We can call it a day and people can get on with their lives.
But  now you are going to make me do a little work.
Porterfield ‘2:36’: Absolutely.
A Leader Who Didn’t Listen
Graham ‘2:38’: Did you know that Marissa Mayer, 20th employee at
Google, female software engineer, one of the most visible employees
at Google. She left there to go to Yahoo! to be its CEO, not a
programmer, but the CEO at Yahoo!. Over her tenure of four or five
years, things were a bit rocky, to say the least. And more
recently, if you have been following the headlines, you know she
has sort of ushered the company to be bought by Verizon
Communications. And she’s basically on her way out the door. Her
choice, she’s resigning. But if you look at her tenure at Yahoo!,
what she really was supposed to be doing at Yahoo! was rebuilding
Yahoo! Again and again in the reporting on her and Yahoo!, and this
came up frequently, her inability to listen to people — she was one
of those people who thought she was the smartest person in the room
— and she tended to articulate things without listening to the
people in the company who were trying to help her. We see this in
companies all the time with leadership trying to help the leader
because failure to them means failure to employees, which can mean
bad things like uncertainty and other problems. I have certainly
worked at several jobs where leadership challenges have made it
hard to go in and do the job each day.
When you don’t have listening, you don’t have the opportunity for
an organization to grow.
Listening Leads to Influencing
Graham ‘4:18’: That was my first piece of evidence. My second piece
is really fascinating to me.

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