I was recently chatting with our new good friend ChatGPT. I asked it: ‘What are the top seven soft skills used by office workers, by percentage?’ The reply:
- Writing emails 20%
- Screen meetings 20%
- Reading emails 15%
- Face-to-face meetings 15%
- Presenting 10%
- Instant messaging 10%
- Face-to-face chats 10%
Possibly, what I had expected, and yet I never knew this clearly that emails and meetings are 70% of what we knowledge workers do. Though, it does seem all that I do. Type or sit in meetings.
A nurse has to study and practice for 4,600 hours before becoming fully qualified. As knowledge workers, we possibly do a couple of one-day training courses, but we largely learn from others. We might not be saving lives, but that doesn’t mean we want to be any less than great at what we do. Yet, our ‘great’ was never written down, we never studied, and we didn’t need to pass any exams. Imagine an alternative…
You arrive on your first day at your new corporate job. There are three core skills to what you do: emails, meetings, and presenting – 80% of your job. You learn what absolutely great looks like. Not in a day but over time, practising, practising, and practising some more. Demonstrating that you can actually do it. This isn’t done because it sounds lovely but because if you can write an email that gets what you want done, chair meetings that solve problems, have on-screen influence where people want to join, and present with such a reputation that people ask you how… wouldn’t that escalate your career and make the company more money?
Yet, here we are with typing speeds of 50 wpm, whereas great typists are twice that. Writing emails that are a wall of text with no clear ask. Meetings that most people would avoid like the plague, if they could. Plus, presentations where it seems the norm to ‘sit through it’ and then inflict the same pain on them a week later!
I once read that if you put a baby shark in a small tank it will only grow to that size, rather than its 15 ft. Corporate workers – yes, you, me, all of us… aren’t we stunted sharks?
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