It’s an old fashioned approach to think we have to know all the answers before we are willing to communicate with clients, colleagues, customers or stakeholders. Inviting them to contribute to solutions is respectful and appreciative. This open approach is also very likely to shed useful light on the problem itself.

The World Café is a technique for really engaging people in questions and issues that matter to them. It combines doodling or drawing on the table followed by discussion and the opportunity to move to a different table with a different question and another round of writing, drawing and discussion.

Readers share their approaches for saying thank you to colleagues, co-workers, and clients. These suggestions followed the post “The Imperative to Say Thank You.“

If we really believed that our success at work depends on other people being successful in their jobs, what would we do differently?

I ask this in the context of exploring our interdependence as people working within the same organization. We Americans have a dim sense of our interdependence with each other and with the rest of the world.

Yet, no matter what our role is, we are supported by many other people of whose work we may know nothing. How many times do we think about the people who are on the roof fixing the leaks or the people who deliver the products or the people whose job it is to find resources for the organization or those who ensure that everyone gets a paycheck?

It grates on me when I hear people talk about “soft skills.” Although definitions vary, soft skills generally refer to the ability to communicate effectively, knit a group of people together toward achieving a goal, and create a sense of shared community and purpose. CareerBuilder.com’s Kate Lorenz describes these as “interpersonal skills and leadership qualities to guide teams of diverse professionals.”

 “…Firms today are having a very difficult time finding managers who have superior ‘soft skills’,“ says John P. Kreiss, president of SullivanKreiss, a recruitment and placement firm for design and construction professionals.  Based on my own consulting practice, I would have to agree that most workplaces could do with more soft skills.

Our language is part of the problem. By calling them “soft,” we are demoting this constellation of abilities and skills to something frilly, mushy and largely unimportant. Let’s find a more fitting term for them.