00:00:00 Thanks for joining me on episode 679 of the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Annie Purdue Olson from leading better together. I encourage you to find the courage to lead in ministry. Well, and one way to be inspired to do that is by listening to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend Scott meter Measure of success tracks back to how people feel and how people operate in that environment.
00:00:39 Because at the end of the day, even the most automated of companies still depends on people. People are still involved in decision making people are still involved in setting things up. People are still involved in fixing things when they break. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcasts. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:01:04 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast, who will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's episode about investing in yourself through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why investing time and learning so-called soft skills actually has very hard benefits,
00:01:38 why and how you can turn even the most people oriented things into task. If that's how you're wired and why this results in much better growth for everyone. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible,
00:02:04 go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. One area where I've worked a lot myself and I've had a lot of different trainings and courses and assessments and various things is in the area of the so called soft skills.
00:02:47 And don't get me wrong again. I've talked before about how I'm wired as a very task oriented person. So people oriented skills, which is really all that soft skills means it means skills that help you work with identify, communicate to, uh, relate to other people are not skills that come naturally to me. And honestly, I'm one of those people that very much has that kind of,
00:03:16 Oh, this is all just woo. You know, soft skills are just a waste of time. The, the energy that you put into learning, these really doesn't pay off at any sort of real hard benefit. What are the results that you get from this? You know, how, how can you see yourself make more money or, or get more efficient in your use of time?
00:03:34 How can you, the business that I'm in grow? How can the business that I'm working in, if I'm in a corporate environment, grow it, all of those places, what I started as a school teacher and all the way through my corporate career, and now as a small business owner, there's a part of me that kind of pushes back against wasting time learning so-called soft skills.
00:03:55 And I've definitely heard that from other people. I've had that conversation with other leaders where they're very task oriented and they just feel like these soft skills are complete waste of time. But interesting thing is one of the reasons I began to go down the path of trying to get better at these things and learn how to do them is because I recognize that getting better at soft skills actually created hard,
00:04:23 tangible, real benefits. I could see that people got more efficient. I can see that turnover reduced people stayed around longer and turnover and having to retrain and, and develop a new person in a position is something that's very difficult, very time consuming, and very expensive for businesses. So I could see that the bottom line would get better as I got better at recognizing how to relate to other people better.
00:04:55 I could actually measure the ROI. The interesting thing about measuring that, you know, the return on investment was there's a huge lag, oftentimes that's, I think why a lot of times people don't recognize the benefit of soft skills because more often than not, you put in that time and effort getting better at, at working with people better at relating, better communicating,
00:05:20 better and understanding, then you begin to apply it and it's sometimes months or even years later before you actually see the tangible benefit, because there's that lag. It's hard to know that it's actually back at what you learned there. There's also with that lag, we often give up on it too early. We begin to work on ourselves. We begin to get better at relating,
00:05:45 and then we don't see an immediate result. And so we give up on it and go back to our old house. But the truth is is you can systematize and turn into a process. Even the most people oriented of activities, networking can be turned into a process, can be turned into a step, can be turned into I'm going to seek the following information with the following questions.
00:06:11 And as you get good at it, you learn how to do it in a way that doesn't sound robotic. It doesn't sound like it's driven by our process. It sounds sincere because it is sincere. This isn't about learning to fake it until you make it. This is about learning to develop the skills and the ability to ask the right questions and even just the ability to shut up and listen,
00:06:33 but to really listen, not to listen so that you can jump in with the next step, but to listen so that you can hear what's the next question I need to ask. What's the next piece of information I need to learn? How do I need to step into this situation to increase my relate-ability with this other person? And the truth is focusing on these sorts of soft skills results in better growth.
00:07:00 And, and when I use the word growth here, I do mean individual growth. I mean, people growth, your, your people will develop more, but I also mean numerical kind of results. Driven growth companies have interviewed people when they're leaving companies and 90% of the time or so when people leave, it's actually because of other people, it's not because of the company.
00:07:24 It's not because of not having a purpose. It's because they don't feel like they belong. It's because they don't feel like they can be their real self it's because they don't feel like they can relate to other people. It's because they don't think their manager understands them and supports them. It's usually because of soft reasons that people leave companies getting better at relating to people means less people leave.
00:07:47 When you look at the efficiency of people, how well they work. One of the things that determines their efficiency is how comfortable they are in their own skin. And in the position that they're in, how well supported, they feel every measure of success tracks back to how people feel and how people operate in that environment. Because at the end of the day,
00:08:15 even the most automated of companies still depends on people. People are still involved in decision making. People are still involved in setting things up. People are still involved in fixing things. When they break, people are still involved in communication and marketing and sales and all of the various components of even the most automated of business that uses robots to do the work are still people involved.
00:08:43 And because of that, the end of the day, the performance of that company comes back to the performance of people. And the performance of people comes back to how do we communicate? How do we understand each other? And how do we manage to work together in a way that creates clarity and purpose. And those things are what we talk about when you're talking about the soft skills.
00:09:08 So if you haven't invested time in learning these things, I encourage you to do so that's one of the areas that our work with people as a coach, and I encourage you to reach out if you have questions or need more help, or just need a direction to go. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast,
00:09:34 as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively, listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent. Or if you're in the U S you can text four,
00:10:03 four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures develop your influence and impact.