Born or Not to Born with Soft Skills? This is the Question

In this podcast, Ricardo talks about the soft skills of leadership. He gives tips to capitalize on these skills and explains the difference between being born with these skills or acquiring them with training.

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Episode transcript

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Hello everybody welcome to the five minutes PM podcast today. I like to discuss with you one aspect that I finished with my podcast last week about the world cup in the referee and all the cultural and change management aspects. And think about the natural. Born soft, skilled a project manager, and why I'm telling you that, because I said many, many times last week that, Oh, to be a project manager, you, we need to be leadership, soft skills, deal with change and deal with cultural aspects and human behaviour.

And this is quite easy to say when I'm saying this to someone with someone that's a natural-born leader, but if I'm not a natural-born leader, I don't have this skill because it's so easy for me to say. And it's maybe so hard for you that our listening to capture that when I say, okay, just Born with there's a skill, or this is very, very hard to say to someone that wasn't born with this skill, this is a gift, but a gift.

It's something that we do not choose to receive. Let's suppose all I want is to be taller than I am. Now. I want to be with more skills to play music, but this is something that I can't decide by myself. So if I know, and I understand that I need to develop my soft skills and I don't have this ability, I wasn't gifted with this ability. What can I do?

So let me share with you. One thing I wasn't in the past good negotiator negotiation aspect in the past a loss or something that raises my panic. They say, Oh, I will negotiate. Then I will lose something like that. And they say no, to be a good project manager, I need to develop. This is Skills. And what I did, I did two things first study, and this is the first suggestion study.

And second, in most important one is our practice look for. So what I did, I did several courses of negotiation and they started looking for opportunities to use my abilities with my kids while buying my car with my wife, with my company employees. So I look at that. So if you want to play soccer and You, some people will learn this extremely easy because they were gifted with that ability.

But I do not have this ability. I will need to train harder. At least to develop the basic skills that I need to do my work. It's impossible for that manager without good soft skills. And if you are not gifted with this, when you were born, you need to develop this for sure. Develop. This will help you to handle let's suppose that you do not like or a not comfortable talking in public.

What do you need to do? You need first training to do courses on how to speak in public, how to the public engagement, how you can be a better communicator. There are hundreds of videos to train new on that. And second, it's pointless to read books. If you do not practice, it's pointless. So what do you need to do? You need, we look for opportunities to talk in public because when you talk once twice, three times, 100 times, 1,000 times, it's different.

It's an issue and you become more prepared for death, more prepared than you will feel it. This gap, you will feel this gap in training plus practice, conflict management. You need to look, you cannot avoid conflict. You need to look for and not bad conflict. I'm talking about good conflict. Do you need to understand differences? Like we said last week about change management culture and the referees have the world cup.

We need to understand this. If we do great conflict management and we train two, that we will become more able to handle this. So if you are not natural Born with these, Skills please study, practice and develop that they will be a key success factor for every single project. I hope you enjoy this podcast. See you next week with another five minutes before the podcast. Bye-bye.

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Born or Not to Born with Soft Skills? This is the Question

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