The Importance of Interpersonal Skills

Employee Development Until the late 1980s, business school curricula emphasized the technical aspects of management, focusing on economics, accounting, finance, and quantitative techniques. Course work in human behavior and people skills received relatively less attention. However, over the past three decades business faculty have come to realize the role that understanding human behavior plays in determining a manager’s effectiveness, and required courses on people skills have been added to many curricula.

As the director of leadership at MIT’s Sloan School of Management put it, “MBA. students may get by on their technical and quantitative skills the first couple of years out of school. But soon, leadership and communication skills come to the fore in distinguishing the managers whose careers really take off.” Developing managers’ interpersonal skills also helps organizations attract and keep high-performing employees. Regardless of labor market conditions, outstanding employees are always in short supply. Companies known as good places to work—such as Starbucks, Adobe Systems, Cisco, Whole Foods, Google, American Express, Amgen, Pfizer, and Marriott—have a big advantage. A recent survey of hundreds of workplaces, with over 200,000 respondents, showed the social relationships among co-workers and supervisors were strongly related to overall job satisfaction. Positive social relationships also were associated with lower stress at work and lower intentions to quit. So having managers with good interpersonal skills is likely to make the workplace more pleasant, which in turn makes it easier to hire and keep qualified people. Creating a pleasant workplace also appears to make good economic sense. Companies with reputations as good places to work (such as the “100 Best Companies to Work for in America”) have been found to generate superior financial performance.

So here is today’s Daily HR Tip: Hire and train for interpersonal skills as well as technical skills. Using pre-hire assessments can help to identify people who may be derailed by their inability to get along with others. If you are unsure where to go to find out more about pre-hire assessments contact The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology at http://www.siop.org/ and they will be able to put you in touch with a reputable organizational psychologist.

Sumber : http://www.dailyhrtips.com/2011/01/12/hr-blog-importance-interpersonal-skills/