Effective interpersonal skills are a part of an individual’s professional toolbox. Such skills play an important role in daily interactions at work and relating to others in general.
By nurturing interpersonal relations, people become more at ease in their work environment and collaborate with other teams smoothly. This may also reflect on one’s productivity and ability to deal with clients.
Poor interpersonal skills could lead to negative feelings and unsatisfactory results at work. It can cause people to feel left out, experience self-doubt, and get into conflicts at work.
Individuals who make efforts to improve their interpersonal skills can contribute to several areas in their organization:
Teamwork and Productivity. A group of people who can communicate to each other has a higher chance of completing a goal. Being encouraging and helpful in their language can help improve productivity.
Conflict management. Friction is inevitable in the workplace. Managing conflicts requires careful use of language, ability to listen to all sides of the story, and understanding motivation.
Leadership. Leadership skills are applied to interpersonal relations when you have to provide constructive feedback and motivate others to achieve your goals.
How to Improve An Organization’s Interpersonal Skills
With practice and support from management, organizations can improve their interpersonal skills.
Identify areas that need improvement. This can be done by asking a colleague, leader, friend, or family member. What are the things that make it hard for a person to understand another person’s words? Where does misunderstanding usually start? Companies can also hold workshops and seminars about business communication or workplace interpersonal skills.
Practice active listening. Ask everyone to pause and pay attention whenever a colleague is expressing his or her opinion. Remove distractions, such as mobile phones, to let the person talking knows that his or her opinion is valued. While individuals can express their ideas and opinions, listening can help them understand each other better and make each other feel respected and valued.
Develop empathy. Being able to place oneself in someone else’s shoes allows you to better understand the motivation and reasons behind their words and actions.
Keep a positive mindset. Having a positive outlook when you are interacting with others allows you to become objective, strive for fairness, appreciate what the other person is saying, and create interactions that will help you get your desired outcome.
Focus on encouraging others. Encouragement can be shown through acknowledging others’ achievements, offering to help someone who is having a bad day or a difficult time, expressing appreciation for team members, or giving simple compliments.
Be aware of your emotions. Whenever there is tension, conflict, or any source of negative emotions, try pausing for a while or perform breathing exercises. Once you are calm, you will be able to think clearly and communicate your feelings and ideas effectively.
Family relationships are considered lifelong and unbreakable. However, being in a toxic or abusive family relationship can be devastating and estrangement becomes the way out wherein someone physically and emotionally distances themselves to cut family ties. It is often seen as an event or outcome with only two possibilities: estranged or not estranged. However, an alternate view argues that it is an ongoing process reflected in a spectrum with different degrees.
Family estrangement is nearly as common as divorce. According to a 2015 survey, nine out of ten adults were estranged from their mother or father. Similarly, from the parents’ perspective, more than 90% of parents were estranged from a daughter or a son. Meanwhile, the proportion of being estranged from at least one sister or one brother reduces to seven out of ten adults.
Causes of estrangement
It might not be easy to understand what would make someone cut a family member out of their life. The reasons to cut off communication and distance one’s self from certain family members differ from the parents’ and children’s perspectives as well as between siblings. It can be caused by a major event or disagreement and arguments that have been building over time to serve as a trigger.
The 2015 survey revealed emotional abuse as the most cited reason as to why adults become estranged from their parents. Other reasons include mismatched expectations about family roles and relationships, a clash in personality or values, neglect, issues relating to mental health problems, and traumatic family events. The report also cited that the parents’ estrangement from their grown-up children is caused by conflicting expectations in the family, issues relating to in-laws, and the experience of divorce. Aside from these factors, people also blame parental favoritism as the cause of estrangement between siblings.
Other issues that may lead to family tensions and estrangement include physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by other family members, conflicting political or religious views, a family member’s sexual orientation, and choice of spouse. This results in the feelings of being unloved, rejected, and hurt by people who are expected to be the main source of affection, safety, and support. While cutting off family members is a means to separate one’s self from these emotions attributed to them, it also acts as a double-edged sword to the person as they are separated from the ones they love.
Dealing with estrangement
There are a few ways to deal with estrangement:
Acknowledge and apologize. Meeting in person and apologizing for your share of the problem can be uncomfortable. However, it is necessary to talk through things, listen to each other, and acknowledge the trauma and pain that everyone experienced. Even if reconciliation is not the goal, letting go of guilt, shame, grudge, and other emotional burdens is an essential step to moving forward.
Give space. You and the person you are estranged from may need time to work through the pain. It is important to respect the other person’s decision by suspending sending texts, calling, or any other contact that may lead to conflict and worsen the situation.
Reconcile. Reconciliation may be expected after passing through emotional distress. However, every person involved needs to be physically and emotionally ready to reconnect. In a case where the estrangement is caused by conflicts that put someone’s life at risk such as domestic violence, you may reach out to professionals to mediate and to know what to expect from the reformed relationship.
Maintain distance. In some relationships, permanent distancing may be a healthy solution and empowering for everyone involved. This means either physically distancing while maintaining occasional contact or cutting off communication entirely. Depending on the effects of estrangement, you need to assess your tolerance to connect with your estranged family members.
Seek support. Whether you are the one cutting off contact or being cut off by a family member, you might need support to cope with the consequences such as feeling ashamed of going against social expectations. You can seek support from friends, other loved ones, and even a professional. For example, people going through family estrangement found therapy and counseling with a professional to be helpful as it makes them feel supported, develop insight and understanding, and move forward.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to family estrangement as it depends on the cause and its effects on your quality of life. Life is never ideal, and so is a family relationship. You might not talk or spend the holidays together with some family members. However, it doesn’t determine your capacity to love, especially if distancing is the only way to give you the comfort and safety you need.
Starting a business should be one of the most energetic and creative activities for any founder. Designing, talking, convincing — these are the most common tasks that an entrepreneur wannabe is thinking of. Once they start the process, they would need to plan, structure, and decide. The work starts to resemble a project manager’s work.
Though entrepreneurship and project management are distinctive areas with different competencies, Taavi Tamberg, Arvi Kuura, and Reet Soosar have researched that “project managers are expected to act as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs”. Could entrepreneurs learn something from project managers and transfer some of their competencies in their work?
Here are some examples, taken from Nathalie Udo and Sonja Koppensteiner’s research:
Knowledge of concepts, methodologies, practices, and vocabulary of the profession
When you start cooking something, you gather the tools and ingredients. Similarly, starting a business needs a good understanding of the terminology and the different information that is required by investors. Maybe in the field of entrepreneurship, they are not named like this, but for sure you can find some academic research and books on this.
Knowing the purpose of the business
Even though the founders do not have all the details figured out yet, having a clear purpose is crucial. Questions like where the business is headed and deciding on long and short-term goals are important to answer. There is a possibility that what the founder initially imagined will change in time, but defining the purpose and following it is important.
Knowledge of processes, methodologies, and tools & techniques
In project management, as in entrepreneurship, there are tested ways for structuring data. This is one piece of information that partners and investors are expecting the founders to know. Even if it is about a business model canvas or a pitching deck, they are known in the entire venture capital pipeline.
As processes, there is always the question of how much time should founders stay in planning or how quickly should they go to test the market. How much should stay and define different plans or just sketch something and give it a shot? This is also a recipe that differs for every founder.
Ability to recognize resistance and overcome it
Wishing to bring something new or something improved in the market is understanding that resistance is part of the game. There will be potential resistance on all sides, from the competition, suppliers, and even potential customers. Having strategies for this could be a lot of help for start-up enthusiasts.
Communication — the ability to provide information regarding tasks, plans, schedules, strategies to stakeholders
Using a methodology in project management gives you the clarity and structure of tools and ways to communicate. In entrepreneurship, this is something that has to be settled and decided by the founders. Here are some of the questions that should be considered:
How much should they reveal?
How should they create the stakeholder’s grid?
How often should they engage in communicating with them?
Who should communicate from the start-up side?
Ability to keep the project moving toward successful completion in face of aggressive schedules and discouraging developments
In projects, people are under pressure to meet deadlines and deal with the scarcity of resources. In building a startup, founders could take the structure and the discipline from project management, create templates, and use them in iterations. Yes, iteration is part of the entrepreneurship game also. However, the creative process can be formalized more and get inspiration from project management by creating steps to follow, milestones to overcome, and deadlines to reach.
Some aspects of project management can be transferred to entrepreneurship. A good idea is an idea in practice, even though it is not in the best shape. Plan, schedule, distribute roles, and structure information. Starting a business can look like the most complex project, so it is important to adapt to some of these techniques.
Confidence is a belief in one’s ability to succeed. It is positioned in between a trait or an ability. Much research has been conducted on confidence over the years. The majority of this research accentuates the importance of confidence in life which leads to studying the techniques to build and improve confidence.
Additionally, Locke et al. have found that the stronger people’s self-confidence is, the higher the goals are and their committedness towards them. This shows that self-confidence could also indicate one’s willingness to act. In this sense, self-confidence is considered one of the most influential motivators and regulators of behavior in people’s everyday lives as it helps strengthen one’s resilience in facing adversity to succeed in life.
However, people often do not include developing confidence together with their competence. A peer-reviewed meta-analysis found an overlap of only 9% between how good people think they are and how good they actually are. This phenomenon could reduce one’s self-awareness and performance, which may result in the creation of a narcissistic culture. Therefore, the need to keep confidence in check must be highlighted and should be practiced with the following strategies.
Test your core beliefs
Core beliefs are the most basic assumptions about one’s identity. It determines the degree to which people see themselves as safe, competent, powerful, and autonomous. These beliefs become the foundation or rules of how one governs one’s behavior. Core beliefs and the associated rules are fundamental to one’s personality, hence to self-confidence, as a personality trait.
The role of core beliefs is also emphasized in the definition of self-confidence. While positive beliefs lead to becoming a confident person, too much positivity could become toxic which results in overconfidence. Meanwhile, negative beliefs could result in underconfidence. To change these two extremes, McKay, M., et al. mention a seven-step process in their workbook, Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life, to help test an individual’s core beliefs:
Identify your core beliefs by asking situational “What if” questions and exploring what that situation can mean for you.
Once the core belief is identified, assess its negative impact by thinking about how this can affect your work, mood, and relationships.
From there, identify rules based on your core belief by exploring its veracity through questions like “What do I actually do to cope with my belief? What do I avoid? How do I think I’m supposed to act? What are my perceived limits?”
Generate catastrophic predictions for each rule in case you break them. Think of scenarios that can possibly happen if you do not follow your rule.
After that, start with a rule that has the least consequence and test it based on the following five selection criteria: easy to set up the situation, allows a direct test of the underlying core belief, has a clear prediction of your behavior rather than suggestive feelings, has an immediate outcome, and has a relatively low amount of risk associated to it.
Test your rule in a real-life situation and keep a record of how you handle the situation based on the new behavior and the outcome it brings. Keep doing this until you are able to test out all the rules.
Once you’ve done all these, you should be able to develop a new core belief. With this new belief, go back to step three and repeat the process. Write the new rule as affirmations by using “I” language in the present tense rather than commands or restrictions.
The whole process can go on for as long as it needs to be until you are comfortable with the new core belief and its rules. The important thing to consider here is to continuously keep a log of everything as it may act as support for new rules in the future. This will also help guide you as you fortify and balance your self-confidence.
Control your worries
Confidence is closely related to a sense of worry. Worry represents a natural process of mental problem-solving on the uncertainty that invokes a feeling of anxiousness. It can motivate people to put extra effort into work or personal tasks, making them feel more confident as they face their problems. However, worry is more known for its negative impacts, such as cognitive bias, which may lead to either underconfidence or overconfidence.
Worry is also a cyclical pattern involving thoughts, body, and behavior. For example, the thought of being rejected during a job interview can chain into other negative thoughts, resulting in anxiety. Subsequently, physical symptoms associated with the fight-or-flight response begin to manifest such as heart palpitations and muscle tension. People may adopt a self-serving behavior to avoid this uncomfortable feeling by shifting the blame to others for making it harder to land a job.
Based on this pattern, it is recommended to control worry by approaching it in three levels. First, to deal with physical stress, you can practice relaxation exercises regularly. Relaxation provides breaks in the cycle of the fight-or-flight response. One of the techniques is progressive muscle relaxation which involves alternating tension and relaxation in a group of major muscles.
Second, practice risk assessment to know which risks to avoid and be prepared for instead of worrying to help your thinking process. There are two main aspects to risk assessment: probability estimation and outcomes prediction. You need to estimate the probability of a worst-case scenario from the feared event coming to pass, with 0% for no likelihood to 100% for absolute inevitability. Then, predict the outcome you most fear while trying to figure out the possible coping strategies that would help ease the worry.
Finally, these five steps can help in mitigating worry behaviors:
Record your worry behavior
Pick the easiest one to stop and predict the consequences of stopping it
Stop the chosen behavior or replace it with a new behavior
Assess your anxiety before and after
Repeat steps 2-4 with the next-easiest behavior
Being confident surely helps one overcome adversity. However, having too much or too little confidence without being accompanied with proper competence could have negative impacts. Therefore, verify your core beliefs and control your worries to have the right amount of confidence. As Charles Darwin said, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
People receive an influx of information on a daily basis, especially with the digital acceleration that the world is experiencing today. Aside from being able to search for virtually anything on the web, people have been relying on video conferencing and other virtual means to communicate with one another since the global lockdown last year. This also brought about the consequence of “Zoom fatigue” or the psychological fatigue from the constant use of these tools.
As such, people are more pressed for time than ever to keep up with the flow of information. Some would opt to multitask in receiving information – like reading an email during a meeting – as an attempt to stay relevant. While individuals are constantly on the lookout for new information, it also distracts them from the present and turns them into ineffective listeners. Even in communicating, others would anticipate what will be said and prioritize what their response will be instead of listening to the other party.
Despite being an essential skill, listening is currently overlooked by most. In fact, there are studies that point to the idea of listening as a skill that people are losing due to several reasons that can act as listening barriers, like visual distractions, impatience, and even an overall sense of superiority over the speaker. Due to these factors, people are susceptible to misunderstandings, which may lead to poor decision-making and dissolve relationships.
To avoid this from happening, it is imperative that one should practice being an active listener. Doing so will help you understand and retain what is being said while also showing that the other party is recognized and respected. This is not only to build stronger relationships but also to lessen misunderstandings and become more effective in maintaining information.
Techniques in active listening
Being an active listener doesn’t only entail that a person listens. Rather, it is a conscious effort to provide one’s full attention to understand and empathize with the speaker. Here are a few ways that will help you become a better listener:
Let them speak. More often than not, people preoccupy themselves with their judgments while another person is talking by evaluating what is being said and prioritizing their own response. Instead of doing this, hold your judgment, keep an open mind, and let the other person finish what they want to say without interrupting to see their point of view. This will also help you widen your perception and open up the avenue for you to learn something new.
Be fully present. Contrary to what people may think, multitasking does not guarantee an increase in productivity. For example, having conversations with other people while doing something else is not only counterproductive but shows a lack of respect for the other person. Avoid distractions like reading your emails or doing other tasks when you are having a conversation with a person to give the speaker your full attention.
Actions speak louder. A person’s body language can express a lot more than what can be said. Crossing your arms, avoiding eye contact, or fidgeting may signal to the speaker that you are disagreeing or not listening to them. Meanwhile, providing eye contact, leaning in, or nodding your head occasionally will let them know that you are paying attention.
Clarify and summarize. Once the speaker is done, it is encouraged to repeat or paraphrase their thoughts, so they know that you understood what they meant. This also gives you an avenue to ask questions or clarify what has been said. Doing so opens the conversation more and reduces miscommunication between you and the speaker.
While the world is constantly racing to get to the next big thing, it is important to take the time and listen. As such, active listening is an indispensable skill that can help build relationships in and out of the workplace. By practicing these steps, you can become more patient and empathetic, as well as improve your leadership skills.
