A business is no place for activism, subtle or overt. It is not a place where you speak your mind. It is definitely not a place to exercise your passions. It is a place where you must proceed with utmost caution. It is a place where every minute you spend and every word you speak should translate to furthering business. It’s a place where you reign in your emotions and conduct things objectively.
As an individual contributor, you might sometimes be excused to act with passion and dedication to your work. But if you are in management, you have to find ways to work with all kinds of people. You’ll have to hone your skills of judgement and not let a few instances create a strong impression of someone working in your company.
But far from making you a soulless person, business makes you a very thoughtful person who can motivate people to work for a common cause.
A workplace is not a utopia where you will not be judged or where you will not be misunderstood. It is a place where you will be prone to interpersonal conflicts. As in most relationships, communication is the backbone of a management system.
How you communicate — with data or without data — often decides how successful you will be as a manager. I figured that it takes more mental energy to reign in your thoughts and to get your point across than it takes to speak your mind. That’s probably why people willy-nilly do the latter more frequently.
Actually, there’s speaking your mind and there’s speaking your mind. Speaking up is a different exercise altogether. When you have an insight to offer, you must speak up. The imagination is timid and clams up under criticizing environments. But if you actually channel it into ways where you speak up with precision without being offended by criticism, you’ve learnt the ropes of management.
Management being a male bastion (something changing as we speak) and soft skills being perceived as a feminine quality, these super important skills are looked down upon with mild disdain. Surprisingly, even women pay little heed to them. So much for soft skills being a feminine quality!
Let them not fool you into believing that practising soft skills a setting for everything “fake”. That’s downright childishness. Soft skills are all about making hard-headed business decisions with a humane touch. They are the glue that builds cohesion in groups. They are the oil that keeps the management machinery run smooth.
