Soft Skills

I'm not a business or organizational expert by any means, and yet I believe that the winning schools, winning organizations, and winning businesses will continue to excel at what I call soft skills. Soft skills to me are things that any one of us can do, but they are things that can turn an average or pretty good classroom, church, business, or organization into a better one. So in no particular order, here are some of the more important soft skills (I also acknowledge by writing this post, I'm probably guilty of violating several of these as well!):

• Thank yous- it's important to cultivate a culture of gratitude. Just this week I sent a thank you note to a department head at the City of Sioux Falls, to an architect, and to another pastor to thank each of them for their assistance and involvement with a a project we're working on. For some, like the department head and the architect, this is their job, and yet thanking them hopefully builds some sort of relationship as we continue to work together. How can you show appreciation for someone today?
• Return communication- whether it's an email, a voice mail, a text, whatever, I think it's important to return communication. In today's ultra busy and fast blackberry world, perhaps the temptation is to be too quick to return communication, and thus you are never actually accomplishing anything because you're always returning communication. But there's a balance somewhere between being too fast and never returning communication. Those that respond appropriately keep the ball rolling, develop new business, or build partnerships, and continue to win.
• Greeting- one of the easier things human beings can do is simply smile and greet people. How hard is this? And yet, I've been in several volunteer situations and several retail situations where I felt like I was a bother as the volunteer or the customer, instead of being appreciated for my time, my money, or both! It also serves as a good reminder for me and my work to greet people as a way of recognizing who they are and realizing that the had a choice today, and they chose to serve with us, worship with us, etc.

What others might we add to this list?