#26 How to Improve Your Soft Skills with Catherine Clark

Research shows that soft skills contribute towards 80% of your career achievements.  Despite this, most people prioritise developing hard skills and do not have an action plan to improve your soft skills.  This is particularly true of the finance leader community, who spend much of their career learning technical accounting skills. The CFO role has evolved significantly during recent years.  You will need to master a significant number of soft skills to successfully deliver your role.  I asked experienced CFO Catherine Clark for her insights.  Catherine is GrowCFO’s lead professional mentor and has significant experience of performing the Board level CFO. Importance of soft skills Soft skills are highly important to becoming a finance leader.  They are the qualities that make your leadership successful. Soft skills are the human skills that you use in teamwork, leadership, collaboration, communication and dealing with people.  These are sometimes known as the emotionally intelligent skills and help you to tune in with other humans. To many people, certain soft skills come naturally.  Others will need to invest time in learning these. Most accountants will learn your hard skills through your qualifications.  People consider these to be a given as you become more senior.  You will then need to differentiate yourself through your soft skills. Finance leaders have an incredible amount of knowledge and provide a unique perspective to your management team.  Soft skills allow you to articulate knowledge in a way that creates significant impact.  Communication is a vital soft skill Most experts state that communication is the most important soft skill.  Many people feel overwhelmed in their roles and rely upon your communications to provide clarity.  Finance leaders play a huge role in sharing the bigger picture, the purpose and the performance of an organisation.  This enables people to understand their role in contributing towards the business. Your gravitas, presence and how you show up must provide comfort to people.  Your finance leader role is particularly important towards making people feel safe within their roles. The CFO plays a key role in providing business confidence to the Board and stakeholders.  Therefore, the CFO must always look calm and in control. Your body language contributes towards 55% of your message, your tone contributes 38% and your voice 7%.  Therefore, you need to be able to communicate through your body language as well as through your words. Most people across the organisation will not have access to the information that you possess.  You must therefore continuously communicate with everybody to help motivate people to achieve your company’s ambitions. Listening skills Your listening skills are also a vital part of communication.  These include asking people the right questions at the right time.  You need to actively listen to people to help them feel their worth in the organisation.  This often results in a huge impact on people’s performance. Active listening helps you to understand other people’s perspectives.  This also supports your decision-making and allows you to factor in a wider range of insights. You can assess your listening skills by trying to recollect what somebody has told you after a conversation. Why is storytelling so powerful? Storytelling is an essential form of communication as it helps to bring things to life.  People absorb information in different ways and may find it easier to relate to stories. Finance leaders need to adapt their communication to different audiences.  Most other people will not possess your level of technical ability or access to information.  Storytelling can help to bridge this gap. Showing vulnerability Vulnerability can be a great approach for building a connection with people.  This helps people get to know you better and portrays you as being more approachable.