English for Master’s Course = Английский для магистрантов. Учебное пособие

C. Complete the sentences

1.Soft skills include …

2.Soft skills are important because …

3.You can develop your soft skills ….

4.You can learn soft skills …

5.You can highlight your soft skills …

6.You can demonstrate your soft skills …

Vocabulary and word study

Task 3. Read and analyze the words. Make sure you know their meanings:

empathy/ sympathy/ compassion to empathise/to emphasise empathetic/emphatic

wisdom/ wizardry anticipate/expect self-awareness/ self-consciousness soft skills/ hard skills/ social skill emotional intelligence (EQ) traditional intelligence (IQ)

to handle people to deride

akin to shortcoming to reside determination assertive blind spots

Reading and Speaking (1)

Task 4. Skim the article below. Does it contain any eye-opening information for you?

EMPATHY IS BETTER THAN WIZARDRY

When psychologists began to write and think about intelligence, they initially focused on cognitive aspects, such as memory and problem-solving. However, some researchers argued that so-called ‘soft skills’ are not to be ignored.

According to Rob Yeung, a business psychologist in the London office of Nicholson McBride, emotional intelligence (EQ)

– as opposed to traditional intelligence (IQ) – describes a set of abilities, competencies or so-called “soft” skills about how people manage themselves and relationships with others. There are five components, three of which relate to how you manage yourself: self-awareness (recognizing your own strengths and weaknesses and knowing how to compensate for them); self-regulation (being able to keep under control emotions such as anger and impulses such as acting without thinking and knowing when to be flexible and open to change); and motivation (having optimism and personal drive).

The remaining two components are concerned with handling other people: empathy (skill in “reading” the emotions and motivations of other people, and being able to anticipate their needs); and social skill (an ability to build and manage relationships with clients, customers, colleagues, etc.).

EQ seems to be in vogue at the moment but only the term itself is new – the concepts have been around for decades. There has been a growing realization that getting ahead is no longer about being a technical wizard or an intellectual genius. For example, it is commonly accepted that traditional IQ tests fail to predict job performance. Everyone can think of examples of boffins who never made it past middle management because they lacked the right personal qualities, even though they know the company’s products better than anyone else. Instead, it is people who are acknowledged to be charismatic, politically aware, open-minded and confident who are successful. EQ is simply a relatively recently label for this set of skills.

Tough business people almost always initially deride empathy as being unimportant to their roles. However, learning to sell more effectively to clients or customers requires an ability to read people’s feelings more accurately to know which buttons to push. An accurate understanding of your employees’ needs and feelings will help you to find the best way of motivating them to know how hard you can work them without breaking them. It’s difficult to imagine any aspect of a job which will not be affected by EQ. Within your own company, having a good sense of political awareness will help you to detect key power relationships and how to deal with conflict. Being self-aware and aware of others will help you to know when to forge ahead and when to take on board advice and give in. The list goes on.

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review by Daniel Goleman estimated that EQ is twice as important as technical skill or IQ in determining top-class performance. However, most people can’t apply these common-sense social skills as effectively as they might. It is akin to understanding the concept of playing a piano but being unable to produce a piece that is aesthetically satisfying. In addition, many people have very little awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses. For instance, there is typically a poor correlation between managers’ ratings of their own skills and the ratings given by their teams. You can only learn from your shortcomings if you are fully aware of them.

Emotional intelligence resides in a centre of the brain known as the limbic system, which is formed at birth – so a proportion of EQ will be determined in your infancy. However, the limbic system responds remarkably well to feedback, training and extended practice. In short, EQ is a set of behaviours that can be learned. Like any skill, EQ can be improved only with a great deal of time and determination. EQ training requires dedication because you may have to confront unpleasant realities – who finds it easy to admit that they are a poor team player or that they find it difficult to be as assertive as they need to be? Objective feedback on your performance and blind spots from someone outside of your business is vital – employees and colleagues often feel unable to be as honest about your failings as you would like them to be.

(extracted from an article by Rob Yeung, a business psychologist in the London office of Nicholson McBride; http://www.ecis.org/committees/newsletters/feb_00/ secJeb00.pdf )

A. Read the text again and answer the following questions:

1)What personal qualities does the word ‘intelligence’ refer to?

2)What skills are covered by the term IQ? What are people with high IQ called in the text? Why do they often fail to provide top class performance at work?

3)What two main types of personal skills does the term EQ embrace?

4)What soft skills help people manage themselves?

5)What soft skills help people manage their relationships with others?

6)What personal qualities does top class performance in management require?

7)Are EQ skills innate or acquired?

8)In what way is it possible to improve one’s EQ?

B. Find among the italicized words in the text synonyms for the following:

1)a connection between two things in which one thing changes as the other does

2)(informal) a scientist, especially one doing research

3)to move forward quickly; to make a lot of progress quickly

4)in fashion

5)to begin to have a particular quality, appearance, etc

6)similar to

7)a system of nerves in the brain involving several different areas, concerned with basic emotions

8)to mock

9)sth that a person tends to ignore or is unable to understand

Task 5. Make up all possible word combinations with the words from the frame with HARD and SOFT, explain their meanings. Complete the table (see the example):

ball, copy, core, cover, currency, disk, goods, hearted, research, sell, skills, ware

TOP SOFT SKILLS

The Workforce Profile defined about 60 “soft skills”, which employers seek. They are applicable to any field of work, according to the study, and are the “personal traits and skills that employers state to be the most important when selecting employees for jobs of any type.”

Task 6. Here are some job interview questions related to soft skills. Match the soft skills (a-i) with the questions (1-18):

Task 7. How many of the above-mentioned soft skills do you possess? Which of them would you mention in your CV as your strong points?

Supplementary Task:

Read the texts 8-10 in the SUPPLEMENT to learn more about soft skills and the ways to improve them.

Reading and Speaking (2)

Why do some people refuse to take soft skills seriously? What problems can people face in improving their EQ?

Task 8. Read the book review below and find out whether your answers have covered all the problems mentioned in it. Discuss the questions after the text:

THE HARD TRUTH ABOUT SOFT SKILLS

In her book The Hard Truth about Soft Skills a Fortune 500 communication and leadership coach, Peggy Klaus argues that soft skills get little respect but can make or break your career. Yet unfortunately, most people learn them the hard way! The author reveals why these core competencies are often ignored and brings their importance to life in 54 lessons that highlight how soft skills mastery can become the key to hard success. The lessons are organized into eight chapters, each covering an aspect in which soft skills play an especially significant role: career management, getting the job done, communication, handling critics, office politics, self-promotion, dealing with differences, and leadership.

During both one-to-one and group training sessions, Klaus continually encountered people who weren’t getting where they wanted to go at work. “Whether young or old, experienced or inexperienced, what struck me most about their stories of missed opportunities and derailed careers was this: Their problems rarely stemmed from a shortfall in technical or professional expertise, but rather from a shortcoming in the soft skills arena with their personal, social, communication and self-management behaviors.”

“As well, I kept hearing from managers and HR folks about employees – both those entering the workforce and those already on board – who were sorely lacking when it came to their soft skills,” notes Klaus.

1.In which aspect of business do soft skills play a particularly significant role?

2.What shortfalls usually account for people’s derailed careers?

3.How does ‘semantics’ account for people’s negligence of soft skills? How does the book by Peggy Klaus deal with this problem?

4.Comment on Klaus’s workplace lessons. Which of them did you appreciate and why?

Task 9. What “little things” should we always keep in mind to establish good business relationships? Read the text below and say whether you agree with the author, Larry Galler. What other “little things” can you suggest?

BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS DEPEND ON MANY “LITTLE

THINGS” AND ONE “BIG THING”

Growing, vital businesses are built on grand strategies. But having a grand strategy is just not enough. A grand strategy needs to be implemented and then constantly reinforced to maintain momentum; that is when the vastness of a grand strategy becomes difficult. Ultimately, most grand strategies boil down to relationships and relationships depend on the interaction between people – one-to-one.

There are many relationships, both internal and external in a business setting. These relationships exist whether they are consciously strengthened or unconsciously ignored. Either way they send a message about how one person values another. It makes sense that, in a business relationship, one should strive to create strong bonds. It makes working together easier and more pleasant, selling and buying faster and less stressful, managing smoother. Respect, ease of communication, more pleasant working conditions, faster flow of information, and easier negotiations all result from strengthened relationships. The bottom line is that it is easier to implement the grand strategy when people have strong, positive relationships inside and outside the company.

These one-to-one relationships depend on many “little things.” It is a personal note to a first-time client, a birthday card to a member of the staff, a congratulatory phone call or “high-five” to the salesperson who just won a key account (see

“personal note” above), a “welcome to our company” message to the new hire, a social event with a key vendor, a pizza party to a department that far exceeded its goals. Each relationship building “little thing” demonstrates personal respect, reliance, and caring as well as gratifying the recipient by being noticed.

“Little things” by themselves are just that – little. But they are like individual bricks that are joined with many other little bricks to create a wall. When the walls are joined with other walls, a strong structure is created. Use “little things” in the same manner – join them, brick-by-brick, into a culture that shows respect and caring. When those little bricks become walls that then become structures, the grand strategy becomes much more attainable... and it’s all built on “little things”... but don’t forget the mortar between bricks – the mortar is a smile – and that’s a “big thing!”

Task 10. How to say it:

POLITENESS

In business, as in life, you might have to say things that the other party does not want to hear. This is particularly true in negotiations. However, when we need to say difficult things, we need to be polite about it. We can “soften”/ “mitigate” blunt or straightforward utterances in the following ways:

1. Using WOULD (especially common), COULD, MIGHT

That is beyond our budget.

That would be beyond our budget.

We need more time to think it over.

We might need more time to think it over

This is a difficult situation for us.

This could be a difficult situation for us

Now try to soften these sentences using would, could, might:

1)The Director needs the meeting to begin at 5 pm.

2)We want you to sign the contract before the end of the month.

3)She expects you to give them a bulk discount.

By using a question form:

Examples: Would that be beyond our budget?