Importance of Interpersonal Skills

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Careers The Importance of Interpersonal Skills Emotional intelligence significantly impacts leadership success—and the bottom line. Patricia A. Wheeler, Ph.D. We’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating. Studies say 90 percent of executive failures are attributable to interpersonal competencies—factors such as leading teams, developing a positive work environment, retaining staff, inspiring trust, and coping with change. The message is clear—if you’re going to excel as a leader in any industry, you must master the “soft” skills. In healthcare management, where the basic unit of business is the person, these skills are even more important. If physicians on your staff are spending time replaying a conflict in their minds, their energy is directed away from patient care. If you lack the skills to motivate your frontline employees to accept and optimally use new information technologies, your organization could be missing revenue opportunities or negatively affecting patient outcomes. Emotional intelligence— however “soft” it seems—has a direct effect on aspects of the organization as concrete as patient safety, clinical outcomes, and profitability. Following is a closer look at the five critical interpersonal competencies. Knowing Yourself It sounds easy, but in fact self-knowledge is challenging for many executives. To truly know ourselves, we must become aware of our blind spots, those situations we don’t handle as well as we should for optimal business performance. For some leaders this involves failure to listen to others’ viewpoints, for some it involves making tough decisions with appropriate urgency, for others it concerns difficulty motivating their staff. Most people have a tendency to sweep their weaknesses under the rug. But this inevitably backfires because our weaknesses affect other people, whether we’re aware of them or not. Self-knowledge

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