Soft Skills for “hard skilled” professionals

This is my first blog, by which I would like to introduce myself.
My name is Heiner Karst and I am an executive coach in Melbourne, Australia.
I coach and mentor senior business leaders and business owners through “forks in their road” related to their careers, their work and the balance in their life’s work.
I also groom IT and other professionals in enhancing their “soft skills” – one on one or in the classroom.
With over 55 years of life experience and 35+ years working in large corporates in Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia (as a CIO), over the last 5 years I have run my own business “Let’s Talk Coaching” as a consultant, coach and mentor.
Working with so many different people of different cultures, generations, professions and industries, I have learned so much and gained so much valuable experience that has helped me understand what a lot of people in “the business of life” are wrestling with.
Together with my clients we have recognised, pursued, found and implemented so many new perspectives and options that I am now blessed to have been able to write up and present in a range of training modules targeted at enhancing what I call “soft skills for professionals”.
My objective with this blog site is to progressively share that learning with anyone interested, hopefully to add value to what we all do, to invite comment, improvement, challenge and suggestions so that together we can vastly improve the confidence, professionalism, fun, achievement, success and outcomes we all seek in our endeavours in making business a better place to grow.
I plan to put out a blog each week and am extremely excited and very humbled that we can “make a difference” for and with each other this way.
However, I may as well start this one with the question I hear you asking: “what do you mean by soft skills?”
You may be more familiar with “interpersonal skills, or “social skills”, or “people skills” or “relationship skills”, some say “influencing or persuading skills”. All of these are relevant. If we refer to technical skills as “hard skills” then “soft skills” for me mean more the behaviour and attitudes we use to make us more relatable and able to communicate with ease with a broad range of people.
I am certainly talking about a range of self leadership, attitude, behaviour and coaching concepts from what I call my “rule book” and the specific topics of trust and respect, listening, diplomacy, advanced rapport and communication, negotiation, networking, skills that focus on “value add” and then some leadership skills around performance management, delegation, and a few “coping skills” around better management of tasks & priorities, meetings and what I call “reigning in the email monster”.

In the meantime I have collected all my blog articles from the past year in an easy overview index as follows:

Index of blog articles per month