Development of Soft Skills

The concept of “soft skills” usually involves such abilities as leadership, communications, team-building, negotiations and emotional intelligence. As in case with creativity and entrepreneurship competencies, soft skills neither can be acquired cognitively. Rather, their acquisition requires development of self-knowledge – through reflection and through feedback from others (Allio, 2005). Similarly, a great deal of learning occurs through transference – from one human being watching another (Cacioppe, 1998; Dugan & Komives, 2007). Understanding one’s personal limits and reflecting on how personal horizons can be widened constitute the basis of developing the soft skills. Thus, Dugan, and Komives (2007) include in their leadership model consciousness of self – being self-aware of the beliefs, values, attitudes, and emotions that motivate someone to take action; being mindful, or aware of one’s current emotional state, behavior, and perceptual lenses. Cacioppe (1998) states that leadership programs should help students to improve self-knowledge and self-worth.

Soft-skills are closely interconnected. Working on developing one ability, for example, leadership, requires the development of other soft abilities such as team-building and interpersonal skills. Dugan and Komives (2007) introduce the seven C’s model of leadership development in University students; among others, one of the components of the model is collaboration which means having shared aims and values with the group and involving others in building a group’s vision and purpose, and another component is citizenship meaning that leaders should recognize fundamental realities of any creative effort: civility differences in viewpoint are inevitable and must

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be aired openly with civility. Taking into account the importance of team-building and collaboration skills in leadership development, Cacioppe (1998) proposes strategic team projects which usually involve four or eight participants working on a real organizational project defined by senior management. A senior manager is usually a project sponsor and the team is ultimately carrying out this project on their behalf.

Projects usually involve gathering of data, interviewing staff or customers, understanding a part of the business that is important strategically and implementing or making recommendations to a panel of senior managers and outside panel members.

Such projects help improve interpersonal abilities and team-building abilities;

participants feel that their ideas and input to the program are valued and worth-while which helps them to experience some improvement in skills and abilities as a leader.

Kass and Grandzol (2011) discuss the development of leadership in the MBA students by introducing in the MBA curriculum an intensive, outdoor training component (OMT) called Leadership on the Edge. OMT places individuals and groups in challenging, unpredictable, but safe outdoor environments for learning, risk-taking, decision-making, and skill development. The authors statistically demonstrated the value of OMT as a tool for leadership development. Over the course of a 14-week academic semester, MBA students who participated in OMT showed greater improvements in leadership practices than those in a classroom only setting. A similar approach is used by Dobson, Frye, and Ravi (2013) who implemented a program of Peer-Led Team Learning in two core courses of the MBA curriculum. The program combines leadership training with practical hands-on application of the ideas taught, and provides for an effective feedback loop. Hobson, Strupeck, Griffin, Szostek, and Rominger (2014) also place a great emphasis on team-work for developing leadership and study the effect of an MBA course where videotaping of student teams was taking place followed in each instance by peer coaching sessions and written instructor feedback. The authors demonstrate that this approach can be successful in teaching teamwork and team leadership behavioral skills to MBA students.

Winstead, Adams, and Sillah (2009) present a curriculum that has been implemented in the business program to enhance and balance students’ soft skills with their intellectual development. The Leadership and Professional Development Program (LAPD) is designed to equip students with the soft skills necessary to

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successfully advance in their careers as responsible corporate and community citizens. The LAPD model is based on leadership and accountability training and has the following elements: 1) leadership and professional development courses; 2) experiential learning; 3) Executive Speaker Series where student hear lectures on real world experiences from corporate leaders; 4) Leadership development workshops.

Boyatzis et al. (2002) discuss an acquisition of cognitive and emotional intelligence competencies by MBA students. They use graduating data from six full-time and three part-full-time cohorts taking an MBA program designed to develop these competencies and compare it to baseline data on two full-time and two part-time cohorts. Their results show that there was a dramatic improvement over time in cognitive and emotional intelligence of MBA students from different cohorts. The authors suppose that these changes were attributed to some components of the MBA program that changed and were not in place in the earlier program. Particularly, a course on leadership development and assessment which uses self-directed learning theory was added; a focus on specific competencies in selected courses while addressing course material, such as the marketing course that assessed students on the presentation skills or the operations management course using group projects assessing their group process competencies; a dramatic increase in the percentage of courses requiring field projects in companies, group work and student collaboration; and opportunities to participate in voluntary activities.

In their study Blaszczynski and Green (2012a) review the existing literature and present different strategies for developing soft skills. They especially emphasize the skill-building process model which consists in introducing the skill to be developed, explaining and/or demonstrating how the skill is developed, practice the skill with instructor guidance, and reinforce the skill based upon evaluation. Once students understand how soft skills are developed, activities for developing soft skills will be more meaningful to them. Regarding the activities to develop soft-skills, such as listening, interpretation, leadership, followership, communication, collaboration, work ethic, reflection, detail orientation, and presentation confidence, Blaszczynski and Green (2012b) recommend pyramid building activity for developing the communication skills, reflection journal activity, listening activity, "What's on a penny?" activity, the line-dancing activity, etc.

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Within assessment measurements of soft skills, these authors underline pre-test/post-test; rubrics (checklists, role plays, logs, journals, reflections); semantic analysis with online free-form text (assessment of soft skills though student reflections submitted online in free-form text: the responses are analyzed in terms of autonomy, belief in public service, self-regulation, and commitment); and portfolios:

communication should be assessed based on written, oral and nonverbal basis; time management – through student activity log, prioritization lists and projects diaries;

conflict management – through reflective essay, group discussion audio recording, role play video recording; stress management – through stress journal, case analysis, management game video recording.