One of the most important questions I've ever learned to ask myself is: "Why did I think they would know that?" How often have you found yourself frustrated that someone acted on incorrect or incomplete information? Have you ever stopped and asked yourself that question? Why did you think they knew that?

It can be surprisingly difficult to think from someone else's perspective, especially if we don't force ourselves to do it regularly, but this is exactly what good communication relies on. Often, we think we've communicated everything fully and clearly because we know what we're trying to say. But that doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have your specific perspective and experiences will understand your meaning.

This is the trick of soft skills. It's just so easy to think "Yes, of course I know how to communicate, I've been doing it for years." And if we're honest, we probably don't want to consider the possibility that the way we've been communicating all this time hasn't been great. It's only natural to avoid looking at our own faults, but that's exactly what we have to do to improve.

The hard skills of our day-to-day work are well-honed every day when we use them. My own instructional design skills grow sharper with every course I complete, just as an accountant improves with every year end closing cycle and a technology professional learns something new with each installation or service disruption.

But soft skills are different. Skills like the 4 Cs of the 21st Century - Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking — are all at risk of losing their edge if not purposefully sharpened. When was the last time you evaluated your own soft skills or made a purposeful effort to improve them?

Communication

One aspect of my day-to-day work is providing feedback on marketing materials to promote our HFTP Academy courses. When I say, "This social media graphic isn't right," I know exactly what I mean. If I add more detail with: "The heading is the wrong font and this image doesn't work," I still know exactly what I mean with this feedback. But have I communicated that clearly to the marketing manager? If I haven't, how can I be upset when the next draft has changes that I didn't want? Why did I think they would know what I wanted? Now everyone is frustrated because we've gone through an entire cycle of revisions that got us no closer to the final draft.
Communication is the most powerful tool any of us can wield. Being clear and straightforward from the beginning, like clearly stating the exact font that should be used and why, can prevent wasted effort and frustration later, like needless extra drafts.

Collaboration

On the other side of the same coin, listening carefully and without judgement opens the door to productive and meaningful work, especially in collaborative environments. Working with a team to accomplish a shared goal can be tricky to navigate, and again, it takes practice and concentrated effort to do well. Collaboration requires a careful balance of per-sonalities, focusing on the strengths of each individual in a way that lifts the entire team to success, without allowing the weight of the project to fall on one set of shoulders.

Let's consider that same social media campaign. As the designer of a course, I have intimate knowledge of each course and what skills it teaches and how. But that doesn't make me good at marketing the course. It takes a purposeful collaborative effort, and it requires trust on all sides. I trust that the marketing team knows what will grab the right audience's attention, and they trust I've designed a course that delivers what they're promising in the promotional piece. When we can acknowledge the expertise we each bring to the team, we can create a final product that delivers a real impact.

Creativity

In an industry that is constantly evolving and innovating, the ability to think creatively can make all the difference when facing novel challenges. As Henry Ford famously said, "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got." In other words, sticking to the same approach will only yield the same results. Like any other skill, creativity takes practice and finesse, but most of all, it takes a willingness to try something new, to fail and to learn from that failure.

Yes, we could have used the same marketing graphic that we used for the last course announcement. It would have been faster and saved us several rounds of iteration, but what would that saved time and effort earn us in return? Likely the same solid results as last time, but when we're willing to try something new, we open the door to even better results. Our target audience might scroll right past something familiar, but a fresh approach catches their eye and draws them in.

Creativity itself is not limited to the obviously creative tasks, like graphic design for marketing. It's easy to mislead yourself into thinking that creativity has no place in your hard-skill focused job, but the truth is that every single job requires an element of creativity, whether it's a traditional style of artistic creativity or simply taking a creative approach to solving problems, like addressing an increase in system downtime.

Critical Thinking

Thinking critically is more than simply questioning everything. Critical thinking requires a deep understanding of our own biases and fallacies. It's easy to believe that you're a critical thinker, while you're actually falling for common cognitive biases.

We're all guilty of seeking out the information that supports the conclusions we've already drawn. If a course doesn't immediately sell as well as we anticipated, my first instinct is to defend the course design. After all, I put a lot of work into it. But critical thinking means stepping back and asking: Is my attachment to this work preventing me from seeing legitimate gaps?

What am I missing because I'm too close to it? This is when I need to drill down to the root cause to find the correct solution.

The HFTP

The only way to sharpen these soft skills is to work at them consciously and with purpose, whether that's through daily self-reflection like asking "why did I think they would know that?" or through structured learning like the HFTP Academy's 21st Century Skills micro-credentials. Because in today's business climate, full of rapid change, those who commit to developing these skills will have gained a competitive edge.