Are you a good listener?  Do you apply active listening?  Do you think more about what you are going to say than what the other person is saying?  Are you easily distracted and only listen when the flow of conversation meets your agenda?  If you were asked:  Which interpersonal communications skill is most important in business? What would your response be?  Certainly, a well crafted verbal approach would be most beneficial to most businesses, right?  Actually, no…the most important communication skill in  business is LISTENING.

Unfortunately, most professionals are lacking in this skill and it is critical to every business; both internally and externally.  In fact, a recent survey of the academy of Certified Administrative Managers asked which managerial skill was “super critical” to business.  The overwhelming response was “active listening”.  Surprisingly enough it was followed by the ability to give clear and effective instructions, accepting responsibility and identifying problems.

Administrators and managers need to actively listen to their employees in order for proper discourse and feedback to occur.  Sales and marketing professionals need to actively listen to their clients and prospects to determine needs and create relationships.  Active listening will also enhance our personal lives as well; since nothing demonstrates care and concern as does effective listening to friends and loved ones.  Listening is a skill which is vital; but is much neglected.  Most of us are not good listeners.  We have become conditioned to filter and apply passive listening skills – which will limit our success in both business and personal aspects.

Effective listening is becoming a big business.  There are countless consulting groups and seminars which focus exclusively on the process of listening.  Did you know there is actually an International Listening Association?  It has members from several countries and promotes effective listening through the exchange of information, methods, experience and materials.  This group is pursuing research on further development of active listening techniques and their application.

How can you become a better listener?  In a book published by the American Management Association; the Ten Golden Rules of Listening are as follows:

• Look at the speaker
• Question the speaker to get clarification
• Show concern about the speakers feelings
• Repeat occasionally to confirm
• Don’t rush the speaker
• Have poise and emotional control
• Respond with a nod, a smile or a frown
• Pay close attention
• Don’t interrupt
• Keep on the subject till the speaker finishes his or her thoughts

Some of these seem very simple – but the next time someone is speaking to you; see how many you neglect or apply.  Changing our behaviors and attitudes is the only way to improve our listening skills.

Well, if you want to achieve lasting business success; you should possess both. What do we mean by hard skills and soft skills? Why are such skills so important and vital to both personal and company performance? Why are soft skills harder to develop than hard skills? Which is more important?

A good example would be as follows: Bob has a very important sales appointment with a prospect which could bring much success to his company. He has prepared diligently and has all his facts and numbers ready. His presentation is professional, well versed and persuasive. However, when his client arrives for the meeting a half hour late; Bob demonstrates his disappointment by displaying a negative and impatient attitude which undermines his presentation and leaves the client with skepticism about his ability to handle conflict and change. Bob loses the deal. All of his work and preparation (hard skills) was defeated by his lack of (soft skills) – in essence a lack of understanding and consideration.

This gives us a good opportunity to define the two: Hard Skills – are technical or administrative procedures related to the organization’s core business.  They are easy to observe and quantify. It is relatively easy to teach hard skills through a formal training approach. Computer skills would be considered hard skills. Bob’s research and technical data can be interpreted as hard skills. His education and training helped him to develop those skills and he applied them in his presentation. They would also include such abilities as working with spreadsheets, operating machinery or speaking a foreign language. Soft Skills – are sometimes referred to as people skills. They are not easy to quantify and are sometimes best described as intangibles. They can include any or all of the following principles: professionalism, optimism, common sense, responsibility, sense of humor, integrity, time management, motivation, empathy, leadership, communication, good manners, sociability and the ability to teach.  Although hard skills are more tangible – it is usually quite easy to identify someone with strong soft skills since they possess a natural ability to work effectively with others. While hard skills can be obtained over a definitive period of time – say through a class or seminar; soft skills can take a lifetime to develop and demonstrate consistently. Soft skills are obtained through life and personal experiences. Most people either begin to develop soft skills long before they start a career or are hindered by the lack thereof.

Everyday in business we can see how a fine balance of both is probably the best scenario. A professional who has a good technical grasp of things but still possesses good interpersonal skills will be a more effective employee both internally and externally. If Bob had applied soft skills to control his emotions and exercised more patience with his client – he would have closed the deal.  So are soft skills more important than hard skills?  Probably not – since demonstrating one without the other will not be an effective way of handling clients and coworkers.  We have all encountered people with a great deal of knowledge; yet they seem to possess little or no people skills. We have also witnessed the other side of the equation where a person is not knowledgeable but puts on a good image and through their personality they appear confident but aren’t. The point is that the most successful professionals seem to have a balance of both soft and hard skills. They are both knowledgeable and personable.  It is often said that hard skills will get you an interview but you need soft skills to get and keep the job.

If corporate crises were a game, the Toyota safety recall would be a Superbowl contender.

Toyota Motors is a company that heavily promotes its engineering innovation, production quality and service reliability.  In a haymaker blow to Toyota’s reputation, the company suspended production and sales of eight of its most popular models — including America’s (previously) best-selling car, the Camry.  And now Toyota is recalling millions of already-sold cars worldwide to fix a potentially life-threatening problem: unintended acceleration.

(Disclosure: I have a personal stake in this story: I own a second-generation Toyota Prius.)

This week Toyota began shipping parts to dealers across the country to correct an accelerator problem that could lead to cases of disastrous unintended acceleration.  The Toyota problem is so serious the automaker stopped production and sales on eight of its top-selling models — including the Camry, the best-selling car in the U.S.  The scope of the problem is staggering: I’ve seen stories on the web sites of European, Japanese, South African, Canadian and Israeli newspapers.  Toyotas sold in China have also been implicated.

I always judge a company’s handling of a crisis by what I call the Tylenol Standard.  Back in 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were the best-selling over-the-counter pain reliever in the United States.  Then, seven people in the Chicago area died; they had all been taking the drug.  J & J jumped into action with an approach that is taught in business schools to this day.  The company suspended all production of Tylenol immediately.  It recalled the 31 million bottles of Tylenol then on store shelves, destroying all the medication that was returned.  It launched a rigorous inspection of all its manufacturing facilities. And, Johnson & Johnson made top officials readily available to the media where their story was: “We don’t know how this happened.  We will find out and correct it.  Meanwhile, do not use any of our products that you have at home; return them immediately, and report any adverse effects from our medication that you have already taken.”

The company’s response was fast, comforting and took a page from the Harry Truman adage: “The buck stops here.”

As it turned out, the buck did not stop at Johnson & Johnson.  The Tylenol deaths were murders, not the result of accidental contamination.  Someone had tampered with some Extra-Strength Tylenol boxes in drug stores around Chicago. The killer opened the packaging and the bottles, inserted potassium cyanide into the capsules and then resealed everything and put the product back on the shelves.  Police and FBI theorized the killer had a specific target in mind but killed others in order to make his intended victim look like a random casualty in a series of accidental poisonings-by-contamination.  (The case remains unsolved to this day, possibly because the intended victim never took the contaminated drug.)

Within a year, Extra-Strength Tylenol had regained its position as the country’s top-selling pain killer.   Unfortunately, the Toyota brass must have cut class in business school the day they taught the 1982 Tylenol lesson.

Toyota was late to the table with an admission that there was, indeed, a problem and slow with information to the media (and through the media to the millions of Toyota owners worldwide).  This sowed the seeds of confusion and resulted in a serious erosion of trust in the company.

Toyota’s worldwide president, Akio Toyoda, grandson of the company’s founder,  made no statements to the media and no apologies to customers until a crew from NHK, the Japanese TV network cornered him at the World Economic Summit in Davos the last week of January.  This reclusive behavior despite the fact that the issue has gained massive media attention since last August when an off-duty California Highway Patrol officer and three family members burned to death after crashing a runaway Lexus they had borrowed from a dealer in San Diego.  The company’s U.S. president, Jim Lentz, was also noticeably absent from the media until February 1, when it was time to announce the fix.  Then he began a media blitz explaining the problem and the repair, a belated attempt to restore Toyota’s battered image.

But wait, there’s more, as the infomercials say.  If you look at the list of cars being recalled for the accelerator fix (below) you’ll notice that the Lexus in which Highway Patrol officer  Mark Saylor died — a 2009 ES — is not on it.  That’s because those cars — and many other Toyota-made cars, including my Prius — were subject to an earlier recall, back in November, 2009.  In that recall, the Lexus accelerator pedals were shortened so they could not be trapped under the floor mat — the ostensible cause of Officer Saylor’s accident. (For the Prius, I was just told to remove the mat — which I had already done.  It still sits in my trunk awaiting the promised “permanent fix.”

But at the same time as the mat matter was being handled, Toyota was aware that for six years both the company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been looking into multiple cases of unintended acceleration and that the mats were unlikely culprits in all of them.  In its autumn response, Toyota tried to sweep the more basic accelerator problem under the floor mat problem.  In fact, in November, Toyota put out a press release misrepresenting the NHTSA’s conclusions about the floor mats and had to issue another press release correcting the first one.  But neither press release acknowledged that unintended acceleration might have been caused by anything other than misplaced or mismatched floor mats.

So there were two problems and initially Toyota tried to conflate the simpler problem (the mats) with the more serious problem (the accelerator mechanism).  The mat recall affected 3.8 million vehicles and despite the fact that NHTSA told Toyota that mat removal was at best an interim solution, no long-term solutions has been reached for many of those recalled cars.  The faulty accelerator affects 4.6 million vehicles, some of which were previously involved in the mat recall (with the attendant danger that owners who addressed the mat problem will now think the entire problem solved.)

Here is a list of the cars in the current Toyota recall.

• 2009-2010 RAV4

• 2009-2010 Corolla

• 2009-2010 Matrix

• 2005-2010 Avalon

• 2007-2010 Camry

• 2010 Highlander

• 2007-2010 Tundra

• 2008-2010 Sequoia