Soft skills training

Last year was a great year for me. God blessed me immensely by something that I did not expect nor imagine. I closed the year with 329 talks, seminars and trainings. Even if I took off early and went with my family for our yearly vacation, invitations kept coming for talks, rallies, conferences and trainings that would occupy a great chunk of this New Year’s early months.

I reviewed the past different engagements and most of the events dealt with leadership and performance excellence trainings that are values-based and behavioral in nature. In other words, most of the talks delivered were centered on soft-skills.

This is what I discovered.

Employers can instruct employees to do a routine or a job so they can update their skills. However, employers cannot motivate, teach or train their employees to have a set of values and attitude that would have POSITIVE IMPACT on their coworkers, customers and in the organization.

The employees would have to discover and self-actualize all these. The basis for this behavior should best be acquired through outside sources or what HR people would term as third party intervention. There is a reason why.

Many times, employers cannot be effective in this area because employees behave like children in our homes.

Children refuse to listen to their parents, but would listen to their teachers basically saying the same things. This is why parents become frustrated and they turn coaching into sermon and this would turn the kids off even more. In their frustration, they scream and shout. When a parent screams and shouts, the children only hear the voice and not the words.

In the work place, a similar scenario takes place. Employers scream and shout through memos and restrictive office policies out of frustration. And when they do this, the employees comply because they are intimidated, but not because they are inspired.

An intimidated person would comply. Compliance simply means a child passing the test with a 75% grade. There is nothing significant, nothing noteworthy about it.

The job is done, but that’s all there is. An inspired employee is a creative person. And in an age of hyper-competition, we need to realize that sometimes all it takes is one idea, one suggestion, one creative moment from an inspired person that if applied and executed well, would save the business organization a lot in terms of expenses or even result to new businesses.

I smile every time high-positioned executives or employers would sit through my session and watch in amazement how I engage their people. And at the end of the session, my clients would say, “You know what Francis? What you said were exactly the same things we said and they refused to listen. But somehow, it’s different when you said it.”

I love my job! I am not alone in this. Even Jesus Christ Himself said, “Only a prophet is without honor in his hometown,” and guess what, Scriptures say, “and He was not able to perform many miracles there because of their unbelief.”

There is a need to train our people in the areas of leadership excellence, work values and skillful living. These are foundational compass points that would help direct our businesses and organizations in the direction of performing well in the uncertain and hyper-competitive world.

The younger generation is quickly populating our work establishments and seeks leaders who can inspire them to be better and be educated in the area of values living.

Give it to them. Change their lives and attitudes; this would also change your business.

(Start the New Year right with Francis Kong learning leadership and life skills as he present Level Up Leadership on Jan. 21-22 at EDSA Shangri-La Hotel. For further inquiries, contact Inspire at 09158055910 or call 632-6310912 for details.)