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Soft Skills in SCM
Soft Skills in SCM
1) Communication:
Technology can aid communication, but it still requires you to make use of text or the
spoken word. The ability to communicate appropriately, depending on context and the
nature of the audience, should always be the top priority in soft-skills development,
critical as communication is for building and managing positive relationships.
2) Interpersonal Skills:
This goes hand-in-hand with communication, but covers a broader scope. Interpersonal
skills enable people to know what type of communication is appropriate and when.
Interpersonal skills also relate to the way you interact when working with others. They
encompass qualities such as tact, diplomacy, and team-working, as well as extending
into the art of good leadership.
3) Observation and Listening:
I have grouped these two skills together with good reason. Whenever you’re not actively
engaged in interpersonal interactions, watching and listening to what’s going on around
you is the best way to learn and develop. Like communication, technology can help you
to watch and listen, but it can’t force-feed you with information. You must have the desire
to see and to hear.
Isn’t Leadership a Soft Skill Too?
Perhaps you’re wondering why I haven’t really mentioned leadership skills in this list of
soft-skills development priorities. I offer two good reasons for this:
Firstly, communication, interpersonal skills, observation and listening are all areas that
every supply chain professional should focus on developing. Not everyone wishes to
take on a leadership role though.
Secondly, good leadership makes extensive use of all the skills mentioned above,
which should therefore be developed to an advanced level before leaders start thinking
about their other soft-skill development-needs.
2. Reference
Traditionally, the supply chain literature has been geared towards hard
skills including functional and technical skill sets with limited discussion of
soft skills. Therefore, the purpose of our study was to assess and explore
the demand for soft skills in the supply chain management (SCM) arena.
Our study has utilised a mixed methods approach in two phases, with the
first stage including a questionnaire distributed to 120 supply chain
employees in the UK, followed by six interviews with supply chain experts
in the UK.
The supply chain skills indicated the need for a balance of both hard skills
(functional) as well as soft skills (relational) in order to manage global
supply chains.
In the last 20 years there has been a growing emphasis towards ‘softer’
aspects of supply chain skills, whereby, soft skills have been defined as
abilities and traits that pertain to personality, attitude, and behaviour rather
than to formal or technical knowledge.
However, the tendency in the supply chain research agenda was towards
hard skills, as these were regarded more attributable to employers’ needs.
Hard skills were interlinked with functional and management skills, such as
inventory management, transport management and logistics service
management.
Our findings indicated that the changing supply chain scope encourages
the requisition and development of different supply chain soft skills with
varied levels of emphasis in relation to 15 soft skills identified in the
literature: Problem solving (PRO); Planning skills (PLN); Flexibility (FLX);
Organisational skills (OSM); Communication skills (COM); Time
management (TIM); Motivation and enthusiasm (MAE); Stress
management (SSM); Initiative (INI); People management (PEM);
Collaborative learning (COL); Teamwork (TEW); Leadership skills (LES);
Management of complexity and change (MCC); Negotiation (NEG).
The intersection between people and technology was high on the agenda
at the recent ProcureCon Europe conference in Prague. CPOs from across
Europe shared their strategies on automation, making intelligent use of
data and leveraging the latest technology.
But it was the human impact of using such tools that tied these
conversations together. The future of work may be highly automated, but it
also makes uniquely human qualities – those softer and more relationship-
based skills – even more important. Here are some of the event’s
takeaways…
When trying to get internal stakeholders to embrace digital tools, you need
to sell the personal benefits. Zsolt Szeker, head of telecom & IT solutions
procurement at Nokia, said that during implementation his team used the
message: “We want to give you an hour to spend with your family, and less
time dealing with data.” BMW procurement director Bodo Bokaemper
added: “Simplicity should be the focus, so you shouldn’t have to convince
people – my ambition is to have no training and no manuals [when
implementing a new tool].”