The success of a team is dependent on many things. A common vision and goals are central, helped by the ability to work as a team and to understand each other’s weaker areas and play to everyone’s strengths, and an open culture of constructive feedback. But a critical and often overlooked ingredient is the way in which individual staff members rise to expectations set by management. This will depend largely on each member of staff’s soft skills and the systems in place that ensure they continue to develop.
What are soft skills?
Soft skills are the skills, personal characteristics/traits and attitudes that help us get through every day. They play a significant part in how we respond to and make the most of opportunities that are presented to us, and they are fundamental to the way in which we develop relationships.
In the early years, the Characteristics of Effective Learning (CoEL) are the soft skills which help children to become life-ready, not just school-ready. We regularly plan activities, opportunities and environments that help them to develop and spend time pinpointing gaps in the CoEL which may be a barrier to future learning and development.
So, if we are aware of the critical importance of these skills and attributes in the lives of young children, why do so many settings overlook them when it comes to developing and supporting their workforce?
You may have seen them represented as a list of simple words, such as:
- critical thinking
- teamwork
- flexibility
- resilience
- negotiation skills
- communication skills
- leadership skills
- problem solving
Taken at face value, lists like the above don’t mean much – you don’t get a sense of how these skills make a difference to team morale, self-motivation, the use of initiative and the effectiveness of teamwork.
CoEL for adults
The impact of performance management activities is incredibly variable. Over the last eight terms, performance management has consistently appeared as one of the top five inspection concerns in the hundreds of Ofsted reports I have analysed from settings across the country. My work with settings would suggest that many leaders find it difficult to evidence that:
- one-to-one conversations with staff improve both the performance of the individual and the setting
- targets provide enough challenge and go beyond just providing staff with more knowledge
- underperformance is tackled at the earliest opportunity
- training or professional development opportunities have an impact on practice.
These issues are likely to continue into the future as there is a much keener focus on performance management in the Education Inspection Framework. Accoding to the Early Years Inspection Handbook, inspectors will be required to:
‘gather evidence of the effectiveness of staff supervision, performance management, training and continuing professional development, and the impact of these on children’s well-being, learning and development. This includes evidence on how effectively leaders engage with staff and make sure they are aware of and manage any of the main pressures on them’
‘consider how effectively senior leaders use performance management and their assessment of strengths and areas for improvement within the setting to provide a focus for professional development activities, particularly in relation to increasing children’s vocabulary and cultural capital’.
So, might the introduction of soft skills provide us with a way of quantifying what is working well and what needs to improve? Would the depth and quality of our feedback to staff be more effective if we were to use criteria that focuses on the skills, behaviour and attitudes which make a discernible difference to practice? For example:
- Does the staff member regularly seek out new information which continues to positively influence practice? (self-motivated learner).
- Do they take pride in their work? (sense of achievement).
- Do they think about solutions to problems rather than asking management to provide an answer? (critical thinking and problem-solving).
- Do they consistently check that their key children are regularly accessing all seven areas of learning? (attention to detail).
- Might practice improve if we change the language that we use to describe our expectations for practice? Or if we use soft skills in the criteria that staff use in peer-on-peer assessments:
- Is the staff member self-aware? And are they prepared to ask for help? (aware of own strengths and areas for development).
- Do they have an awareness of how their actions affect others?
- Are they adaptable, flexible and open to new ideas? (responds positively to change).
In recognition of the challenges I have seen in inspection reports and conversations I have had with managers about tricky staffing issues, I mapped the CoEL across to adulthood. My goal was to develop a performance management matrix that would:
- provide staff with something familiar
- identify behaviours and attributes that support any expectations that have been set for practice
- help settings to deliver aspects of practice with consistency and to sustain improvements.
I now use the framework (which I refer to as the Characteristics of Effective Performance ©) regularly in my work because it provides managers with a way of addressing all sorts of staffing issues, including frustrations such as those around treating resources with respect, turning up on time and getting staff to use their initiative.
None of this is rocket science, but it does need a significant investment in time to unpick the types of behaviours and attitudes you want to encourage across your team. It isn’t as simple as using words such as ‘good communication skills’ or ‘a problem solver’ – we need to be explicit about what we want to see; only then will staff know what it is that we are looking at and for.
I initially started with questions to support one-to-one discussions with staff, but over time I have seen greater impact on practice when we have included questions for personal reflection.
Should you choose to introduce soft skills, I recommend that they become an integral part of your performance management system and that they are assessed with consistency throughout the year. Why? Because our ability to use our soft skills may vary from week to week and month to month. They can be affected by things that are happening in our personal lives, our health and well-being, and previous or bad experiences.
Semi-regular reviews will ensure that behaviours and attitudes are consistently where you need them to be and that you are able to deal with any emerging issues before they become problematic.
Final thoughts…
Nancy Stewart wrote in How Children Learn, ‘…it is not enough for a child to have a particular skill or know some facts. These are of little value in the end without the desire, confidence, motivation and control to use them, and the mental abilities to look at something in a new way, link ideas together and plan and manage the ways forward.’
Nothing changes in adulthood; we still need to be able to apply what we know and understand in a meaningful way to our daily lives; therefore, if we don’t assess skills, behaviours and attitudes, we are likely to struggle with consistency of practice.
Playing and exploring (engagement) Finding out and exploring Playing with what they know Being willing to ‘have a go’ (Development Matters, Early Education, 2012) Self-motivated learner Example – Does the staff member regularly seek out new information which continues to positively influence practice? Willing to take calculated risks Example – Do they have the confidence to explore and experiment with familiar activities in order to turn them into new and exciting learning opportunities for children? Responds positively to change Example – Are they adaptable, flexible and willing to give something new a try? ]]
