Serious Soft Skills

Hosts Dr. Tobin Porterfield and Bob Graham talk about specific soft skills that fuel innovation and guide you when you are working in a group.
Bob Graham (‘0:00'): Coming up, we're going to talk about some specific soft skills that guide you when you are working in a group. That and more in just a few seconds.
Introduction
Graham ‘0:19': Welcome to Episode 7. It's already been a week. I'm Bob Graham and with me is Dr. Tobin Porterfield. We each teach college, we collaborate on researching soft skills, and we both have used and seen others employ soft skills over the course of our long careers. Not that long, but long. We think our experience and expertise give us a unique lens for looking at soft skills. We're going to show you that in the next few minutes.
Setting the Stage
Graham ‘0:56': Toby, let's talk about soft skills being used in groups. But before we do that, can you just set up where we are in this whole continuum. We have been doing this look at soft skills in various categories we created over the last couple of weeks.
Dr. Tobin Porterfield ‘1:08': We've got our four groups of soft skills. We started out in Episode 5 with Individual soft skills. We talked about loyalty and time management and others that you bring to work that are really internal and you need to have to operate successfully in the work environment. Then we moved outside the individual to those we call Nexus soft skills that help us interact one-on-one with others. In Episode 6, we talked about written and oral communication, patience, empathy, emotional and social intelligence, those types of things.
Sorting Out Your Soft Skills Inventory
Porterfield ‘1:51': I hope that as our listeners heard those and processed through some of those soft skills, they said some of those come naturally in me. Maybe there are others that you look at and you say that you don't even think about it. You already developed that skill, maybe it's making presentations or writing. You were just trained in it and you just have it as part of who you are now. To that, we say, that's great. We hope that you recognize those soft skills that you have and you use them. We hope you look at the others and say how can I build strength in those? How do I bring those into play? How do I make them part of how I naturally engage?
Soft Skills for Innovation
Porterfield ‘2:31': We are excited now to share some of these soft skills that really make a difference in groups. I was just thinking, if I have to be put on one more team at work, I am going to go out of my mind. It's all about groups and teams these days. Someone the other day said to me that when it comes to innovation in the academic world and in the classroom, you aren't going to lock yourself in a room and suddenly come out with a great idea of how you are going to innovate in the classroom. It's going to be in a group. It's going to be people bringing different experiences with technology, things they have done that worked and failed, but it's when a group brings things together.
When a group gets together and problem-solves, that's where our real innovation comes from.
Organizations that Work in Groups
Graham ‘3:15': You see that over and over. Look at NASA, a great example of an organization where you get a lot of people around the room to solve problems. Anyone who you meet who works at NASA will tell you that they have big teams that solve big problems and small problems. No one does it alone. We see that with SpaceX,