Soft skills as a marginal advantage – tales from the Olympics

Victoria Penbleton

Back in the summer (remember that?) Britain was a very cool place to be. Not only were we hosting the Olympics but we were hosting them very well.

On top of that, we were doing well in the competition elements too – and no where more so than in cycling.  So what was it that made our cycling team so very successful?

It’s been widely reported (here, for example) that there was no one simple, single ‘magic bullet’ but instead the success was the result of the accumulation of a lot of little things – of what was called ‘Marginal Gains’.  A lot of them were simple common-sense things but they all added together, incrementally to mean we had a very high-performing team.

Wheels which give a two percent increase give a two percent increase: but wheels which give a two percent increase on another two percent increase from (say) a different saddle give a much, much bigger margin of improvement – obviously!

So it is with the soft skills of things like presentations training, time management, stress management and client relationship training. They’re not killer blows that flatten your opposition – instead they’re part of a subtle, incremental approach. Put together, they’ll make you better at what you do – and better than the other guys, too! 🙂

Let’s say you’re about neck-and-neck with another job candidate in terms of, say, how well you write your computer code… but you can talk about it and explain what you’re doing a little bit better than him/her… or perhaps your time management is fractionally better so you’re 5% more productive… you get the picture.

And to shift scale from the individual to the organisation, the same thing applies. If you’re customer service team is five percent better than the opposition’s and your staff are five percent happier (and therefor more productive) and there are fewer off with stress because you’ve provided training in how to cope with pressure… well… you get the idea, I’m sure.

In other words – just because soft skills are subtle (and it’s very hard to measure their impact directly) it doesn’t mean they’re not the thing that turns you from an Olympic finalist to and Olympic medalist, so to speak.