Can Soft Skills be taught and how?

When elaborating a Soft Skills course for the first promotion of EMDIEL - Executive Master of Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurial Leadership - at ESCP Europe, I wondered what content and how I could possibly teach that, and even wether it was teachable.

Then I read the interesting research by Robert A Baron and Gidon D Markman in which they demonstrate that one of the key social skills that enable an entrepreneur to successfully develop a new business is his/her ability to build efficient interactions with all kind of people, from associates to clients, providers, new contacts, friends&family, perfect strangers .... the very wide quantity of persons with whom an entrepreneur might interact, everywhere, everyplace and everyday, in order to build prototypes, create a community, engage new resources, and progressively develop new opportunities.

And that is teachable! We can definitely learn how to build efficient interactions.
We even have models and tools for that. One of them is the Process Communication Model, that I particularly like for its efficiency, simplicity and insight.
So I decided to base my 8 hours course on the Process Communication Model, and make them practice and experiment efficient interactions, developing their ability to switch from one channel/perception to another, to identify the signals of miscommunication and quickly adapt, and to understand the links between psychological needs and distress sequences...

Next time, I will probably also include a workshop on Listening. Maybe another one on Intuition. And another one on our fears and remedies...
In the end, I realize that soft skills are a vast and entertaining field, where experimentation and dialogue are fundamental, inviting us to invent a new way to teach and learn.

Ideas, Comments or Questions ? +33 6 99 68 82 21