Social skills

With commencement exercises just around the corner for most colleges and universities in the country, I’m seeing mounting anxiety among the graduates-to-be, and their parents, about looking for a job. That includes preparing resumés and CVs, and looking for tips on how to conduct oneself during a job interview.

Unfortunately, there are no surefire formulas or recipes for landing a job because different jobs have different requirements. If you want to go into a job related to marketing, the employers will want someone more aggressive and persistent, compared to, say, a science research laboratory, where you want people who talk less, think and do more.

Smooth talk, power dressing and a slick resumé can get you a job, but it does not guarantee that you will keep the job. Eventually, the lack of fit—in Filipino, “hiyang”—will mean the employee leaving, on his or her own volition or, alas, by being fired.

I’ve just come from a workshop on academic leadership organized by the University of the Philippines for its faculty, and one thing I noticed, from several of the speakers—Singaporean, American, Filipino—were references to the need for universities to impart social skills to our students.

Competitiveness

Words like “empathy” were used, almost strange for an academic conference, but I wasn’t surprised. Last October the World Bank issued a report, “Enhancing Competitiveness in an Uncertain World,” which included a chapter on particular skills needed for today’s jobs. That chapter was based on surveys of employers on what they were looking for in prospective employees.

Three categories of skills were named: cognitive (for example, verbal ability, numeracy, etc.), technical (occupation-specific, for example, handling machines) and social/behavioral. The last category is especially interesting, and included openness to experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeability, emotional stability, self-regulation, perseverance, decision-making and interpersonal skills.

So much of labor productivity today—whether in manufacturing or in services—depends on the ability of people to work with each other.

This applies even to educational institutions where, ironically, you find some of the most unpleasant people. This is because, in the past at least, it was presumed that intelligent people had to be eccentric, at best your forgetful nerd who prefers to be alone, or outright disagreeable, the sort who pick fights with students and fellow faculty.

That is changing now because the ability to teach, and to mentor, is now shown to be tied to a professor’s social skills. A professor can be the best in his or her field, but if unable to pass on the skills to students, would defeat the rationale for being in a university.

One of the best lectures during the UP academic leadership workshop came from Prof. Joey Lapeña of the College of Medicine, who described the traits needed to be a good mentor: curiosity, courage and humility. You don’t usually hear professors, especially UP professors, talking about the need to be humble, but it makes sense: People who are humble make good mentors because they see life as a lifelong learning process. That makes them wiser, and better, mentors.

Early childhood

The World Bank report on competitiveness talks about how the development of social and behavioral skills need to start in early childhood because these skills become a platform for the child to develop cognitive and technical skills. A child who is open to new experiences, for example, is more likely to be creative, to be inquisitive.

There is irony, though, in the way early childhood education runs risks of stunting a child’s social and behavioral skills. Unfortunately, some parents push too hard about their children acquiring cognitive and technical skills as early as in nursery. A recent Dutch study, headed by Eddie Brummelman and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science last month, found that parents who overvalue their child—boasting that their child knows almost everything—run higher risks of developing a narcissist because kids pick up these inflated views.

The study was cleverly designed: Parents were asked if their children knew about certain “facts,” which included such bogus items as a “Beijing Revolution.” Overrating parents would answer “yes” even to these items.

That study was conducted because of an observation that narcissism has been increasing among Western youth. But I can see how we may be moving in that direction as well, even as we tackle an older problem of children who have low self-esteem. Traditional child-rearing in the Philippines tends to put down kids—for example, other people are told, in front of the child, that this particular one is not good in school or, more brutally, “bobo.” That creates a problem of low self-esteem that will affect the child all throughout school, and into his or her career.

The converse is also dangerous: A child who is raised to believe that he or she is smarter than everyone else. The trend has been to encourage children, so well captured by praise like “Good job!” But overdoing this can also be counterproductive, especially if it comes from a parent who is convinced that the child is the smartest kid in the universe.

The adverse consequences can be lifelong: Narcissists tending to believe that the world owes them the best. When they don’t get what they want, they fight, they demand. Good for you if you are independently wealthy and can afford to start your own business, but generally, even if you are exceptional, employers and work colleagues are not about to tolerate your belligerence.

Narcissists can actually get jobs easily because the initial impression they give is one of intelligence and self-confidence. But once they start work, they can become what management people call “emotional vampires,” sapping an office or organization of “blood” because they’re always putting down other people, and demanding more for themselves.

Social skills need to be instilled early in life, at home and in school. Some private schools even devote special attention to students who may have been born with problems like Asperger’s syndrome, and whose inability to read people’s emotions can lead to social awkwardness and an impression that they are narcissistic.

At the university level, there can still be a reversal of problems of low self-esteem, through nurturing professors who help students to discover and develop their strengths. It can be more difficult to reverse narcissism; in fact, students might still be able to make it through, even with honors, but will find it tough once they go out into the world.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph