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4 Social Skills You Need To Master Before Starting Your Business

Mary Ann Keeling

November 03, 2014

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You have decided to start your own business? Congratulations! You have an idea that might work, the company logo, the money to invest. But before starting doing business you need to master social skills, unless you are not going to do business with people, which is highly unlikely.

Leaders who excel at the social skills are great communicators. They can handle the bad news as well as the good news and they are experts at getting their team to support them and be excited about a new mission or project. Leaders who have good social skills are good at negotiating, dealing with change and resolving conflicts diplomatically.

The four basic social skills you need to acquire, in order to become a successful businessperson, are: communication, giving praise, negotiation and conflict resolution.

Communication

Communication is about message transfer. You need to be able to send your message accurately and choose the right way either verbal or non verbal. This means you should watch your language and body language. Speaking clearly and efficiently proposing your ideas is a must in modern society. Practice and prepare in advance when needed. Pay attention to your grammar and vocabulary and the tone of your voice. This is important in writing, too. Also if you want to do business, you need to make good impression so pay attention to your clothes and your body movements. Learning to read body language can be a real asset in a leadership role, because you will be able to determine how someone truly feels. Also, a good communicator is also an excellent listener. Listen actively your co-workers and your customers to make sure your business gets to the top.

Giving praise

A leader can inspire the loyalty of a team simply by giving praise, when it is earned. Learning how to praise others is a fine art, but well worth the effort. It is important to let people know that their work, no matter how far they are from the top, is important to the organization. It takes less than 10 seconds to say, "I appreciate the time and thought you put into this report. It is exceptional. Thank you." Not only your employees, but your business partners will appreciate appreciation.

Negotiation

It is inevitable that, from time-to-time, conflict and disagreement will arise.  Without negotiation, such conflicts may lead to argument and resentment resulting in one or all of the parties feeling dissatisfied. The point of negotiation is to try to reach agreements without causing future barriers to communications. Sounds difficult? It is. Negotiating skills can be learned and should be practiced. But before starting any kind of important negotiation, prepare yourself. Good negotiation leads to good results and win-win situation. However be prepared that negotiation is not always possible and sometimes, if not often, a conflict might arise during negotiation.

Conflict resolution

From time to time conflict is pretty much inevitable and leaders must know how to resolve conflicts between their team members, customers, or vendors. People have different interest and under the certain circumstances those differences might escalate to conflict. It is up to leader to resolve it and deal with it. In addition, a conflict can be constructive as long as it is managed and dealt with directly and quickly. A person needs to accept the differences between people in order to be able to resolve the conflict when it does happen, and also work to prevent it, and this will greatly contribute to a healthy and creative team atmosphere. When team members learn to see issues from the other side, it opens up new ways of thinking, which can lead to new and innovative solutions, and healthy team performance.

Being entrepreneur is not easy. But it becomes less difficult if you are aware of and you posses certain social skills. 

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