Many of the courses we run at Aspire focus on people management. It’s not really a surprise considering we’re a soft skills training company – managing people is what we’re about. The thorny issue for many of us is those soft skills turn out to be quite hard to get right. They can be strangely elusive when you need them the most.

As managers, we need to be fair and more than that – we need to be seen to be fair. We are required to get high performance out of our teams and give “constructive feedback” if this isn’t happening, if the required targets aren’t being hit, for example. This is why businesses rely on standardisation and measurement, all of which are supported by processes to get things right.

It makes sense to manage people by the book, and if we were creatures of logic, that would be fine.

However, until the entire workforce is replaced by AI robots, we would do well to consider the bits of us that aren’t based on logic. And that’s where the soft skills come in. When logic fails, it’s usually because of the gut (instinct) or the heart (emotions). Neither of which is a forte of AI at present, and at least until quantum physics and spirituality crack the code of consciousness, I’m not holding my breath on that one….

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