A few months ago I wrote about the need for employees to develop their soft skills. Such skills sit alongside the academic qualification and expertise of employees. Without such soft skills, academic qualifications and technical expertise become an irrelevant asset.

I had highlighted the need for persons to have decision-making skills, communication and inter-personal skills and self-organisation skills. They need to have an appreciation of the financial dimension of every decision made. They need to be quality conscious and be customer centric. They need to have leadership skills and able to manage their resources well. They need to understand the objectives of the organisation where they work and what contribution they can make for those objectives to be achieved.

Today, I would like to add another dimension. One may learn communications skills or self-organisation skills. However, one’s ability to use those skills depends on one’s attitude, one’s mindset. Let’s be clear, skills matter and they matter a lot – both technical skills and soft skills.

One’s skill set is about what one can do. A person can prove that one has them. In the case of technical skills, one has certificates to prove the acquisition of such skills, while in the case of soft skills, one’s behaviour proves that one has them.

Mindset is something different. It has to do with what one thinks and believes. For example, for a person who has a customer-facing job, it is not just about putting on a nice smile or greeting a customer warmly. It has to do with the way one thinks and the way one thinks is highly influenced by one’s academic qualifications, technical expertise, soft skills and also by one’s personal experiences and natural instincts.

With the right mindset, an average person can become a star employee. With the wrong mindset, what looked like being a star employee becomes a problem employee

So going back to the example of a person having a customer-facing job, it is useless for that person to be able to greet one’s customers warmly if, deep down, one is not a trusting person. One may know all the rules of customer care but would still be unable to put them into practice if one has an instinctive dislike of people.

And this is what mindset is all about. It colours one’s way of thinking and, therefore, one’s behaviour. It is not a question of moods, which change according to circumstances. One’s mindset very often remains the same. Skills can be enhanced or acquired. However, mindset remains what it is.

One may ask why mindset is so important since an employee may have all the required skills and therefore, for a recruiter, would have ticked all the boxes. Moreover, it is known that it is very difficult to assess, let alone predict, mindset.

When employers are asked what they look for in an employee, they invariably speak of qualifications, experience and soft skills. Once they are confronted with the issue of mindset, they first stop to think and then they accept that they would rather employ a person with the right mindset and a lower skills set than the other way round.

We also need to appreciate that today CVs tell you very little, apart from the fact they all look the same since most persons use the Europass format. In any case, most persons have learnt that they need to have someone vet their CV before they send it. We also know that many people prepare themselves well for an interview and so manage to demonstrate their ability to communicate, to project good self-organisation, etc.

The distinguishing factor becomes mindset – the person’s attitude to do the job the right way. With the right mindset, an average person can become a star employee. With the wrong mindset, what looked like being a star employee becomes a problem employee.