
Bite-size question
Bite-size question
A two-hour module on social skills for networking can help microentrepreneurs to improve interpersonal interactions and business performance as a result. By contrast, a one-day session focusing on social skills and customer care doesn’t seem to lead to any positive effects.
Starting and running a business necessarily involves lots of interpersonal interactions, including serving clients, negotiating with providers, managing employees and connecting with peer business owners, among others.
Social skills have been found to be valuable in jobs that involve teamwork and high levels of interpersonal interaction. Therefore, they’re also likely to be useful for business owners and managers, given that building effective connections is part of the recipe for successful entrepreneurship.
Interpersonal or social skills refer to communication and relationship-building competencies that are needed to have effective interpersonal interactions. Communication competencies include active listening, oral, written, assertive and non-verbal communication. Relationship-building competences include cooperation, coordination, trust, intercultural sensitivity, service orientation, self-presentation, social influence, negotiation and conflict resolution.
Under the assumption that social skills are only partly innate and can also be learned, interpersonal skills training has been gaining interest as a way to boost business performance through improving how business managers interact with their stakeholders.
Microentrepreneurs
Interpersonal interactions, business performance
This summary is based on experimental evaluations of the following programmes and tweaks: