James A. Runde

There are two different kinds of listeners. When you are working with clients, there are the people who listen to respond, and there are people who listen to listen. The person who listens to respond is basically the kind of person who can’t wait to get the microphone, and their sentence with the client or customer starts out, “Yes, but.” They’re basically an intellectual show … [ Read more ]

James A. Runde

What I’ve found is that in the recruiting process, soft skills are under-assessed. In other words, they’re not properly measured.

Once people get hired, they are often slow to be developed by the human resources people. Only when there is a problem, only when somebody gets passed over for promotion, does a person realize that they undervalued, underappreciated how much the soft skills were going to … [ Read more ]

James A. Runde

In the early phases of people’s career, the very first thing is adapting from the academic world to the business world. In the academic world, the teacher has the answer and is there to help you. In the business world, the boss is expecting you to come up with answer and you’re expected to help the boss, so everything’s turned on its head.