Soft skills are critical across nearly all organizations- team behaviors,  management skills, communication capabilities, group problem solving, group decision making, personal effectiveness, emotional judgment, outlooks,  response and use of power,  conflict resolution and on and on.  With the increase in generational issues, diversity of cultures in organizations and pace of change, soft skills will increasingly get more important.

Organizations spend billions overall in training programs - some with good returns and others with little or none.  

One Issue: It's very hard to effectively address and improve soft skills with generic training but this is still the most common practice.  Self-awareness is a critical,  often ignored element. It is key to effective soft skills.   Too often organizations address this with the personality profiling tools of the past which put people into one of 8, 16 or 32 categories which muddy the water and focus on typing a person rather than identifying underlying behavior patterns or competencies.   Sometimes, we see the memory of some of these experiences, preventing anything being done with self-awareness.

From our perspective, organizations could greatly improve their existing employee and leadership development efforts by focusing first on self-awareness and then on using that data and awareness to build soft skills rather than to push people into generic soft skills training with questionable long-term benefit.  Its one of the most powerful areas to put data analytics to work although to some this concept is counter-intuitive.   This self-awareness comes now from behavioral assessments providing data that is both ipsative and normative and also specific to the job the person is in. Additionally feedback  from others from well-conceived 180/270/360 reviews or new technologies that look at network dynamics should accompany these metrics.