Developing your soft skills is crucial if you're an entrepreneur. Discover the 6 key skills you should focus on and our tips on how to strengthen them.
Starting a business is exciting, but it’s also challenging. Like many entrepreneurs, you’re likely focusing on creating and marketing your products or services.
However, it’s essential not to overlook the importance of your skills as an entrepreneur. The abilities that often make or break a business are things like how you work with people, make decisions and adapt to change.
These are your soft skills, which are your personal qualities that support you in leading teams, navigating obstacles, and interacting effectively. Nowadays, soft skills are just as important as technical expertise.
In this blog, we’ll delve into what soft skills are and the 6 key ones you should focus on developing as an entrepreneur.
What Are Soft Skills?
While hard skills are the types of abilities you need to complete a job, soft skills are the personal attributes, habits and social abilities that shape how you approach interactions with others and tackle challenges.
For entrepreneurs, soft skills can help you inspire your team, negotiate with partners, adapt to change, and make better decisions. These are all essential aspects of building a sustainable business.
At Tramshed Tech, we offer skills programmes, including our Swansea programme and our partnership with the Big Learning Company. These provide tailored support to help you strengthen these essential abilities and apply them in your business.
6 Soft Skills for Entrepreneurs & How to Develop Them
Now that you understand what soft skills are, let’s explore the 6 most important soft skills for entrepreneurs and how you can develop them:
1. Communication
Business is all about talking to people. To be an effective communicator, it’s vital to be clear, persuasive and actively listen to others.
.jpg)
Communication is a key soft skill you should develop, as business is all about communicating effectively with others.
A helpful way you can develop your communication skills is to practice public speaking. It’s challenging to speak clearly and concisely in front of large groups of people, which is why once you tackle this, your communication skills will greatly improve. It can be quite daunting to begin with, so focus on speaking up more in team meetings and later progress to presenting in workshops or local meetups.
Before you begin speaking, ensure you have a draft of what you’re going to talk about. To help with this, you can use AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to make your message clear and concise for your audience. It’s also valuable to gain feedback from others on your presentation to know where you can improve.
2. Leadership
As an entrepreneur, you’re automatically a leader, but true leadership is about inspiring, motivating, and guiding people.
Strong leadership skills will allow you to build trust, foster a culture of collaboration and set clear goals. This will improve your team’s performance, enhance your employees’ satisfaction and allow you to scale your business.
To be a great leader, it can be helpful to mentor others. By practising being a leader, you’ll be able to refine your leadership style while providing real impact.
To start guiding your team with confidence today, join our skills programmes to build your leadership abilities through hands-on workshops and real-world team challenges.
3. Adaptability
Businesses often face lots of changes. Being adaptable to these changes is a key soft skill you should be developing.
It will allow you to pivot when circumstances out of your control occur, anticipate challenges and remain calm under pressure.
To develop adaptability, you can do any of the following:
- Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone: Take on difficult projects outside of your general knowledge to build flexibility and confidence in unfamiliar situations.
- Stay Updated: Spend some time each month learning about industry trends, technological developments, and your competitors' moves to anticipate changes before they happen.
- Practice Scenario Planning: To make unforeseen circumstances seem less overwhelming, map out likely problematic scenarios and come up with solutions.
4. Problem-Solving
Problem-solving isn’t just about finding solutions to issues; it’s a mindset for approaching obstacles creatively and efficiently.
To problem-solve in a more efficient way, break problems down into small, manageable chunks. This makes them easier to tackle step by step.
.jpg)
To problem-solve, conduct a SWOT analysis to generate actionable ideas about how to solve your issue.
A helpful framework for solving problems is using a SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Define the issue your business is facing, and then list what your business does well that could help solve the problem. For example, your business may have a strong brand reputation or a loyal customer base.
Identify any weakness where your business is falling short, spot any opportunities that could help solve the problem and find any outside threats that could make the problem worse.
Once you’re clear on each section of the SWOT analysis, you can use your insights to generate actionable ideas. For instance, to improve your marketing strategy, you can leverage your loyal customer base, redesign your website if it’s difficult to use, focus on exploring social media growth and mitigate competitor promotions by offering limited-time incentives.
5. Networking
Meeting and building relationships with the right people is the backbone of business success. It’s helpful to form meaningful, lasting connections with clients, partners, investors, and peers.
Those with excellent networking skills can unlock many collaboration opportunities and learn from others, resulting in long-term business growth.
Attend industry events and join online communities to meet like-minded professionals in your field. While networking, you can also practice your active listening skills, and it helps to show genuine interest in others’ goals and challenges.
To help build your relationships, follow up consistently with those you meet and support them in their work.
By joining Tramshed Tech’s ecosystem, you gain access to over 600 members and 50+ companies across Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Barry, and Grangetown.
6. Time Management & Organisation
As an entrepreneur, you know what it’s like having to juggle multiple responsibilities and deadlines at once. Effective time management and organisational skills are crucial to be able to prioritise, delegate and complete tasks.
.jpg)
Manage your time by using the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritise tasks and use time blocking to efficiently complete them.
Create a to-do list of all the tasks you need to complete and their deadlines. Prioritise tasks with the earliest deadline and those that are the most important and difficult. You can use the Eisenhower Matrix to help you differentiate between urgent and important tasks.
Look at your to-do list and split a piece of paper into these 4 quadrants:
- Urgent & Important: These are tasks that must be done immediately and are crucial to your business, like responding to a critical client issue. Complete these immediately.
- Important but Not Urgent: These tasks are important to your long-term business objectives but don’t need to be done instantly. For example, developing your soft skill of networking, which you can schedule.
- Urgent but Not Important: These are tasks that require your attention but aren’t central to your objectives, such as emails. If possible, delegate these tasks or spend as little time as possible on them.
- Not Urgent or Important: These are often distractions, so it’s best to eliminate them or only complete them if there’s extra time.
Once you’ve done this, always plan out your day using the time blocking technique. This means dividing your day into blocks of time, such as hour by hour or a couple of hours, and dedicating each block to a task. You can do this by using an online calendar, a planner or a piece of paper.
How Tramshed Tech Can Help
We hope this guide has explained the 6 soft skills you need as an entrepreneur and given you actionable steps to developing each one.
We are Tramshed Tech, a startup ecosystem with 50+ companies and over 600 members across Cardiff, Swansea, Newport, Barry, and Grangetown.
Our skills programmes, including Swansea-based sessions and Big Learning Company workshops, provide hands-on learning and mentorship to help entrepreneurs grow personally and professionally while strengthening their businesses.
Ready to level up your soft skills? Give us a call on 029 2010 3090 or send an email through our contact form.
