Identifying and removing barriers
Barrier Breakers Methodology for Soft Skills Development and Evaluation, or BBM®, allows us to identify and remove barriers that block soft skills, and to then develop, manage, and evaluate soft skills.
Soft skills are “the traits and abilities of attitude and behaviour rather than knowledge or technical aptitude.”
Unlike ‘hard skills’ which have to be learnt – or input – soft skills are innate human competencies that need to be accessed before they can be developed. When soft skills aren’t used to their full potential it’s because barriers are in the way. These barriers block our ability to access these competencies, and make it impossible to develop them further. Consequently, soft skills development programmes that don’t first address these barriers, or that attempt to input soft skills as if they were hard skills, have limited and short-lived results.
BBM provides a framework that defines five Barrier Profiles. Each Profile comprises the dominating influence of a barrier; what causes the barrier; the impact of the barrier; the soft skills it blocks; how to identify the barrier, and how to break through it. As well as being a mechanism for development, this framework provides an evaluation tool through which to measure levels of 40 soft skills.