Have you ever felt that the world was set up backwards...
I was talking to a colleague early this week about evolving as a leader.
He recently finished his MBA, and said something along the lines of, "I need to focus more on 'soft' skills. My whole life I have been learning 'hard' skills, but the 'soft' ones are so important.
WHY THE HELL ARE THEY CALLED "SOFT" SKILLS?
Who has ever aspired to get better at the "SOFT" stuff? And, yet, is there ANYTHING more important than our "SOFT" skills?
Ironically, "Soft" skills are the HARDEST to FIND, the HARDEST to TEACH, and certainly the HARDEST to APPLY, because it requires not just to "KNOW" things but to "BELIEVE" things... it requires you, in many cases, to understand and be aware of your own ego, and to change your behavior.
HAVE YOU EVER read ANY list about "things you need to be successful in business" or "ways to success" BOTH in BUSINESS and IN LIFE that suggested...
"You really need to be GREAT at hard skills"
"In order to be successful you must master linear regressions or advanced calculus."
"To be a successful business person you must be able to recite the GAP rules."
"For a complete life you must really know how to code in C++."
???
Clearly, "hard" skills are extremely important, and necessary. We desperately need them to make the world go around... But, what I find so very often, is people who want to succeed at management or business or leadership, people who are ambitious and driven... THEY WANT TO LEAD and SUCCEED, and THEY KEEP INVESTING IN HARD SKILLS!
And, to succeed in business and in life, it's the "soft" skills that matter.
Dictionary.com defines "soft skills" as:
- desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: theyinclude common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude
DESIRABLE qualities that do not depend on acquired knowledge?
That is one of the biggest problems of "SOFT" skills - people disassociate them with knowledge - and to improve them, you must be dedicated to continue to learn about them, to study them, to value them, to speak to them...
Taking them out of the "academic" curriculum in any meaningful way makes them "LESS" important by the "laws" of those setting what is important.
Taking them out of the "acquired knowledge" category makes them something that you are not encouraged nor instructed on how to develop and improve.
The BEAUTIFUL thing about EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE, which in my opinion IS the intelligence of SOFT SKILLS is that IT ABSOLUTELY CAN BE DEVELOPED... according to many studies much more so than IQ. And yet, the whole world is structured around hard skills.
"He/She who can best describe reality without laying blame will emerge the leader." Susan Scott
One of my favorite quotes of all time... "without laying blame" is all about soft skills and "describing reality" objectively is also almost exclusively at the mercy of soft skills. You need to be able to gain people's trust, you need to be able to engage people thoughtfully in what they do, you need to be able to ascertain who is laying down facts with less bias, and then you need to be able to communicate back what you heard, and what is going on, in a way that everyone can not only understand, but can also ACCEPT!" ALL OF THOSE are SOFT SKILLS!
We do ourselves a tremendous disservice by calling "soft skills", "soft"...
Why aren't they the "HARD" ones?
or...
"premium" skills
"diamond" skills
"ultimate" skills
"skills-you-most-desperately-need" skills?
It actually bothers me and frustrates me for multiple reasons...
1. We teach everyone to "value", "pursue" and "invest" in hard skills as the path to success... and it's just BAD advice!
2. We create & develop managers who lack the fundamental things we need in order to create and develop the organization and business we want to build.
3. We miss a tremendous opportunity to make lives better - and make the work experience more interesting, productive and joyful, by not giving "soft" skills the right context.
4. We create a "inferiority" complex... a "second-class" skill set by calling them "soft" and often fail to acknowledge or reward those who most deserve it...
But, eventually, it is those people with soft skills that most often sit on top and drive the bus... and we introduce them, so very often by making a laundry list of their hard skills and the institutions they went to learn them...
I am not saying "hard" skills are not important... I am saying the world is backwards... and the "soft" ones are the hardest to get, find and apply...
Imagine a world where we could talk about "soft" skills more openly and clearly as teams, as people, in conversation. Imagine if we talked about self awareness and ego as much as we talked about margin and utilization? Imagine if we could call each other out on behavior as easily as we call each other out on missing key metrics? Imagine a company where we worked as hard on quantifying and measuring and developing and VALUING soft performance as much as we do "hard" performance? How would our business and our organization and our experience of business be different?
What are you doing personally and professionally to evolve and grow? How much do you invest in the "soft" stuff? How does your company value, consider and develop "soft" skills?
Why the hell do we call them "soft" skills? Nobody wants to be "soft", but the vast majority of leaders want the results and the roles that a mastery of "soft" can deliver...
What's in a name?
So very often...
a mindset.
Let's change it!
in harmony,
Nestor