Revenge of the Soft Skills

I’m guessing most everyone is familiar with the concept of hard skills and soft skills; hard skills being teachable abilities, things that you might learn in school or through on-the-job training, while soft skills are considered to be interpersonal and critical thinking abilities like communication skills, how you solve problems and form judgments, and how you relate to others.

Management experts have long stressed the importance of having a balance between hard skills and soft skills for a healthy workplace and a successful organization. But in reality, if you look at how people are rewarded and who gets promoted, it’s often the hard skills that are more highly valued.

A big reason for this is that hard skills can be quantified more easily than soft skills. The connection between hard skills and objective measures like sales goals or project deadlines is more clear, and as a result, hard skills have become more closely associated with the financial success of an organization. Additionally, in highly competitive environments, the quantifiable aspects of hard skills are a way of ‘keeping score,’ which has, over time, created an implicit hierarchy that subordinates soft skills to hard skills in most organizations.

However, as technology transforms the economy and also how we live and work, we have to think differently about the bright lines that have traditionally separated hard skills and soft skills. Furthermore, successful leaders are learning that there is nothing easy about so-called soft skills; flipping the paradigm to hard skills and harder skills.

Another flip of the paradigm is the speculation about what jobs will be replaced by automated robots or algorithms in the future. Most experts agree that if a skill can be easily explained and measured, it can be automated. And, alternatively, skills that are difficult to routinize, that can’t be forced into a set of rules, or when you can’t create an algorithm for doing them – these skills are harder to outsource and harder to automate, and therefore more valuable.

Many experts are predicting a profound transformation in the nature of our work. First, machines will take over more and more of the routine tasks that are based upon skills that can be easily quantified and objectively measured. Second, in a world that is becoming more and more diverse and changing rapidly, value creation will become increasingly dependent upon subjective, difficult to quantify, and distinctly human capabilities like curiosity, imagination, creativity, and emotional and social intelligence. This means organizations must develop their capacity for harder skills like design and systems thinking, pattern recognition and understanding narrative; all of which have been overlooked and undervalued in a wide range of business functions.

Typically in management, hard skills are associated with planning and control, allocation of scarce resources and a top-down, production-based orientation toward maximizing economic returns for shareholders. This approach tends to neglect more innovative business models and transformational strategies that can develop the organization’s potential for more equitable value creation.

All of this sets the stage for the revenge of the soft skills. It expands the view of the business from being managed for profitability to being organized for value creation. It flips the mindset from scarcity to abundance, where the organization is seen as a resource with ongoing capacity to generate sustainable value creation.

This view provides an opportunity for all types of organizations — privately held businesses, publicly traded corporations, nonprofits, education institutions — to adopt a different set of guiding assumptions, to break down the false dichotomy between hard and soft skills, and integrate the need for economic success with a concern for developing sustainable, value-creating organizations.