Soft" skills

Ideas

31/03

Part I: Let's stop calling them "soft"

What do you think and feel when someone tells you that another person is "tough"? I think there is a high probability that you have answered something along the following lines: a person who does not bend, who does not give up easily; who has strong opinions and hardly changes them; who can be impolite or even rude in his dealings; who is direct, forthright; who does not reveal his emotions easily; who is brave. If we associate "hardness" with "hearing" it can also mean that you do not hear well. If you associate "hardness" with "ear", it may also mean that you do not listen well. While I may be interpreting this in a biased way, eliding the hearing and intelligence aspects, it seems to me that the attributes that are typically stated in relation to being tough could easily pass for descriptions of people who are successful in professional environments. In certain contexts, being a tough person is an advantage and a source of recognition and appreciation.

Let us do the same exercise for a "soft" person. Soft" people are those without energy or vigour; they are lazy and give in easily to pressure; they are irresolute or trivially and naively indifferent. Unlike hardness, it will be difficult for us to find contexts where being soft is advantageous.

Knowing that I will be entering shaky ground, let us move the psychoanalytic elephant away from the china shop of the avenue of political correctness. Trying to give some expression to our unconscious, the sexual connotation of these words may help to understand the valorisation of the first and the devaluation of the second, in a world where the pendulum of value still tilts more to the side of men than of women, without happiness or justice.

Words carry more than descriptions. They are loaded with meanings, stories and history. When we transfer them between domains they have the extraordinary ability to change substance without changing form. The same word can mean different things in different contexts and with different intentions. But what is left behind? What trace remains of other uses when the story we want to tell with that word is different? Specifically, what will be carried by the words "hard" and "soft" when we stop using them to qualify people and start categorizing skills?

If it is not clear yet, I am referring to hard skills and soft skills. I have already alluded to this topic when I wrote about business jargon and emotional bureaucracy but here I want to offer a particular dedication to this famous dichotomy which, already showing its end, I argue should perish.

The term soft skills was coined in the 1960s by the United States Army. They used it to refer to any skill that did not involve the use of machinery. The military must have realised that many important activities were included in this category and that they could even be a determining factor in the success or otherwise of initiatives. These attributes were vague enough to mean everything and nothing, but there was little doubt about their importance.

Little will have changed. These skills are still considered fundamental and have evolved to the point where we find declinations such as "interpersonal skills" or "behavioural skills", although many go beyond the sphere of action. Charisma, influence, authenticity, listening, sensitivity, wisdom, eloquence, clarity, sincerity, leadership, collaboration, openness, flexibility, vision, presence, humour. The list goes on and on, with a tendency to be endless. One of the big problems with these kinds of competencies is that they often designate attributes that may not actually be competencies. They are ways of being, qualities or virtues.

When I think about this I remember the director Luís Gonzaga Moreira, who better than anyone else explains the it factor phenomenon, which leads some actors and actresses to be chosen and others not. Just as in the world of acting, also in the world of business, which may have more similarities with the former than one might think, there are people who have "it" and others who do not. To have "it", in the world of leaders and those led, is to possess soft skills. Once again, they may be everything and nothing, but they will be something, because we can identify them.

By contrast, the no less important hard skills are those that imply technical or administrative mastery. It seems clear that knowing how to operate a machine, a computer, for example, is part of the range of hard skills. Nowadays this type of skills extends beyond the purely physical. Knowing how to handle software also seems to fit into this category, but the distinction between the two types of categories may not be as straightforward as it seems.

The boundaries are not only Cartesian (body vs. mind), because knowing how to read and interpret a balance sheet or how to calculate a budget does not only imply the use of the body and even then these abilities would not belong to the soft skills. The difference seems to lie in another classic dichotomy: reason vs. emotion. Everything that is less cognitive and more emotional tends to be considered "soft" but, to make things even more complex, if we enter the field of metacognition - the ability to think about how one thinks - we will stay in the same category.

In the end, the division between "hard" and "soft" skills seems to be another subterfuge to make the world more manageable. Everything seems simpler when it is divided into black-white, left-right, good-bad, etc. With these gimmicks one fosters division between people and, worse, division in and of people, making the world more complicated. What advantage do I get from knowing how to interpret complex data if I don't know how to explain it to others? What is the use of being attentive to others and knowing how to communicate clearly and eloquently when I do not understand what I have to communicate?

It is necessary and urgent to find mechanisms that allow us to see ourselves in a complete way and to value uniqueness and coherence. To reduce people to their performance and their productive capacity is to leave a huge amount out. Where do ethics, morals and aesthetics fit into soft and hard skills? Nowhere. By continuing to use these designations we are pushing away the possibility of connecting art to science, leisure to business, beauty to productivity. The world of work needs these connections, but for that it needs to reinvent itself. Let's start by stopping attributing softness and hardness to skills.

Part I written for Link to Leaders on 4 February 2022; published 14 February 2022.

Part II: Let's stop calling them skills

In the first part of this reflection I suggested that skills should no longer be qualified as "soft" or "hard". Now, starting from the end, I will make another suggestion: let us stop calling soft skills competencies.

I have been conducting an exercise on this subject for over a decade. I have conducted it with large and small groups, in academic and corporate settings, in different countries and cultures and the results are always the same. I am neither generalising nor exaggerating: always. Make no mistake, this is not science, it is empiricism, although I do not rule out the idea of studying this phenomenon. I have always carried out this exercise with groups and, even without any previous experience, I am confident enough to suggest you try it without company. Please follow these steps:

Think of a person who is a reference for you¹. It could be a relative, a teacher, a colleague, a boss, a friend or even a public figure that you do not know personally.
Now that you have found this reference person of yours, think of some interactions with this person (or their work) that have stuck in your memory.
Then list between five and ten distinctive characteristics of that person; list the traits that make them a reference person for you.

There remains a fourth and final step but before explaining what you have to do, it is important to reflect on what brings 'skills' and 'qualities' closer together. First of all, let us get away from a common prejudice concerning these two dimensions which states that the former are acquired and the latter are innate. In other words, competence is something that is learned while qualities are born with people. It is a simple and appealing but incorrect explanation.

Both dimensions are linked, are part of a continuum and are learnable. The development of one is inseparable from the evolution of the other. In a tentative and quick definition, "competence" has to do with know-how, has an operational dimension, is related to knowledge and manifests itself through productivity and efficiency; "qualities" have to do with knowing-being, have an ontological dimension, are related to wisdom and manifest themselves through ethics and aesthetics.

It is time to go back to your list of characteristics for the last step of the exercise. Now you will have to categorise each of the characteristics, labelling them either 'competence' or 'quality'. It is likely that in some cases you will find it difficult to decide on just one of the categories and find that the two fit together well. However, I suggest you make an effort to choose only one of the labels whenever you can.

I bet you ended up with more qualities than skills. If I won the bet it means that the result of your exercise is in line with the outcome that always arises when I conduct this exercise. A conclusion: when we think of people who are a reference for us, we clearly tend to value their qualities more than their skills. So, more than what they can do, we value their way of being. Following this hypothesis it will be easy to return to the "sticky" idea that people's way of being tends towards constancy and to be considered innate, at least a significant part of it. It is also easy to associate qualities with character or personality and the path to a psychological perspective (from which I want to move away in this text) of these concepts appears without difficulty.

If such a hypothesis makes sense and, more than that, if it has a basis in truth, some important questions arise: if we value qualities more than skills why do we continue to adopt educational-pedagogical and assessment systems aimed at developing and assessing skills? Why do we continue to spend so much on leadership development programmes²when what we value most in our leaders are their qualities?

It is easier and less risky to measure and assess skills than qualities (or virtues). For this reason, we have sought a solution which I have shown does not work, I hope, when we divide them into 'hard' and 'soft'. The assessment of qualities is riskier. It implies considering a higher degree of subjectivity, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we learn to navigate through these meanderings³The inclusion of a moral dimension is unavoidable.

Science and business have a chronic difficulty in taking moral positions. Perhaps because they seek an exemption and neutrality that are virtually unattainable; perhaps because in today's world such positions mean a refuge for growing extremism and fundamentalism. Subjectivity is an asset we value in people who help us to be better. What prevents us from embracing it?

Is it a fear of crystallising in a certain moral superiority, with all the risks that this brings? Evaluating qualities implies judging the people who possess them. Such an exercise requires comparing them with certain standards or yardsticks, questionable and debatable, it is true. To avoid this eventual superiority, it is necessary to educate our capacity to construct opinions, and an inseparable part of this educational process is the capacity to justify them and, more than that, to change them through their justification. Wanting to influence without having the space to be influenced is manipulation or imposition. When we contemplate, in an authentic and conscious way, the necessary and sufficient flexibility and openness to be changed by the process and by others, we will run less risks in putting ourselves on a higher level and we will come closer to a position of equality and equity.

Is it caution not to cross certain boundaries? In the end, we are responsible for defining the limits and crossing them.With the recent events in the world, where several limits are crossed every day, it is no longer enough to have systems and paradigms that lead us to a supposed objectivity. Objectively, we are not having good results by following that path. The corporate world has shown encouraging signs, with several companies taking political and moral positions in relation to various issues, from the various types of discrimination that exist to the recent war provoked by the Russian government.

As Tim Leberecht and Monika Jiang write⁴it is very important that companies take positions that go beyond their purpose and mission statements and advocate on issues that are important to all of us and to our planet. However, it is not enough to point out what is ugly in others. One must look at and care for what is inside. In this way beauty appears not only in its aesthetic and reputational dimensions but is intrinsic.

And the same logic should happen in other contexts, beyond the corporate. Schools and universities must once again assume one of their primary functions: to create good people. Not only better professionals. Families must once again take up a fundamental role in contributing to global human development, but for this, the world of work cannot exhaust mothers and fathers, nor education, daughters and sons. Society can find new ways to create communities that support all the previous movements and governments the structures that support all this. It is a collective, joint effort that must start from the individual dimension. Each of us will be responsible for these changes, but we also need to see them in others.

It is clear that what we value most is what "comes from within", what is embodied; these are the human qualities. May the qualities we value in others inspire us to find or create them in ourselves. It is a practical, real and concrete exercise but it goes beyond that. Know-how is very important but knowing-how while knowing-being is what we all need now.

For all these reasons, let us stop pursuing the development and valorisation of skills; let us stop attributing them hardness or softness. Let us embrace the much more complex but also richer path of learning to be better people, again.

Part II written for Link to Leaders on 21 March 2022; published 31 March 2022