Soft skills - misnomer of the century

“Coming soon…VIP skills…the new and improved soft skills”

 Surely it’s time to get the Marketing folks to do a complete re-branding and relaunch of the tired old expression, “soft skills”?

 Naturally, this exercise will be expensive; you’ll need to hire an on-trend influencer, hit up all the socials, and drop the new brand imagery at some elaborate launch parties, but think of the demand generation, WOM* and brand awareness?

 (If that sentence doesn’t clearly mark me out as someone who a) has a somewhat jaundiced view of Marketing and b) is someone in their late 40’s trying to be cool, then I’m Will.I.am.)

 Joking apart, I think the term “soft skills” grossly undermines the value of a collection of business skills that are critical assets in the toolkit of any businessperson in any country, in any industry and any role. Strong and refined capability in these skills helps deliver hard business results. 

What are so-called “soft skills”? I’m talking principally about presentation skills, persuasion, negotiation, and assertiveness, but there are more. (Full disclosure – the skills I’ve listed here are those that I teach. I thought that as it’s MY blog it’s my prerogative. I’m turning into a diva😁)

In the Procurement world, CIPS has cited communication, internal stakeholder management, influencing, supplier relationship management and leadership as the top 5 soft skills that Procurement professionals should possess.

  And as Mindtools* puts it:

“The workplace has evolved an interpersonal dynamic that can't be ignored. The acts of listening, presenting ideas, resolving conflict, and fostering an open and honest work environment all come down to knowing how to build and maintain relationships with people. It's those relationships that allow people to participate fully in team projects, show appreciation for others, and enlist support for their projects.”

Why are soft skills ignored?

There’s no shortage of training opportunities for the development of hard, technical skills, but aren’t organisations missing a trick here?

For some reason, many organisations seem to assume that everyone already possesses the necessary soft skills to excel at a job: they can lead and motivate a team, communicate across all levels and geographies, can influence and persuade to make change happen, and can simply get along with other people.

But if you’ve worked in any organisation, big or small, it’s unlikely that you’ll agree with this assumption.

My only conclusion is that organisations still believe that these skills are a “nice to have” and don’t see a positive ROI from investing in them. It’s true, from an ROI measurement perspective, it can be devilishly difficult to directly attribute the hard benefits that follow. However, while we can all nod sagely and agree there’s got to be a benefit, in a 2017 trial, MIT Sloan School found that soft skills training delivered an ROI of 250%.

Why technical skills aren’t sufficient

Of course, technical skills are obviously important and are instrumental in getting you the job in the first place; you wouldn’t want duff advice from Legal that could bring untold risk to your business, or an SAP expert who couldn’t navigate around the myriad modules required for a large enterprise to operate effectively, but these skills aren’t worth much, particularly the higher up the organisation one moves, if they’re not accompanied by the softer skills of how to deal with people.

An absence of these soft skills could end up with a demotivated and disenfranchised team; stakeholders, customers and suppliers who don’t understand your ideas and become frustrated, and opportunities for change left withering on the vine.

And here’s the case for the “re-brand”

As many of the tiresome, repetitive processes are now being automated leaving more time for businesspeople to focus on value-added, strategic work (with a heavier emphasis on soft skills) the need to close the soft skill gap has never been more apparent.

Further, the deployment of refined soft skills impacts wide-ranging aspects of business performance that really “move the needle”. Think of customer attraction, customer and employee retention, employee productivity, the extent to which suppliers are willing to collaborate etc. These things matter to your bottom line.

 What’s in a name?

So, what do you think? “Soft skills” really doesn’t cut the mustard (as they say in the UK) does it? On my website, I refer to them as “personal effectiveness skills”. But how about something with a bit more pizazz, like “VIP skills”: Vitally Important People skills? It’s the best I could come up with I’m afraid, but I’m open to suggestions!

 What you should do about it?

Do you have a problem? If some of your organisational metrics (for example: customer retention, employee churn, employee engagement, stakeholder collaboration, supplier collaboration) are heading south, these could be the signs of a soft skills gap.

 The crux of the matter is that it’s all about people dealing with people, isn’t it? Where could your organisation be in the future if these gaps were closed through investing in the development of these skills?

 Please get in touch if you think I can help your teams with their personal effectiveness capabilities.

The best days lie ahead

Martin

*WOM – word of mouth marketing (apparently)

*www.mindtools.com - an organisation that delivers “a complete toolkit of resources for professional and personal development”