They might be skills, but they’re not soft

Are you good at your job?

Different, easier question: Was Ty Cobb good at baseball?

It’s generally understood that Ty Cobb was a jerk. His teammates didn’t like him very much. But he’s still in the Hall of Fame. That’s because baseball keeps score… of hits, of runs and of catches.

What about your job? It’s probably a bit more complex.

There are linchpins, people who don’t shirk responsibility when the chips are down. And, among others, there are connectors, people with insights, folks who never seem to lose hope. Your company is staffed with people who can’t possibly be rated on a linear scale, because you’re not baseball players. You are managers and inventors and leaders and promise-makers and supporters and bureaucrats and detail-oriented factotums.

And yet…

And yet we persist in hiring and training as if we’re a baseball team, as if easily defined skills are all that matter.

What causes successful organizations to fail? Stocks to fade, innovations to slow, customers to jump ship?

We can agree that certain focused skills are essential. That hiring coders who can’t code, salespeople who can’t sell or architects who can’t architect is a short road to failure.

These skills — let’s call them vocational skills — have become the backbone of the HR process.

But how to explain that similar organizations with similarly vocationally-skilled people find themselves with very different outcomes?

By misdefining ‘vocational’ and focusing on the apparently essential skills, we’ve diminished the value of the skills that actually matter. Most of the textbooks business students experience and the tests business students take are about these vocational skills, the checkboxes that have to be checked.

But we give too little respect to the other skills when we call them “soft” and imply that they’re optional.

It turns out that what actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work.

Culture defeats strategy, every time.

And yet…

Organizations spend a ton of time measuring the vocational skills, because they can. Because there’s a hundred years of history. And mostly, because it’s safe. It’s not personal, it’s business.

We know how to measure typing speed. We have a lot more trouble measuring passion or commitment.

Organizations give feedback on vocational skill output daily, and save the other stuff for the annual review if they measure it at all.

And organizations hire and fire based on vocational skill output all the time, but practically need an act of the Board to get rid of a negative thinker, a bully or a sloth (if he’s good at something measurable).

Theft

If an employee at your organization walked out with a brand-new laptop every day, you’d have him arrested, or at least fired. If your bookkeeper was embezzling money every month, you’d do the same thing.

But when an employee demoralizes the entire team by undermining a project, or when a team member checks out and doesn’t pull his weight, or when a bully causes future stars to quit the organization — too often, we shrug and point out that this person has tenure, or vocational skills or isn’t so bad.

But they’re stealing from us.

What can we teach?

Along the way, we’ve confirmed that vocational skills can be taught (you’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach), while we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things.

We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught.

We call these skills soft, making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

We rarely hire for these attributes because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure.

And we fire slowly (and retrain rarely) when these skills are missing, because we’re worried about stepping on toes, being called out for getting personal, or possibly, wasting time on a lost cause.

Which is crazy, because infants aren’t good at any of the soft skills. Of course we learn them. We learn them accidentally, by osmosis, by the collisions we have with teachers, parents, bosses and the world. But just because they’re difficult to measure doesn’t mean we can’t improve them, can’t practice them, can’t change.

Of course we can.

Let’s call them real skills, not soft.

Yes, they’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. The skills of charisma and diligence and contribution. But these modifiers, while accurate, somehow edge them away from the vocational skills, the skills that we actually hire for, the skills we measure a graduate degree on.

So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to today.

Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down, or program a computer to do.

Real skills can’t replace vocational skills, of course not. What they can do is amplify the things you’ve already been measuring.

Imagine a team member with all the traditional vocational skills: productive, skilled, experienced. A resume that can prove it.

That’s fine, it’s the baseline.

Now, add to that: Perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, goal-setting, inspiring and motivated. A deep listener, with patience.

What happens to your organization when someone like that joins your team?

Work to be done

Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Lou Solomon reports that 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees. The only surprising thing about this statistic is how low it is.

How do we build people-centric organizations while also accepting the fact that two-thirds of our managers (presumably well-paid, well-trained and integral to our success) are uncomfortable doing the essential part of their job?

In a recent survey, the Graduate Management Admission Council, the folks who own the GMAT exam, reported that although MBA’s were strong in analytical aptitude, quantitative expertise, and information-gathering ability, they were sorely lacking in other critical areas that employers find equally attractive: strategic thinking, written and oral communication, leadership, and adaptability.

Are these mutually exclusive? Must we trade one for the other?

An Encyclopedia of Real Skills

The fact that there isn’t an accepted taxonomy of real skills demonstrates just how little effort organizations large and small have put into finding, improving and developing real skills among their teams.

In this first draft, we’ve chosen five large categories and then given examples of each. Not a definitive taxonomy, but a start, a way to move the conversation and the investment forward.

The five categories might include:

Self Control — Once you’ve decided that something is important, are you able to persist in doing it, without letting distractions or bad habits get in the way? Doing things for the long run that you might not feel like doing in the short run.

Productivity — Are you skilled with your instrument? Are you able to use your insights and your commitment to actually move things forward? Getting non-vocational tasks done.

Wisdom — Have you learned things that are difficult to glean from a textbook or a manual? Experience is how we become adults.

Perception — Do you have the experience and the practice to see the world clearly? Seeing things before others have to point them out.

Influence — Have you developed the skills needed to persuade others to take action? Charisma is just one form of this skill.

Self Control

Adaptability to changing requirements

Agility in the face of unexpected obstacles

Alacrity and the ability to start and stop quickly

Authenticity and consistent behavior

Bouncing back from failure

Coach-ability and the desire to coach others

Collaborative mindset

Compassion for those in need

Competitiveness

Conscientiousness in keeping promises

Customer service passion

Eagerness to learn from criticism

Emotional intelligence

Endurance for the long haul

Enthusiasm for the work

Ethics even when not under scrutiny

Etiquette

Flexibility

Friendliness

Honesty

Living in balance

Managing difficult conversations

Motivated to take on new challenges

Passionate

Posture for forward motion

Purpose

Quick-wittedness

Resilience

Risk-taking

Self awareness

Self confidence

Sense of humor

Strategic thinking taking priority over short-term gamesmanship

Stress management

Tolerance of change and uncertainty

Productivity

Attention to detail

Crisis management skills

Decision making with effectiveness

Delegation for productivity

Diligence and attention to detail

Entrepreneurial thinking and guts

Facilitation of discussion

Goal setting skills

Innovative problem-solving techniques

Lateral thinking

Lean techniques

Listening skills

Managing up

Meeting hygiene

Planning for projects

Problem solving

Research skills

Technology savvy

Time management

Troubleshooting

Wisdom

Artistic sense and good taste

Conflict resolution instincts

Creativity in the face of challenges

Critical thinking instead of mere compliance

Dealing with difficult people

Diplomacy in difficult situations

Empathy for customers, co-workers and vendors

Intercultural competence

Mentoring

Social skills

Supervising with confidence

Perception

Design thinking

Fashion instinct

Map making

Judging people and situations

Strategic thinking

Influence

Ability to deliver clear and useful criticism

Assertiveness on behalf of ideas that matter

Body language (reading and delivering)

Charisma and the skill to influence others

Clarity in language and vision

Dispute resolution skills

Giving feedback without ego

Influence

Inspiring to others

Interpersonal skills

Leadership

Negotiation skills

Networking

Presentation skills

Persuasive

Public speaking

Reframing

Selling skills

Storytelling

Talent management

Team building

Writing for impact

And then, the two questions

1. Is it possible to teach these real skills? Is it possible to focus on them, hire for them, reward for growth? Can we put in place programs and insights that will lead to progress in all these areas?
2. If we did, would it matter? Would an organization that excelled at these real skills be more productive, more profitable and a better place to work?

Which leads to: What are we waiting for?

This is why we built the altMBA. To turn on lights and help people realize just how far they can take their soft skills. Because they’re real.