For enterprises to succeed today, it requires a focus on skills beyond the vocational. This doesn’t imply that sales, procurement, or financial expertise are unnecessary or less important to an organization’s operational success. Rather, it means that “soft skill” attributes are now equally critical as hard skills within the workforce. In the competitive marketplace, agility, flexibility, and resilience are imperative to weather ongoing volatility and uncertainty. What enables this? It is soft skills, or as Seth Godin, entrepreneur, best-selling author, and speaker, calls them — real skills.
Soft Skills Transformed
The growing criticality of soft skills seems a natural part of the Future of Work transition. Skills such as empathy, communication (oral and written), adaptability, collaboration, leadership, and strategic thinking are now table stakes for managers and executives. However, it’s no longer the higher ranks where real skills are necessary and desired. These skills are now core attributes for any role in today’s organizations. Imagine a workplace where, regardless of role, soft-skill development was an integral workforce strategy.
This means that real skills such as communication, collaboration, and strategic thinking are occurring at every enterprise level and among employees and project teams. Essentially, soft skills become core principles that drive organizational success and competitiveness. Making that vision a reality, however, requires a shift in executive behavior.
Progress Begins Today
There is evidence that much work must be done. Godin notes in an excerpt from his book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams, that …“69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees.” This is a startling number. Communication skills at the managerial level are essential for communicating strategy, responsibilities, and performance effectiveness. Lack of communication severely impacts collaborative efforts and strategic decision-making.
Remarking on the statistic, Godin says, “Communicating with employees is uncomfortable because we’ve built systems of compliance and dominance that make it difficult. We ask people to leave their humanity at the door, then use authority to change behavior. We overlay corporate greed and short-term thinking with a human desire to create work that matters.”
Instead, the Future of Work paradigm promotes empathetic leadership that supports open communication and professional growth. The systems reliant on compliance and dominance are transitioning into workplace models that value teamwork and innovative approaches to solving enterprise challenges.
Everything Can Be Taught
It is often believed that only vocational skills can be taught. This is simply not true. Even Godin says leaders “underinvest in this [soft skills] training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Environmental factors as well as our own experiences with managers can shape how we communicate and problem-solve.
An enterprise that embraces an inclusive and diverse workplace can be successful in training employees in real skills. With behaviors modeled and supported by the executive suite, employees are more inclined to adapt and follow the lead of those they look to for guidance. Soft skills are real skills with real strategic impact. Model, train, and reinforce the power of soft skills in every organizational environment.
This article is one of several we’ve covered on soft skills. The Future of Work Exchange recognizes that real skills have real impacts on the Future of Work and workforce strategies. As more enterprises focus on soft skills as critical attributes to employment candidacy, it opens doors to technologies to better measure real skill competencies and performance. Those innovations will only strengthen how organizations source, hire, and retain their workers.
