As artificial intelligence (AI) permeates the modern workplace, the demand for digital upskilling has increased in kind. Reminiscent of the emergence of the Internet prior to the turn of the millennium, and the introduction of personal computers prior to that, the implication for today’s workers is to learn how to use the technology…or be left behind.
Coinciding with this demand is a resurgence in the appreciation of soft skills. As the CEO of Goldman Sachs recently declared, 95 percent of an S-1 filing can be done in minutes. The last 5 percent now matters because the rest is a commodity.
In other words, the robots inevitably will do what they do best. It’s up to us to do the rest. And to do so effectively, we’ll need to draw upon our human talents for the likes of communication and relationship management. But why do we consider these “soft” skills? And how do we differentiate them from “hard” skills?
The Measurement Approach
I’ve been giving this some serious thought. Where I initially landed was that the successful application of hard skills can be measured definitively. For example, the code you wrote works as intended, or you’ve arrived at the correct mathematical solution. Hence, the metric is a hard number, or a binary yes or no (1 or 0).
On the other side of the coin are soft skills, so named because they are not hard skills—a bit like the white rhino and the black rhino, or hard dollars and soft dollars. Successful application of these skills less obviously boils down to a number. For example, how do you measure your communication skills or your relationship management prowess? The number of e-mails you send or the size of your network both miss the point. One approach might be to measure the skill indirectly, perhaps in terms of employee engagement or volume of sales, but that’s correlation, not causation.
Terminal Performance
I was comfortable with my position until I listened to a podcast by David James in which Guy Wallace quotes the late Joe Harless: “Soft skills is a euphemism for hard skills that we have not worked hard enough yet to define.” In other words, Wallace explains, we typically don’t begin with the end in mind—that is to say, terminal performance.
This made sense to me. I realized we could measure an executive’s communication skills by monitoring his target audience’s actions in response to the key messages in his memo. And we could measure a line manager’s provision of feedback by calculating her team member’s subsequent uptick in performance of a task. Thus, if we factor in terminal performance, a business metric emerges.
However, as Wallace also explains, this is all highly dependent on the intended outcome in the context of the individual’s role, which makes it challenging to quantify at scale. Put simply, we can’t measure the outcomes of everyone’s communication skills or provision of feedback in the same way.
Yet I also see how, just as we standardize the outputs of hard skills via acceptance criteria, we can do the same for soft skills. For example, we could use a rubric to assess whether a communicator explained the what, the so what, and the now what; and whether a provider of feedback clarified the situation, described the behavior observed, and explained the impact. In this way, we “harden” the skill across the board.
Other Labels
Complicating matters is the fact that some folks take umbrage at the word, “soft,” because it conveys the impression that it’s easy or weak. I consider this a misinterpretation, but I also acknowledge that perception is reality. Thus, countless peers have proffered alternative adjectives such as “business,” “professional,” “power,” “behavioral,” “employability,” “core.” I’ll add one I’ve used myself in the context of a skills-based learning strategy: “transferable.”
The problem with all these labels is that they don’t satisfactorily differentiate hard skills from soft. For example, is a hard skill such as data analysis not also a business skill or a power skill? It’s certainly transferable.
Wikipedia describes soft skills as “psychosocial,” and I feel this hits the mark closer than most. Intrapersonal skills that are exercised inside your head—such as creative thinking and resilience —are psychological, while interpersonal skills that are exercised with other people—such as communication and relationship management—are social. Unfortunately, Wikipedia goes on to declare that hard skills are specific to individual professions, which is demonstrably false.
Another popular way to differentiate hard skills from soft is with the labels, “technical” and “non-technical.” However, corporate learning analyst Josh Bersin argues that soft skills are not soft because they’re highly complex, take years to learn, and are always changing in their scope. That sounds a lot like technical skills to me. He also combines core/technical skills. I wouldn’t dare suggest he was wrong; it’s just a matter of personal proclivity.
After further rumination, my own proclivity now is to use the labels, “objective” and “subjective.” Hard skills such as computer programming and data analysis are measured quantitatively; hence, they are objective skills. In contrast, while the measurement of soft skills such as communication and relationship management can be rendered objective, we tend not to and so they remain qualitative in nature, in which case, they are subjective skills.
Always Going to Be a Little Bit Wrong
Having said that, perhaps all these linguistic gymnastics are just an academic sideshow. Our audience doesn’t much care for it, and for them, I suggest it would make more sense to package “digital” skills and “people” skills. These complement “role-specific” skills and, of course, “compliance” skills, both of which might be better managed as competencies.
I also suggest that however you slice and dice skills, it’s always going to be a little bit wrong. There inevitably will be exceptions, cross-categorizations and dependencies. Frankly, it will be a marriage of convenience.
And that’s OK, because whatever you call them, what really matters is that we develop them to improve our performance…or be left behind.
