To run a business and be successful in life requires skill, knowledge and plenty of time. It takes 6 years to qualify as a solicitor (The Law Society, 2021), 6 years as a vet (British Veterinary Association, 2021), 10 years to qualify as a GP (NHS, 2021) and 15 years to complete training to practise specialist cosmetic surgery (National Careers Service, 2021), while a brain surgeon requires 18 years of training and study (Study Medicine Europe, 2019).
While these timescales may lead to an individual being able to practice in their chosen field, having hard skills (knowledge) does not necessarily make them a guaranteed success, as they still have to be able to deal with people. We have all come across an individual who is technically competent but has poor interpersonal skills. It is this that the art of soft skills training seeks to correct.
A vague definition
Clive Lewis, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Illumine Training, defines soft skills as ‘one of those somewhat vague terms that means slightly different things to different people. If ‘hard skills’ consist of the things needed to perform a specific job—say, being able to reconcile a bank account as an accountant or fixing security settings on a computer as an IT specialist—soft skills is everything else—the generalities that help most people perform in their jobs and work with others more effectively’.
Phrasing it differently, Beck Chalmers, Director of Holst Workplace Effectiveness, says that ‘soft skills are nice to have or non-technical requirements for a role, and include skills such as communication, presentation and creative thinking. In contrast, hard skills may include computer literacy, project management or warehouse management’.
As to what soft skills may entail, they can be generally considered as good communication skills: being self-motivated; having leadership qualities; being able to take responsibility; able to work in a team; able to problem solve; being decisive; able to work under pressure and time constraints; being flexible; and being able to negotiate and resolve conflicts.
So, whenever the question is raised regarding when a soft skill becomes a hard skill, Chalmers answers by saying that it is conditional on the role. For example, someone in business development pitching for business with high stakes prospects will need presentation skills and an ability to persuade as a hard skill—it is a necessity. However, for someone in another position, these might be designated as soft skills.
It is noteworthy that Chalmers would never suggest that specific skills tend to be lacking. Rather, she thinks that it is more about the demands or requirements of a role—‘the skills that a person requires to be successful in their job’.
The problem for employers is that everyone is different, and, so, their strengths and needs are, by definition, going to be different. This means that soft skills can cover a wide range of sub-topics, such as the interpersonal skills of listening and rapport building. To Lewis, ‘many people get by with relatively low skill levels in some of what they do, but most benefit from making specific, targeted improvements’.
Chalmers believes that organisations benefit from taking time to identify the main competencies (behavioural and those that are hard, soft or technical) and consider the organisational values that are required for each role. This allows them to make decisions on where to invest. ‘The key thing to remember,’ says Chalmers, ‘is that organisations fall down when learning, whether in the classroom, online or by coaching, etc. It can be linked to organisational initiatives and where there is no commitment or support to follow-up or embed sustained change on the job’.
A moving target
Nothing worthwhile stands still, and, so, it follows that the demands of the workplace morph and, as a result, soft skills also needed to change.
In recent years, change has been driven by the online world. For Lewis, modern ways of communicating mean that ‘textspeak and spending a lot of time online do not always equip people for a world of work in which good grammar and face-to-face communication are the norm’. Furthermore, he believes that some are promoted into supervisory or management roles without having the necessary skills required to manage others effectively.
One of the challenges for management is that what they do is often more important than what they say. Here, Lewis thinks that management needs to be able to understand the behaviours that the organisation expects everyone to adopt and ‘having and demonstrating emotional intelligence would be good examples of this’.
Emotional Intelligence is a typical soft skills course and is often identified as a key leadership skill. It encompasses how people manage anger, stress or fear, all of which have an immediate impact on performance. From Lewis's perspective, this course ‘teaches people how to motivate themselves, manage stress and inspire those around them—it is ideal for anyone who needs to be in full control of their emotions to fulfil their potential’.
Chalmers agrees that skill requirements change over time. She points to agile leadership as an example of this, ‘with its focus on having a growth mindset and value generation … but with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing a shift to wellbeing and resilience’. She said that this makes logical sense because that is what organisations and their employees need right now.
Soft skills include being able to work in a team, having good communication skills and being able to take responsibility
However, no matter the motive, training still needs to be personal, so a natural question to pose is whether training needs vary according to not just the individual, but their demographic.
In response, Lewis says that ‘gender, age and job role are bound to have an impact, but so will recruitment practices, company culture and the industry involved’. The problem is not so much demographic, but that, invariably, there is not a budget (or the time) to train staff for all situations, needs or eventualities. He says that ‘organisations need to be selective and need to identify the skill, attitude or behaviour shifts that are likely to have the biggest impact on current and future performance’.
On the other hand, Chalmers worries that seeking a consensus within an organisation is a big challenge: ‘people have preferences on presentations, and the amount of detail in communications and writing skills is a classic example. A big challenge with writing skills is consensus within an organisation on the use of the active and passive voice. Business writing conventions have changed over the decades and people often hold strong preferences’. This will be viewed differently according to demographic.
Identifying needs
In some cases, it will be evident who needs a soft skills nudge. However, for others, a training needs analysis will be necessary. That said, employers that conduct regular performance reviews should already have a great deal of information available to them about the areas where their employee's shortcomings are having an impact on performance.
For any training to work (soft skills or otherwise) HR needs to collate the information and feed it to senior management, who must take ownership of identifying and addressing the skills gaps in the organisation.
However, Chalmers offers another option: the testing of staff. Yet, before testing, she says that employers should understand what they are looking for: ‘if you are looking to save money with better recruitment choices, then assessments such as the McQuaig Psychometric System are perfect, but if you are looking to develop individual or team resilience then assessments such as resilienceflow® are key’. As she sees it, the biggest benefit of testing is that assessments increase self-awareness, and, with that, an employer can target the areas that the individual might need to develop for the role.
McQuaig holds itself out as building competence by benchmarking a role internally, recruiting to the requirements of that role, developing people based on their strengths and helping to retain the stars. On the other hand, resilienceflow ® is a psychometric assessment that aims measure an individual's resilience in regard to how they approach their job.
When considering testing, Chalmers warns that employers ‘should not use them as a way to punish; assessments will only give you the questions to ask, after all, people are more than a set of numbers’. She illustrates this by noting that strong qualities and traits are desirable in many roles. An assessment will tell where that person has strengths, but it cannot tell to what extent a person is able to manage those strong behaviours in the workplace.
The benefits
So, ultimately, what can soft skills training do? Where is the benefit to a firm investing resources? To answer this, Lewis points to a simple example, such as interpersonal communication: ‘when people in a team listen effectively and know how to show empathy towards each other and recognise that ‘different’ does not mean ‘inferior’, they will work better together’. He adds that they will accomplish more and there will be the knock-on benefits of staff being happier, more engaged and more productive.
Summary
People are not homogenous. Everyone is different and born with different skills that can be developed. While knowledge can be attained, as the adage goes, ‘people buy people’—it is the soft skills that make individuals a success.