Soft Skills - A Definition by Malcolm Andrews
First Published on Linkedin, Sept 22, 2020
What Exactly Is A Skill?
A skill is a task which a person has some expertise of performing.
For example, in my early teens I spent many hours hitting a ping pong ball against the wall of our entrance hall at home (don’t ask).
The hall was narrow and I didn’t know it at the time but because of this mindless activity, I developed extremely good hand/eye coordination which I only discovered when I started to play badminton in my thirties (I was awesome).
Getting a clear idea of what Soft Skills are is easier if, first, we have a definition of Hard Skills because the contrast puts them into context.
Hard Skills Are Straightforward
They operate strictly to a set of methods and techniques which need to be studied and learned before they can be used.
Take Excel or Adobe for example, you probably learned them at Uni to do project assignments. Or maybe you needed them in a previous job. Either way you bought the manuals and spent a weekend or two getting up to speed with them.
Most Hard Skills are acquired by those who want to pursue them professionally like Software Engineers, Civil Engineers and Graphic Designers.
Soft Skills Are More Subtle
Their application involves our emotions, interaction with others and our personal judgement.
They have room to be flexible, to overlap and intertwine.
Very often a job interviewer will be looking for Soft Skills but won’t specify them. For example, ’What’s your experience of teamwork’ may, in reality, be asked to find out how flexible you will be about covering your colleagues’ duties or whether you can see the other person’s point of view in a meeting?
Teamwork, Flexibility and Empathy are all examples of Soft Skills.
Case Study: applying soft skills when we interact with others, impacts the way they will respond to us.
A Software Development company won a contract to build operating software for a large design company. A project team was assembled and located at the clients’ site.
After a month, the project team were falling behind schedule and discussions with management found that they were constantly getting requests from the client’s staff to carry out small tasks which their internal software team were too busy to schedule. My client’s team had been agreeing to these requests.
I was hired to provide a workshop for them on Assertiveness!
From this scenario, we see that the external software team were a big hit with their client’s staff who not only trusted them sufficiently to share go to them with their problems but also expected them to solve these on their firm’s time!
Clearly, there was an absence of any realistic response to the unscheduled work requests which were using up the consultant’s time and threatening to derail the project.
So a gap emerged between the expectations of my client and the reality of the project specification. In this case, the gap was due to the misuse use of Soft Skills (Responsiveness, Collaboration and the complete absence of them in others (Assertiveness & Persuasion).
Mind the Gap
It is this gap between the stakeholder’s expectations and the reality of your response to this that lies at the heart of the Soft Skill piece.
We have established that Hard Skills operate strictly to a set of methods and techniques. However, when the ball is dropped, as inevitably it will be, a Gap is created between expectations and reality and it is hard to respond to this with the Hard Skill mind set.
Soft Skills are the human dimension of Project Management - need to be built-in at the planning stage because to avoid a potentially disastrous outcome, a fast, out-of-the box reaction may be needed when a gap is discovered.
In the Case Study, the presence of several Soft Skills would have prevented gaps from opening up between client and consultant. For example Communication between the team on-site and the Project Managers at Head Office; Responding Under Pressure which might have led to a Negotiation that could have turned the client’s requests from a loss maker into an opportunity.
This series of Soft Skills articles is designed to ensure that practitioners are able to guard against the potential risks that could be caused by a sudden gap between a Hard Skills mind set and the human element of a project. Both are needed to ensure successful, risk-free task completions.
What Do Employers Want?
Companies are looking for both Hard and Soft sets of skills but mostly they are looking for Soft Skills.
Hard Skills tend to be very specific when it comes to hiring. You need to show evidence of proficiency.
However, Soft Skills can be applied to any job situation. Of course, they are also needed to support Hard Skills... collaborating with a client on specifications or negotiating terms for example.
This year, Linkedin’s global survey of the skills being sought by employers found that the Top 5 were all Soft Skills.
Creativity
Persuasion
Collaboration
Adaptability
Time Management
What do we acquire soft skills?
In the work context, if it’s a Soft Skill like Teamwork or Problem-solving, it’s embedded naturally in your behaviour. It’s what you’re like. You may have discovered it at school in the hockey team or at home persuading trying to talk your way out of doing your chores.
Soft Skills: The Bigger Picture for Employers.
In summary, just as organisations need specialists for product development, technical experts, IT systems analysts, sales executives…whatever specialisation the organisation needs to be successful, so it needs specialists with the skills to hold all this activity together, make it happen, move it forward…the human activity that can motivate, integrate, collaborate, manage stakeholders, communicate with markets, negotiate, administrate, align the reality with the expectations.
Connect with Malcolm Andrews via Linkedin
I work with Senior Executives to build a personal communication style which adds to their feelings of confidence & ease when collaborating with peers, greater fulfilment when being proactive with stakeholders and satisfaction from acknowledging their personal growth as they move up in their career.
