The Value of Soft Skills

Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ was a game changer.

It gave us a new angle on looking at performance in the workplace and suggested that there is much more to being successful than high levels of cognitive intelligence.

Emotional Intelligence was the Kryptonite for the hard skills hard-liners who thought soft skills were a bit too fuzzy, woozy and touchy-feely for the tough environment of business.

Soft skills, although not always called that, have been at the heart of management, organisational and leadership theories for many years. Many studies show that soft skills play a critical role in success in the workplace and in determining people’s potential for training, learning and openness to coaching.

Researchers and practitioners have also commented on how they dislike the term “soft skills.”

There is nothing soft about earning the respect and the trust of the team you lead or work with.

 

There is nothing soft about understanding, recognising and navigating human motivations, and having the ability to empathise. There is nothing soft about having to maintain relationships and manage conflicts. And there is nothing soft about developing resilience to challenges and decision-making.

Those who recoil at the idea of “soft” have a point. They prefer terms like communication, essential, human, interpersonal, life, new hard, people or social skills.

How the Brain Works

But, the closest we can really get to the broad term of soft skills is through the lens of emotional intelligence and through some of the insights of neuroscience into how the brain drives communication and how we learn.

Most importantly the brain is a social brain. It cannot function in isolation. It requires human contact and human relationships to develop. Social connection is important. The better we are at communication, the more we connect with colleagues.

When we communicate, we bring everything who we are, our biases and whatever psychological baggage we carry to impress on the moment of our communication. Our social brain is processing our entire history and experience of human interactions.

 

We also know that the brain uses three different learning systems each of which functions to learn a different set of skills and each system is located in a different part of the brain.

The cognitive system is wired to learn the what things. It learns fact-based knowledge and needs repetition to change short-term into long-term memory.

The behavioural system is wired to learn the how of things. It takes what you know and applies it to situations. It requires physical repetition and small, step by step changes in behaviour to develop ‘muscle memory.’

The emotional system is wired to learn the feel of how we do things. It reads a situation and signals the appropriate behaviours. It requires context and real-life experience to develop. It also heavily influences the cognitive and behavioural systems.

Why does this matter?

David Goleman’s book was an attempt to open the eyes of managers and leaders to see that if they treated their work colleagues who are paid to do their job as no more than an economic transaction or thought of them as being no more than their job title then they were not getting the best from their colleagues. As Daniel Goleman puts it:

Emotional intelligence is the ability to sense, understand, value and effectively apply the power of emotions as a source of human energy, information, trust, creativity and influence.

 

Twenty-five years on, the World Economic Forum’s January 2020 report We need a global reskilling revolution – here’s why says:

Yet while it will be necessary for people to work with technology, we’re also seeing a growing need for people to develop specialized skills for how they interact with each other.

 

You may be brilliant, prefer to work alone and continue the life of a hermit but it’s also important to demonstrate that you understand and appreciate the value of collaborating with others and having the skills necessary to do so.

The grim arithmetic of the Covid-19 pandemic may well make us stop and think that the business world will need to operate in a way which places more value on some of these, well, dare we say it… soft skills.