Hard Skills Have a Place

Last night, many American’s watched the first for four 2020 US Presidential Debates. It was heartbreaking, eyeopening, and not surprising. While I have many thoughts and feelings about it, I want to bring it back to hard skills and soft skills.

Hard skills

• Don’t require another person’s creative collaboration or cooperation.

• Low creative communication.

• They are typically easier to quantify and measure.

• It is easier to forecast the results.

• Most if not all processes are typically repetitive and mechanical-like in nature.

Soft skills

• Require other people’s creative cooperation and collaboration.

• High creative communication.

• They are often more difficult to measure and quantify.

• The forecasting the path to success is very difficult.

• Exploration and experimentation is required within the process .

When leadership uses hard skill measurement to force results needed from soft skill collaboration, leadership will alienate and burn out those that are required to collaboratively create results. In many, fear, distrust, and a creative revolt will occur. For some, apathy, power-grabbing, and submission will happen. Ultimately, the mix of hard skill measurement in our advanced idea forward, customer driven world will continue to create a divide UNTIL we re-align leadership with the realities of humans they represent versus the bubble of the boardroom that lines their pockets.

Hard skills have a real place in the world’s economy, from routine manufacturing and repetitive labor to mechanical process that are not yet done by robots. The output measurement of hard skills is in place to keep workers safe, keep costs down, and make production as humanly efficient as possible. Labor laws and labor unions are in place to protect the health and well being of hard skill workers.

I got a great boost from this post by Seth Godin in conversation with Lynn Johnson on LinkedIn live. Starting at 17:00 minutes will get you into their conversation about hard skills and soft skills between these two.

Today’s Empathy Practice:

Try to recognize when you measure yourself and others as if they were machines. When you do, back off, give them some space to be human. Be nice to yourself and others.