A Definition of Soft Skills that Matters for YOU!

In early 2019, I received a phone call from a friend asking if I had a few minutes for him to run an idea by me. Since Chris Rollins had done as much to train and mentor me as anyone else I could think of in the four years leading up to that point, I jumped at the chance to provide him with any input I possibly could!

I felt a connection with Chris from our first conversation in 2015. We had similar experiences during our corporate careers and both of us really wanted to have an impact on the organizational cultures of the smaller businesses we were working with. And both of us understood just how important effective communication is to building a strong team that achieves great results.

The idea Chris wanted to bounce off of me was a concept of a collaborative book on the DISC Model of Human Behavior, one of the most powerful tools I ever seen for building effective communication into a company’s culture. Having worked through dozens of hours of training with Chris on the topic, I was over the moon about the idea - and then he invited me and Cindy to join the group he was putting together to write the book!

In the opening chapter of Discover Your Team’s Potential, Solving the “Soft Skill” Dilemma, Chris shared something he learned during his time in the United States Army that absolutely stunned me. He wrote:

“Soft skills” is a term initially developed by the military to help determine the difference between technical skills and leadership skills, the latter of which are considered equally (if not more) important than the former. The “soft skills” were often harder to teach because when you are dealing with people, it isn’t always as simple as telling them to “do this” or “do that.” Somehow, along the way, our culture has allowed the term “soft skills” to be thought of as insignificant. Considering that the military began the analysis because they recognized the difference between groups of soldiers achieving victory or defeat often came down to how one group was being led compared to the other, it only makes sense that they decided to devise a system of measuring those leadership skills so that training could be improved in that critical area.”

As we looked at Soft Skills vs Hard Skills recently, I challenged you to consider how measurable soft skills really are when we’re willing to put the same energy into developing them and to clearly define the results we want to achieve by taking action on those skills on a daily basis. It’s only reasonable that we take this type of approach since that’s exactly what we do when we’re trained on any kind of technical skill…

The Oxford dictionary defines soft skills as “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” Investopedia explains soft skills this way: “Soft skills are character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person's relationships with other people. In the workplace, soft skills are considered to be a complement to hard skills, which refer to a person's knowledge and occupational skills.” While both are fairly simple, I don’t believe either provides us with anything we could see exhibited through behavior or that would yield tangible results…

We’re about to fix that though! Shortly after Chris shared the story about where soft skills came from, he referenced a study from The Carnegie Institute of Technology (and mentioned in this article on Forbes.com) showing that “85% of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Shockingly, only 15% is due to technical knowledge.”

If those numbers are even close to being accurate, wouldn’t it serve us all well to have a working definition of what soft skills really are and a clear picture of how to apply that definition to achieve real results? I sure think so...

A Practical Definition We Can Apply Right Away

We just looked at the definition of soft skills from the Oxford dictionary, “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people.” While I think that provides us with a fairly decent starting point for what soft skills are, I don’t believe it’s quite enough to take action on… At least it’s not for me.

We started down this path by answering the question, What Do They Really Mean by “Soft Skills”.? then we worked through some comparisons of Soft Skills vs Hard Skills. If we combine all of that with what Chris Rollins shared about the origins of the concept, I think we’re ready to build a practical definition that we can each work into our daily routines. Once we have that, there’s no reason at all for not putting it into action and achieving measurable results - just like we’d expect to see from learning any particular technical skill…?

Before we do that, consider these final reasons any of this even matters. According to a Salesforce.com study conducted just a few years ago, 86% of the executives surveyed cited lack of collaboration and ineffective communication as the primary reasons for workplace failure. Further, an SIS International Research study showed the cumulative cost per year due to productivity losses resulting from communication barriers at more than $26,000 per employee. Not only that, the same study found that a business with 100 employees spends an average downtime of 17 hours a week clarifying communications. Translated into dollars, that’s more than $530,000 a year. So as we consider those “personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people,” these statistics make a pretty solid case for developing a working definition of what behaviors need to be in place as we learn those skills!

Let’s be honest here, interacting effectively and harmoniously with one person may require very different behaviors than it does with another. On top of that, it can be extremely difficult to measure something we can’t see. For simplicity then, let’s look at something we should be able to see and measure by considering our own behaviors and the behaviors of the team members we’re with to develop stronger soft skills.

If we stick with Oxford’s definition, I believe applying what I frequently share as The Platinum Rule - Communicate with others as they would have us communicate with them - would serve as a solid starting point for our practical definition. When we communicate and interact with each individual that we deal with based on their needs rather than our own, “effectively and harmoniously” becomes much more possible!

So how can we nail this down in a way that’s concise and as easy to understand as it is to apply??

The SKILLS we develop and apply that enable us to adapt our behavior in a way that meets the individual needs of each person we interact with so that we communicate together more effectively and achieve results that yield maximum productivity with little or no time lost to poor collaboration or clarifying misunderstandings.

While the idea of soft skills covers far more than just communication, I can’t think of a single instance where applying any one of those skills doesn’t involve some form of communication. If we use this as our starting point for understanding what we should be working toward, then we can tie our specific behaviors for applying each separate skill in a way that can be seen by the team around us and that has a measurable impact on what we’re working to achieve.

Where the (Soft Skills) Rubber Meets the Road

Since we have A Practical Definition We Can Apply Right Away, let’s close this loop by looking at some practical action steps we can put in place to make sure our soft skills are yielding measurable results - just like we’d expect to see from developing new or better technical skills! Consider those stats we just looked at showing what executives saw as the cause of most workplace failure as well as the numbers showing the cost of downtime due to poor communication. If only that were where it stopped…

In Leadership Gold, John Maxwell shared that “Some sources estimate that as many as 65% of people leaving companies do so because of their managers… The ‘company’ doesn’t do anything negative to them. People do. Sometimes coworkers cause the problems that prompt people to leave. But often the people who alienate employees are their direct supervisors.” I recently read an article from the American Management Association citing research done by the Stanford Research Institute International and the Carnegie Melon Foundation showing that “75% of long-term job success depends on people skills, while only 25% on technical knowledge.” When we consider both those things, then we throw in Gallup’s study showing that “it’s generally estimated that replacing an employee costs a business one-half to five times that employee’s annual salary,” we can begin to have a clear picture of some real costs that can absolutely be impacted by applying those soft skills!

As I mentioned before, the soft skills that show up in our communication can be seen directly through our behaviors - whether we like it or not! Becoming extremely effective in that area is just as simple as learning to recognize the communication style of the person we’re communicating with and applying The Platinum Rule. I won’t hash that out again here but if you’re not familiar with how simple doing this really is, send me a quick message so we can make time to talk…

The idea of Leadership is also frequently listed as a soft skill. All too often though, I hear that word used as a title (noun) or as a descriptive word (adjective) tied directly to someone in a certain position. Rather than hashing out that entire fight here and now, I’ll just suggest that real results rarely come from BEING something but that absolutely do come from DOING something. When we’re willing to treat leadership as a verb, by taking specific action to lead the people around us, we can expect to see that action have a tangible impact on each of the numbers we’ve looked at to this point. I’m guessing you have a clear picture of what taking that action looks like by now… But if you could use a refresher, it might serve you well to review my Leading At The Next Level lesson called Defining Servant Leadership - Building Champions of Service. (By the way, I just submitted a chapter for an upcoming book called Voices For Leadership on that same topic! More to come on that…)

I’ve heard things like Drive and Work Ethic referred to as soft skills as well. I believe both of those are very intrinsic things but I also believe that having clear goals for what we want to accomplish and a clear purpose around the impact we hope to make in this thing called life plays a significant part in developing our drive and our work ethic. The fact that you’ve hung with me to this point tells me you have those things, now let’s work to build them in the team members around us so we can recognize an even larger return on our investment into our soft skills!