The hard thing about soft skills - my second year in LinkedIn

This week marks the completion of my second year in LinkedIn. Last year I wrote a post about how my skill set became outdated in a year, and it seems like a good time to reflect again on what I have learned over the past 12 months.

The more I think about it, the harder it became to describe what I have learned. In my first year here, I picked up various technical skills that were easy to rattle off in a list. This past year, sure, I picked up some technical skills along the way -- not so much new languages or softwares but rather deepening what I have started learning previously.

I feel like I’ve learned a lot and grown as a person and as a professional, but the rest of the learnings are hard to describe, because they are what one would call ‘soft skills’. Soft skills are by definition less tangible and harder to quantify. To an analyst who likes her data, they’ve always been harder to talk about and assess.

But this past year was a big one for soft skills. It is not just because we published new research about how communications skills is the no. 1 skills gaps across major cities in the US.

Soft skills are especially crucial this year because this is the year GDPR, the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years, came into effect. Even with LinkedIn’s strong Member First culture that ensured we had a great start in protecting data privacy, we still had to formalize and implement tons of new processes and guidelines. Many existing tools have to be retooled or modified, and I spent about half a year doing compliance related work.

It was both frustrating and humbling.

The frustration is unsurprising and easier to understand - so much resources were spent on tweaking existing tools, and sometimes these tweaks lead to worse user experience. The fact that multiple teams were implementing changes at the same time meant that the workflow was not smooth, and many unexpected problems crop up after the teams plug the new pipelines together for the first time. Our end users experienced unexpected downtimes or had to take a longer time to do things, and many of them had to explain to customers about why there were delays in some of the reports we’ve been providing.

And yet it was humbling to be in the midst of all this complexity and frustration to see the professionalism, resilience, and empathy of the people I work with.

I support our Customer Success Organization by providing them insights at scale via our internal tools. Throughout the whole process, this team had to explain to our customers about why things are changing and why certain reports were delayed. It must have been very frustrating for this team, and yet they live and breathe our LinkedIn values of Relationships Matter and remained understanding and collaborative, even as they Demand Excellence of us and remained Open, Honest and Constructive in their feedback.

On the other end of the pipeline, our engineering, analytics teams and as well as my Insights teammates had to deal with all the nitty-gritty of the complexity head on. We ran into brand new problems that no one saw coming, solutions that we built sometimes brought another set of unexpected issues. There were no instructions for these new problems, and we solved them along the way.

One of the Insights team motto is “when there’s no wind, row”. This year, we had to. This year, we did.

This is what resilience and teamwork look like to me. Don’t get me wrong, we made mistakes and we learned. If we were to do this again, there will be a long list of things we’d do differently. But we did it in the end, and I learned so much about how to collaborate better, how to communicate better and how to tackle complexity and uncertainty better. I was inspired by the people I work with, and I hope that I’ll always remember how to face problems and pressure with similar grace.

Big projects aside, I got a little more involved in my team’s hiring this year. I sat in on some interviews, and saw first hand how soft skills are important. There were so many technically strong candidates who looked great on paper but fell short when it came to their soft skills. For some, it was a lack of data storytelling skills; for others, it was a lack of business acumen.

Incidentally, my immediate team in APAC also published research showing that tech jobs with soft skills are the fastest growing in Singapore. After sitting in on those interviews and reflecting on the compliance work I did in the past year, I am not surprised at all.

Soft skills will only gain in importance as our world become increasingly complex, and where existing playbooks may no longer work and we have to figure things out with a diverse set of people. We have to be resilient, and learn to communicate well to people working in different parts of the organisation and the world so that we can move forward as a team.

But soft skills are hard -- it’s not just that they are less tangible, they don’t work universally. Communication tips that work well in a western culture may not land as well in an Asian one, for example.

Soft skills are hard because the key skills? Empathy, being a good listener, being open-minded? They are messy and unpredictable. You may have plans and ideas, but being truly open and empathetic means you might need to throw your preconceptions and ideas out of the window and begin from scratch. Being truly collaborative takes time, and getting alignment across a diverse team may mean moving more slowly than you’d like.

Soft skills are hard because they are about embracing being human, and accepting that the people and customers you work with are human too. Humans are imperfect; we make mistakes, we have hidden agendas, we can be forgetful, we don’t always read existing instructions or wikis, and the list goes on. Soft skills mean you learn to see and acknowledge these quirks, and learn to work around them and be forgiving.

Soft skills are hard, and I wonder whoever came up with the soft vs hard skills classification see the irony.

Anyway, it has been a long year. A frustrating but humbling and rewarding year. I am flattered and grateful to have received two awards (the two little trophies in the picture above making their home between my monitors), but more than anything, I feel honoured to be working with a great team in a great company.

Here’s to another rewarding year ahead!

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P.S. My team did research on the latest emerging jobs, you can check them out here.