The Main Issue CEOs have with Leaders! They Have Not Mastered the Hard Skill Competencies of Management! From GW’s Leadership Manager Workbench….

From GW’s Leadership Manager Workbench….

As a management consultant, I don’t make up the rules. I just observe over time what tenets of management relate to certain situations in business and report what actions are normally taken by an executive or CEO in similar situations.

Such is the observation with leaders. The vast majority of them are mediocre managers because they place all of their emphasis on learning how to use the soft skills instead of the blocking and tackling skills first. The hard skills.

I recall the time I was facilitating a program for potential department managers at Flakt, Inc., in Michigan. One of the 25 participants was a former Army Platoon Leader who had served in the Gulf war.

The major topic of discussion at this session was defining the most important attributes of a leader. The vast majority of the responses all hinged around the leader’s need to use soft skills like empathy, sympathy, integrity, etc. but about 30 minutes into the session, he had still not said a word.

Knowing that we were both veterans, but from different eras, I continued receiving comments from around the room until it became his turn to comment. It went something like this:

“I don’t believe empathy, sympathy are as important to a leader as other attributes, because it's just common decency. Whenever my platoon would go out on night patrol, it was probably the most dangerous time in my duty. I never cared whether they instilled any of the soft skills mentioned in our leaders. No, the most important attributes were the decision making, problem solving, and action planning attributes that we needed to stay alive. We only used those soft skills when someone didn’t make it back, or was injured on patrol, it was just common decency.” The entire audience was silent for several seconds.

Years later, my consulting firm began assignments at companies on optimizing the supply chain. A part of that assignment is to analyze the workloads of everyone in the supply chain so that we could shrink it and eliminate waste.?

After performing this assignment with multiple companies, we analyzed the results over time, and realized that 90% of the workloads involved those same hard skills that the platoon leader professed. Decision making, problem solving, action planning. Only 10% involved soft skills like sympathy, empathy, integrity, diversity. We believe the soft skills are important, but not nearly as important for an executive as mastering the hard-skill competencies.

The main issue that today’s CEOs have with today’s leaders is that they have only mastered the competencies of the soft skills, but use the hard skill competencies 90% of the time, and hardly understand how they all fit together.

A CEO has mastered the hard skill competencies, but often finds himself or herself required to promote a leader who has not mastered the competencies of strategy, planning, organizing, teamwork, and control. That’s the main issue that CEOs have with leaders. They are prepared for leadership, but not for management!?

So, what a CEO found is a leader who is skilled in empathy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, but has no skills in the blocking and tackling competencies that make a business double in size. What good is that? You need both.

Each of you has to make your own decision about what it takes to be a CEO or executive. We can only mentor you in what we glean from successful executives as to what to be competent about. They consistently tell us they can take a course on “soft skills” once and the competencies don’t change as they get promoted. However, mastering the hard skills requires transformation for every position they promote you to during your career, because a leader’s role diversifies at every level.?

For example, your decision-making techniques, hard skills, change from being a staff or middle manager, to a department manager, to director, to executive. Empathy requires little change from when you learned it from a coach the first time. Your decision-making techniques are different when you are a staff manager than when you are deciding on a merger and acquisition protocol.?

Keep in mind the “Axiom of Results Accomplished: CEOs and executives are compensated to accomplish the key objectives of the company. The more key objectives accomplished, the more value that person brings to the organization.”

That axiom relates to SMB companies as well as Fortune 1000. Soft skills might be very important to you, but keep in mind where the money lies in the hard skills of the company, and your leadership manager position.

Sign your potential leaders up for our Leaders Journey, [email protected], it provides the needed management depth.

gw

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