Soft landing

Muhammad Tahir Rabbani risked poking the bear on LinkedIn when he asked the Learning & Development Professionals Club:

How can we differentiate between hard and soft skills?

His question was serendipitous because I had been giving that very question some serious thought, and where I landed was that the successful application of hard skills can be measured definitively. For example, the code you write works as intended, or you arrive at the correct mathematical solution. Hence the metric is a hard number, or a binary yes or no (1 or 0).

On the other side of the coin are soft skills, so named because they are not hard skills – a bit like the white rhino and the black rhino, or hard dollars and soft dollars. Successful application of these skills less obviously boils down to a number. For example, how do you measure your communication skills or your relationship management prowess? The number of emails you send or the size of your network both miss the point. One approach might be to measure the skill indirectly, perhaps in terms of employee engagement or volume of sales.

I was comfortable with my position until I listened to a podcast by David James in which Guy W Wallace quotes Joe Harless: "Soft skills is a euphemism for hard skills which we have not worked hard enough yet to define." In other words, Guy explains, we typically don't begin with the end in mind – that is to say, terminal performance.

And this made sense to me. I realised we could measure an executive's communication skills by monitoring his target audience's actions in response to the key messages in his memo; and we could measure a line manager's provision of feedback by calculating her team member's subsequent uptick in performance of a task. Thus, if we factor in terminal performance, a business metric emerges.

However, as Guy also explains, this is all highly dependent on the intended outcome in the context of the individual's role, which makes it challenging to quantify at scale. Yet I also see how, just as we standardise the outputs of hard skills via acceptance criteria, we can do the same for soft skills. For example, we could use a rubric to assess whether the feedback that the manager provided clarified the situation, described the behaviour observed, and explained the impact. In this way, we "harden" the skill.

Complicating matters is the fact that some folks take umbrage at the word "soft" because... continue reading