Soft Skills

A business is more than a collection of random people loosely sharing a work space and some common goals. To truly function as it should and deliver both a purpose and a profit it has to have structure. Structure, in turn, hinges on having clearly identifiable job descriptions, each one tasked with specific performance indicators. ?

Viewed through this lens a business is a collection of highly skilled individuals, tasked to perform specific, measurable functions through which they are rewarded. Were that to be all a business is we would have solved, long ago, what makes a business viable, what makes it exceptional and what truly allows it to grow in the face of staunch competition and adverse market conditions.

I mention competition and adversity because any business can flourish when the going is good and doing business is easy. But only a business that harnesses the full potential of those working in it can survive and even thrive when things are tough.

Tough environments demand ingenuity. They require innovation. They dictate the need for change. They necessitate teamwork. And they call for trust.

This is where the classic conundrum emerges about business, the one that makes obvious the disconnect between what we believe and what we want to believe. All of the above are soft skills. You can’t really go to a school to learn about them. You can’t truly test for them when hiring. You can’t measure them in your organization.

Soft skills are a human attribute that emerges only after there is a connection within a business to such a degree that you have created a business environment that is largely free of friction.

A business environment where those who work in the business can communicate openly, can share information and ideas freely, can express opinions and doubts, can contribute to the collective sense of purpose of the business and share in its successes and failures, remains an unattainable dream. Pundits explains this by saying that market conditions exert their own logic, that everyday pressures whittle away at ideology, that no business can afford to work like this and survive. These are all handy excuses bandied around because no one wants to do anything different.

Being different is a risk. It requires extra effort to set up and maintain because a business that is different has to have its own code of conduct, its own language of expectations and its own rules of behavior. That’s a lot of effort to put in place at a time when every business requires effort to survive. So, it’s much easier to be conventional, mediocre, run-of-the-mill.

That’s why when it comes to measuring success every business trots out metrics that have to do with quarterly targets and bottom line and when it comes to measuring employee performance every business trots out qualifications, job descriptions and key performance indicators.

It’s not just a case of this not being enough; it is a case that none of this does anything of real value ?for the business. A business that’s true to itself and true to its customers has a vision. The vision it has tells it where it needs to aim for and it allows it to understand why. Its mission then are the endless lists of daily tasks that acquire meaning only when they align towards the business’ vision.

The alignment between vision and mission makes the work done by those inside a business, meaningful. Meaningful work has countless intrinsic and extrinsic benefits, not least of which is a sense of happiness. It is the soft skills each person brings that make all of this viable. Communication, openness to ideas, teamwork, reliability, punctuality and social skills, to mention but a few, are the lubricant we apply to reduce interpersonal and intraorganizational friction.

On top of these soft skills, it is the cognitive competencies that employees possess that make a husiness even remotely practical.

Here's the rub: without these soft skills and cognitive competencies a business structure becomes unsustainable and the business stops being viable. But with them in the mix a business becomes dynamic, resilient, adaptive and robust. It learns to thrive even in adversity and change and grow at every opportunity it encounters.?