Human skills

It drives me a little crazy when we refer to the necessary workplace skills as a combination of hard and soft. I think what trips me up is the language. Hard and soft. As if one set of skills is difficult and rigorous — the hard skills — and the other set is easygoing and fluffy — the soft skills.

Yep, that’s where you lose me.

Sure enough though, the hard skills probably are difficult and rigorous. The schooling, the training, the talent, the deep knowledge. All the years and the hard work needed to ensure competence, maybe even mastery. Hard, hard and harder.

On the other hand, I think the so-called soft skills are downright mislabeled. First, if we’re being completely honest, they aren’t even close to easy. I would venture to say they are rather challenging, definitely nuanced, and more often than not, problematic. That does not scream fluffy to me. Second, they are the most fundamentally complex of all our skills. They relate to personality and temperament, traits and habits, character and mannerisms. They are, essentially, our human skills.

Some of these human skills are what I refer to as highly social skills. Think communication, listening, vulnerability, empathy, kindness, respect, awareness, collaboration, relationships, conflict management and emotional intelligence. Making our way through life in concert with other humans is a social contract that requires us to stand in the middle of our deepest shared humanity. And I dare you to say that is easy.

Others of these human skills are closer to personal attributes: things like accountability, teamwork, leadership, integrity, courage, wisdom, professionalism, adaptability, resilience, perseverance and resourcefulness. Imagine conquering the world of work through sheer grit and determination. Think of the fortitude necessary to maintain integrity under the most tempting of times, or the level of wisdom that can only come with age. Not even in the ballpark of soft.

And finally, we have the superhuman skills that align to mental agility. Curiosity, creativity, innovation, design-thinking, critical thinking, strategic thinking, problem-solving, growth mindset, influence, storytelling and the ability to be indistractable. The power to captivate an audience by telling a compelling story, the capacity to imagine something that has never been done before and then going and doing it, or the gift of continually approaching life with the understanding that there will always be more to learn. That, my friends, will never fall under the label of easygoing.

Bottom line: Soft skills are not soft.

They are also not easy, comfortable, agreeable, smooth, fluffy, gentle, delicate, calm, melodious, or any other synonym. Repeatedly referring to them as such is a disservice of epic proportions to the multifaceted human standing in front of you.

I spend the vast majority of my time in the human potential space, so perhaps I’ve just grown weary of labels that don’t capture the full story of the human experience. Humans are complex creatures. We contain multitudes. The vastness of human potential is nearly incalculable. I could write for days alone on the sheer magnitude of the role emotional intelligence (EQ) plays in our collective humanity. EQ is flat out the game changer.

So yes, hear me when I say the technical hard skills are an absolute necessity. Hiring an airplane pilot who doesn’t have flight school credentials is a bad plan. And so is hiring that same pilot if they lack the human skills around critical thinking and problem-solving. I’m just imagining how handy those troubleshooting skills might be if the aircraft was experiencing a mechanical moment.

OK, let me land this plane. Metaphorically.

There are two coordinating sets of workplace skills that operate in unison. Together, working in tandem. One without the other is an incomplete equation. And yet somehow we’ve allocated oppositional language to describe them. Hard and soft. I’m merely suggesting — OK, maybe strongly urging — that we call them what they really are. Hard and human. Because there’s not one thing soft about human skills.

Ancora Imparo … (Still, I am learning)

Editor’s note: Stacey Mason is the founder of The Improv Lab, a professional development business in Bentonville. The opinions expressed are those of the author.