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Not soft skills, but real skills

 Seth Godin nails it.  

Lets call soft skills, real skills he says. 

We give too little respect to the other skills when we call them “soft” and imply that they’re optional. What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes and perceptions of the people who do the work.

Vocational skills can be taught: You’re not born knowing engineering or copywriting or even graphic design, therefore they must be something we can teach. But we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to decision-making, eager participation, dancing with fear, speaking with authority, working in teams, seeing the truth, speaking the truth, inspiring others, doing more than we’re asked, caring and being willing to change things. We underinvest in this training, fearful that these things are innate and can’t be taught. Perhaps they’re talents. And so we downplay them, calling them soft skills, making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

At scale, organizations pay less attention to soft skills when hiring because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills are impersonal and easier to measure. If it’s easier to test for, it seems more important when selecting our team.

And more wow

Let’s stop calling them soft. They’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. The skills of charisma and diligence and contribution. But these modifiers, while accurate, somehow edge them away from the vocational skills, the skills that we actually hire for, the skills we measure a graduate degree on.

So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead.

Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need today.

Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down or program a computer to do.

Real skills can’t replace vocational skills, of course. What they can do is amplify the things you’ve already been measuring.

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