Not soft skills, but real skills

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.

[More here]

And the unconference happened

Most conferences have an agenda. No, not the stated agenda, but an agenda of marketing, airtime to sponsors, ensuring the past and future customers are invited, of ensuring that the "stars" of the industry are invited and attention showered of them. All in all it is a your scratch my back, I scratch your back syndrome. Some of these become cliques and claques and therefore the real point behind a conference is lost. And then there is the unconference - organised and run by the alumni of the ISABS ODCP program. And as the name suggests, this is truly an un-conference organised by the alumni, for the alumni. No funders - except the alumni themselves. No sponsors. Just the team. I havent seen a more tastefully organised conference (yes, its an unconference). To begin with - the location - not a typical star hotel, but an outdoorsy place. The food - simple. The welcome - personal. It was like a homecoming. The setting was warm and welcoming. It was a smaller conference. Ju...

The power of jotting down ideas

Long long ago, I always used to carry a small letterpad with me. To jot down ideas that might occur. Over the years, it has changed from a notepad to evernote to google keep, but the power of jotting down ideas is immense. Small ideas go into keep. Anything to be quickly typed goes into whatsapp as a self message. Bigger or better formed ideas go into Google docs A few are still written, but I manage to copy them into a digital format sooner rather than later. But the power of jotting down is immense. My google keep is an encyclopedia of ideas - most of which may never get implemented.

No conferences

Decided not to attend any conferences this year. Atleast not the typical ones I have often ranted about here. Will be both choosy and intentional about which ones to attend. The ones to attend are the ones put up by practitioners of a craft. The rest is marketing one way or other.

Serendipity and Learning

Search This Blog