• 30
  Nov 2019

• Soft Skills or Power Skills?

  
  

  Dr. Farida Virani | Management

Shiv Khera, the renowned corporate trainer, made a very significant statement. He said, “We are hired for our technical skills, but fired for the lack of soft skills”. In the corporate world, HR departments rate soft skills, as a valuable asset while selecting new employees, conversely they also agree that employees with well-developed soft skills are hard to find. Clearly, there is a huge gap between the managerial soft skills that organizations need, and that the fresh employees possess. The B-Schools in India must focus on making the MBA students conversant with the soft skills that suit that the corporate skills needs.

Let us unpack the word “skills.” It is a complex idea. In most skills-based solutions, companies group their corporate skills needs into two types: the technical or “hard-skills” in a job, and the people and managerial “soft-skills” in a job. With corporate experience of two decades and more, my perspective is contrary to the popular view. I believe, “Though technical skills are termed as hard skills they are fluid, they change all the time, are frequently obsolete, and hence learning and relearning is a must. Eg: Javascript was the most popular programming language in 1995 but today Python is the only language continuously on a rise, says a survey about top programming languages of 2020. Conversely soft skills are power skills because in reality they are the skills that give you real ‘power’ at work. Power skills are hard and solid because they are difficult to build, critical, and take extreme effort to acquire. Power skills separate leaders from the crowd”.

Automation, robotization and digitization look different across different industries but it will surely provoke significant job disruptions in future. The World Economic Forum surveyed the CHRO’s of some of the world’s leading companies and has released The Future of Jobs report revealing the top 10 skills employees will need by 2020 and beyond. These are;

• Complex problem-solving - The capacity to solve novel, ill-defined problems in the VUCA real-world settings.
• Critical thinking - Involves being able to use logic and reasoning to interrogate an issue or problem, consider various solutions to the problem, and weigh up the pros and cons of each approach.
• Creativity – The ability to connect the dots with seemingly disparate information, and throw all the ideas together to present something ‘new’.
• People management – Management professionals and team leaders must know how to motivate their teams, maximize their productivity and respond to their needs.
• Coordinating with others - Involves strong communication skills, an awareness of other people’s strengths and weaknesses, and being able to work with a range of different personalities.
• Emotional intelligence – Is that intangible ‘smartness’ that helps one tune into the kaleidoscope of human emotions, and behaviors depending on the mood of a colleague, partner, family member, or even our own internal feelings.
• Judgement and decision-making – The ability to sift through the numbers, find actionable insights, and use big data to inform business strategy and decisions.
• Service orientation - Involves stepping into the minds of users (consumers) and thinking about what they value, fear, and dislike; and developing new products or adapting services to future proof your company or brand.
• Negotiation – The ability to display greater interpersonal skills, and being able to negotiate with colleagues, managers, clients, teams and other stakeholders.
• Cognitive Flexibility - Is all about being a mental gymnast. It is the ability to see new patterns, and to make unique associations between ideas.

Dissed as “soft skills,” these abilities are high-value currency in today’s workplace. Once dismissed by business leaders as mushy nice-to-haves, these “power skills” are in high demand and short supply today. Power skills are indispensable to the way we work today and closely tied to a company’s success. An MIT Sloan study found that power skills training in problem solving, communication and decision making yielded a 250% ROI in eight months. It is time for power skills to stand shoulder to shoulder with technical skills in every management school agenda as well as every organization’s training and development efforts. Let’s reframe our conversations about “soft” skills and talk about how to supercharge our power skills.

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