The battle between soft skills and hard skills
Early influences
I think we sometimes underestimate the impact of our early influences. When I was little my dad used to read Asterix and Obelix books to me. He would sit hunched on the bottom of my bunk bed, reading aloud and explaining the characters’ names to me (Vitalstatistix, Impedimenta, Nefarious Purpus etc.). I used to love it when a particular scene or pun would make him laugh out loud. But my real favourite was a collection of 1940s Wonder Woman comics re-released in the 1970s which I read quietly and alone. I memorised each frame before I could even read.
I just wanted to be Wonder Woman. She was beautiful and resourceful. She encouraged a bunch of bikini-wearing girls on a remote island to believe in themselves so they could vanquish the evil Seal Men. She stood up to a posse of small-town racists who were secretly super villains who tried to bury her alive in concrete. She created a secret hit squad from a bunch of bored chocolate-eating sorority girls. And she went back in time and told a love-sick Miss Havisham to get over the fact that she had been dumped on her wedding day.
I loved that she was strong, fast, smart and independent, but also that she was encouraging, intuitive, had great listening skills, and always stood up for the underdog. But somehow as I grew up, I forgot why Wonder Woman was my hero and that her appeal was a combination of bold strength and genuine kindness.
IT in the early days
When I finished university in the 1990s I went straight into IT. Back then things were changing fast. If you were there, you might remember tearing the edges of dot-matrix printer paper or enduring the screech of the dial-up modem. New computer languages and tools were popping up so fast you could barely keep track. Developers were like gods and could name their price. No one was talking about methodologies like Waterfall or Agile – they were just trying to get things done. And absolutely no one was talking about ‘soft skills’.
Back then I didn’t even know the terms ‘hard skills’ and ‘soft skills’, but I could see the clear divide between them. Hard skills – being able to program in Visual Basic, or C++ or Java – would get you the job every time. Understandable for the era. In contrast, soft skills weren’t even discussed. In fact, I was actively embarrassed by my mine – all pesky, vague and emotional.
That meeting
This feeling was so acute that I actually remember fighting back tears in a smart windowless corporate meeting room in 2005 surrounded by all male colleagues as we got the results of a team personality exercise that I felt put me squarely in the ‘soft skills’ category. It was the DISC system.
The facilitator explained that everyone had personality flavours that gave them a score for Directing, Influencing, Supportive and Contemplative (hence DISC). My results showed me to be very low for Directing, medium-high for Influencing and Contemplative, and extremely high for Supportive.
I still remember these results 15 years later. I was the only person in the room to get anything more than a hint of ‘Supportive’. The message I took from this was that my role in the team was to bring homemade cookies into the office and skip around asking if everyone was feeling OK. I hardly even noticed what I scored for the other attributes. All I saw was that damn ‘S’.
DISC categories
I was reflecting on this recently after talking to a Michael Simonetti, a successful large-scale Agile delivery manager, about the role soft skills play in the smooth running of a big team. Afterwards, I found myself looking up the DISC system and finding newer more nuanced definitions.
• D = Direct, decisive, determined, dominant, results-oriented
• I = Inspiring, interactive, extroverted, optimistic, persuasive
• S = Steady, stable, diplomatic, trusting, patient, supportive
• C = Conscientious, competent, precise, analytical, logical, cautious, systematic
Psychologist…and cartoonist
What I also discovered, rather thrillingly for me, was that the DISC personality profiling system was created by William Moulton Marston, lawyer, psychologist, suffrage campaigner and, most awesomely of all, creator of the Wonder Woman comics.
I realise now that what he had created in Wonder Woman was the perfect mix of hard and soft skills. I should have remembered her in that DISC meeting as I sat loathing the box I thought I’d been put into, but in fact had put myself into. I should have trusted the judgement of my young self who recognised how cool it is to be both capable and kind.
We need a mix of hard and soft skills
Since that DISC meeting, I have seen a number of teams, made up of really good people, stumble and falter when they don’t have the right mix, especially from the top, of hard and soft skills. I’ve also realised that the best managers I’ve ever had – managers that unite teams and get things done – all have fantastic soft skills. They create a safe space for the team to do their best work. They include people and they share information. They facilitate meetings so everyone has a voice. They foster honesty and vulnerability, and this, in turn, builds trust. And trust means that problems are made visible early and differing opinions are offered and heard so the best solutions are found. It also means that conflict, when it does arise, evaporates like a cocktail at happy hour.
So, embrace and celebrate your soft skills, I say. Foster them and encourage them. See success as team-wide, celebrate other people’s wins, build allies by supporting and encouraging your colleagues, listen with all your ears. Be the person that gets your colleagues organised to go for coffee in the morning. Heck, bring in some homemade choc-chip cookies!
I would love to hear what you think about the importance of soft skills.
Cheers - Kylie
P.S. A shout out to Gaz and Steve for being the best managers I’ve ever had, Pete for always making team coffees happen and my dad for all those books he read to me as a child.