Stop Avoiding Hard Skills and Instead Embrace Them
Ensure L&D Offers Practical Business Value
Add bookmark
Did you ever wonder why, in decade after decade, many CEOs and top line executives have such a low opinion of your leadership and talent development programs? It is because they do not feel that your current programs directly help executives to operate the business which requires the use of hard skills to achieve the company’s financial, operating and strategic business objectives every fiscal year. For the most part, they consider your programs as nice-to-have while being designed for the soft skills utilized by lower management.
Soft and Hard Skills Defined
Soft skills generally include interpersonal skills and attributes (communicating, listening, motivating, creative thinking, counselling, etc.), leadership behaviors (servant, morality, trust, authenticity, humility, compassion, integrity, etc.), leadership styles (autocratic, democratic, etc.), and supervisory skills (delegating, problem-solving, reviewing performance, interviewing, etc.).
REPORT: Employee Engagement and Experience for the Post-COVID World
Conversely, hard skills cover the job-related technical and business skills needed to achieve job success, which evolve from the primary function and the four or five key responsibilities listed in the job description. At the senior and upper management levels, they also include the following hard skills.
Functional Acumen – understanding particular business functions (sales, marketing, product development, manufacturing, etc.) and sub functions (for manufacturing, they are production, quality control, manufacturing engineering, inventory control, etc.), along with planning, controlling and leading major multi-functional and/or multi-divisional team efforts to achieve critical business results
Financial Acumen – understanding the company and division income and cash flow statements and balance sheet, sales volume, and gross profit margins for major products, budget/profit planning, and performance
Fiscal Year Business Objectives - for the company, divisions, and key executives
Business Strategy – understanding the company and divisional strategic plans and objectives, major product/market development plans, financial plans, and contingency plans
Executive Skills – Board and top management interaction on key business issues, stock market analysis, and analyst interaction, championing innovation and continuous improvement, consistently achieving profitable financial results and strategic growth, establishing a highly effective workplace culture, etc.
Management Skills – knowing how to plan (and set objectives), organize, control, and lead important multi-functional projects, and consistently leading
So, the task here is to understand the particular business objectives of the leaders in your program and, with their line management superiors, agree upon what specific hard and soft skills are needed to facilitate the achievement of those business objectives.
READ: How to Get Top Line Management to Buy into Soft Skills Training
Management Level/Soft-Hard Skills Mix
Today, the vast majority of leadership and talent management programs concentrate almost exclusively on soft skills development, especially for first-level supervisors. To meet the developmental needs of top-line executives, leadership development programs need an appropriate mix of soft and hard skills (25% soft/75% hard skills) as outlined in the following table.
Lower - 75%-25%
Middle - 50%-50%
Senior/Upper - 25%-75%
So, the task here is to reflect the appropriate percentage of soft and hard skills in your program’s content.
Justification for the Inclusion of Hard Skills
Regarding leadership and talent management programs, it is critically important to acknowledge that the ultimate customer for all your programs is the CEO and top-line executives. To that end, there are three highly-reputable articles that highlight the need for the inclusion of hard skills in their eyes.
The first one is by Jack and Patti Phillips in their August 19, 2020 article in the Chief Learning Officer magazine which indicates that the estimated $200 billion spent globally each year on leadership development receives little return on investment from the business leaders who are their customers.
They point out the following: “According to a recent Fortune survey, only 7% of CEOs believe their companies are building effective global leaders, and just 10% said that their leadership development initiatives have a clear business impact.” They also note that these viewpoints are consistently reinforced in the negative press it receives in worldwide professional journals and from the business press.
The second one is by Jeff Pfeffer in his January 2016 article in the McKinsey & Company Quarterly entitled “Getting Beyond the BS of Leadership Literature”, who concludes that there are several problems inherent in the majority of LD programs. First, leadership is framed almost solely within the context of morality, such as authenticity, telling the truth, integrity, agreeableness, and so on. Second, framing leadership in that way "substantially oversimplifies the real complexity of the dilemmas and choices leaders confront".
Third, he states that "placing leaders and their actions into good and bad seriously oversimplifies a much more complex reality and continues to reinforce a problematic, trait-based and personality-centric view of human behavior." In other words, such programs overemphasize the soft skills of leadership while minimizing or avoiding the hard skills that are needed to achieve the required business outcomes. In doing so, they provide little practical business value.
The third one is by Ron Carucci in his January 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “A 10-year Study Reveals What Great Executives Know and Do”. After interviewing more than 2,700 executives, he concludes there are four recurring patterns of executive skills that distinguish the performance of exceptional executives – knowing the financial and market/product realities of your industry competitors; knowing your company’s functional strengths and weaknesses, and how best to coordinate them in any companywide effort; providing great decision-making based on the use of analytical and quantitative tools and measures for all aspects of the business; and forming deep-trusting business relationships. In sum, these four patterns reinforce the above 75% to 25% hard/soft skills mix for senior and upper management, and the overall need to incorporate hard skills into most leadership and talent development programs.
When viewed together, these three classic articles clearly and powerfully emphasize the need to include the appropriate hard skills into certain leadership and talent development programs will greatly improve their return on investment in the eyes of the CEO and line executives.
Reasons Why Developers Almost Exclusively Utilize Soft Skills
There are many reasons that help explain why developers have evolved into primarily using soft skills; some of which are industry-related while others are developer-related.
Industry-related Reasons
- There are a multitude of sources of leadership information that successfully inundate leadership and talent developers with programs and program content, as illustrated by the previously-mentioned estimate of $200 billion spent per year. These sources include seminars, conferences, websites, books, consultants, blogs, videos, podcasts, articles, and research reports, among many others.
- Most of these sources heavily market their information directly to HR executives and Leadership/Talent Developers.
- The vast majority of the above sources deal almost exclusively with soft skills information that is readily available to all developers for quick and easy access in comparison to any information on hard skills, which is much more time-consuming and harder to uncover, develop, and use.
- Most of the purveyors of these sources, like any other business, are interested in selling you their soft skill products and/or services with only a tangential concern, whether it is a REAL solution for your developmental need or problem.
- Most interactions between the source purveyor’s staff and leadership or talent developers concentrate on soft skills because neither party has the career background and experience to deal with any hard skill information. Therefore, it creates a vicious cycle of dealing only with soft skills that recur repeatedly.
- No source purveyor management will change its business model of selling soft skills material until their leadership and talent development customers require that relevant hard skills be included.
Leadership and Talent Developer-related Reasons
- The vast majority of developers have little or no practical business background in the major functional areas of a business (Finance, Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing, Operations, Product Development, etc.) and therefore shy away from their use.
- Most developers are people-oriented and not numbers-oriented, while numbers are emphasized in all functional areas to measure legitimate business results and progress.
- Developers have spent most of their careers developing a detailed knowledge base of soft skills and now simply want to teach what they know, without having to learn and apply new and more complex hard skills.
- Some developers have become complacent in their world of soft skills and do not want to take the risk trying to learn and apply new, and more complex hard skills.
- Many leadership development programs involving hard skills will likely have to be designed from scratch, which is obviously more costly, time consuming, and difficult to do. However, there are many generic programs covering various hard skills that could be purchased, amended, and reused to teach the appropriate hard skills.
- It is much easier to access and use an existing program content, rather than writing a new one.
- While purchasing a purveyor’s off-the-shelf program that is well researched and developed, easy to implement, and cost effective is very tempting; most often it would be like having a solution in search of a problem.
- The current emphasis on soft skill programs strongly suggests that the 25%-75% soft-hard skill mix is the same at all levels of management, which is the opposite of top management’s viewpoint that more likely reflects the real business world.
- Most developers do not recognize that relevant soft skills are best taught when combined with the relevant hard skills.
- Most developers do not recognize the fact that when relevant hard and soft skills are tied directly to the achievement of one of the company’s critical business objectives, top management takes notice and begins to recognize the practical business value that such training can provide.
- Some HR and Leadership Development management personnel do not even try to understand the company’s annual business objectives so that they can uncover what specific hard and soft skills are necessary to achieve them.
- HR and Leadership Development management does not accept the fact that, in general, most CEOs and top line management value hard skills much more than soft skills because they feel hard skills are far more predictive of job success. If appropriate, your programs should reflect that fact.
WHITEPAPER: 4 Ways Every Manager Can Create a Positive Learning Culture
Leadership Development Training Program Example
For maximum effectiveness of any leadership development training program at the middle management level and above, hard skills and soft skills should be taught together. The design of any such program should commence with a thorough understanding of the leader’s business objectives with them and their line management superior(s) so that the relevant hard and soft skills needed to achieve the business objectives can be agreed upon.
The LD or TM staff can develop the hard skill portion of the program content by working directly with various line management experts. Such experts can come from outside consultants, business school staff, authors, inside experts within the company, among others.
These experts should be highly knowledgeable in the best-of-the-best successful and innovative business practices, so that the attending leaders can learn the new practices and discuss their applicability in achieving some of their business objectives. These experts, with the assistance of the LD or TM staff, will be responsible for developing and presenting the hard skill portion of the program content.
Let’s take an example of a training program for a group of General Managers who are operating a $100 to $150 million per year business. A business objective to increase sales by 15 percentage points over last year has been established based on a significant product software enhancement with greatly improved functionality that needs to get to market two months ahead of schedule.
The relevant hard skills for this program might be to learn the new and/or improved features of the product’s functionality, to train sales personnel how best to sell those features into the existing or new customer base, to achieve the desired delivery performance ahead of schedule through improved project management, to improve customer service’s responses on the enhanced product’s typical service issues, and implement the entire project within the cost parameters to achieve the profit goals.
The relevant soft skills for this program would be developed simultaneously and might be to motivate the entire workforce regarding the greater competitive advantage the enhanced product will provide, build a higher level of trust among employees in the enhanced product, to achieve better teamwork and coordination between field sales and customer service employees and to teach project management skills for improved delivery performance.
Though this approach will likely increase the cost of the program by an estimated 20% to 25%, the program’s return on investment to top management will be greatly enhanced and easily offset by the product’s improved financial and market performance.
INTERVIEW: L&D: The Skills Your Employees Will Need in the Future
Teaching Hard and Soft Skills Together
The company and division’s ability to achieve some of its important business objectives and strategies will be greatly enhanced.
The practical business value of appropriate leadership and talent development programs will be recognized by line management executives as a practical way to help achieve some of its important business objectives to which they are held accountable by the CEO and the Board of Directors.
By providing practical business value in the appropriate leadership and talent development programs, HR and LD functions will clearly demonstrate their ability to be an equal business partner to line management peers.
Line management is taught how to implement the relevant soft skills in a practical, real world business setting by applying the relevant soft and hard skills together in an effort to achieve one or more of their important business objectives.
With the improved reputation of LD programs covering the relevant hard skills as they relate to a particular business objective, line management support for these programs and those that deal solely with soft skills will be greatly enhanced.
By covering the relevant hard and soft skills in relation to the line management leader’s business objectives, the leaders and their superiors will value the time and effort they invest in the program and future programs much more than they currently do and consider it as a worthwhile return on that investment.
Conclusion
If the subject content of appropriate leadership and talent development programs is not changed to incorporate such hard skills, the historical pattern of top management seeing little or no practical business value in these programs is likely to continue and the HR and LD functions are doomed to repeat their failed program content.
It seems to me that the leaders of the HR and Leadership Development functions are facing a critical crossroad regarding their lackluster reputation in the eyes of their ultimate customer (the CEO and line executives) and the future funding for their programs. However, this crossroads offers an historically significant and pivotal opportunity to make a major paradigm shift in all program content, but especially for those designed for middle and upper management.
CEOs and line executives will gain a much more favorable view of the HR and LD functions when, and only when, they see that their programs for middle and higher management directly helps the company to achieve some of its specific business objectives that facilitate improved profitability and strategic success.
The only meaningful way to do that is to teach the appropriate mix of hard and soft skills together in a workshop setting that pragmatically helps the leaders to achieve some of their actual business objectives within the practical context of their associated real-world plans, challenges, risks, and strategies.
It is simple. If you want your ultimate customers to respect the pragmatic business value and worth of your programs while improving your reputation as an equal business partner, incorporate hard skills into the program content. This major paradigm shift can be implemented by developing or updating several key programs or more every fiscal year.
