What are hard and soft skills? And how valuable are they to the running of your business? In order to be at the top of your game as the leader of a company, you may find that you have to continually up your game, starting with these skills. Soft skills are behavioral competencies or personality-driven skills and refer to a person's emotional intelligence quotient or EQ, characterizing a person's relationships with other people. Soft Skills also relate to personal attributes that help enhance a person's job performance and career prospects. Examples of soft skills are leadership, team building, communication skills, vision, self-awareness, managing change, strategic thinking, and critical thinking. Hard Skills are technical, operational or position skills that are specific and teachable abilities. Hard skills are quantifiable and refer to a person's Intelligence Quotient (IQ). Computer or software applications, problem solving, strategic planning, presentation skills, time management, foreign languages, accounting, math, chemistry, or physics are all hard skills. Is one set of skills more important than the other? Well it depends on the career path you take. Hard skills are those where the rules stay the same, regardless of which company, circumstance, or people you work with/for. Soft skills are self-management skills and 'people skills', where the rules change depending both on the company's culture, and people you work with. Hard skills can be learned in school and from books. In contrast, there is no simple path to follow to learn soft skills. Most soft skills are not taught well in school and have to be learned on the job by trial and error.
Werner Baumgartner, managing partner at White Oryx, based in Dubai highlights that for the successful functioning of a team, both skill sets are necessary, as they complement each other. "Being a believer in the situational approach I absolutely agree that there will be situations in which hard skills trump soft skills and vice versa. But this should never be taken as an excuse for managers not to excel in both skill sets," he said. "In the business I work in, a good manager needs to understand how to master both skill sets: soft and hard skills. Hard skills are essential for the work one has to do him/herself. And if a manager wants to instruct or coach an employee - something a good manager also needs to do, depending on the skill-sets of his subordinates - he needs to be able to teach hard skills as well," he said. It's often thought that soft skills are more important in business careers than hard skills. Most of us know, or have worked for, senior people that don't seem that smart, due to their limited hard skills. The fact remains that they are in senior positions because they have exceptional soft skills, such as leadership skills, management skills, or even self-promotional skills. "However, any person who manages other people needs to have a great set of soft skills as well. I'd like to compare in that regard the manager to a good teacher. We all assume that a teacher knows his subject - but we all agree that some teachers are much better in not only transferring this knowledge to their pupils, but also in motivating them to do more than what is absolutely expected. Good managers need to do the same - they need to understand what everybody is good at, what triggers them to give more than what is usually expected, how to motivate them and how to address their shortcomings," he said. In the US, 2012 was the first year the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business introduced a revamped MBA program that introduces leadership and change-management skills. According to Dr. Murali Chandrashekaran, associate dean, University of British Columbia, business education is at a crossroads and needs to take a new direction. And to do just that, UBC has swapped its traditional teaching structure (which focused on technical skills) to incorporate more abstract thinking and creativity, it was reported in the Globe and Mail. "Eventually, if the MBA program is not helping develop talent for the future then we're not really fulfilling our broader purpose," Dr. Chandrashekaran said. "But prediction is really hard, especially when it involves the future." In fact, several MBA programs across the country have redesigned the way they teach. These programs argue that developing leaders, who can communicate, analyze and think beyond spreadsheets and quarterly reports, is crucial to move beyond the financial crisis and avoid the same mistakes down the road.
