Burning Questions: How Do We Think About Soft Skills?
As part of our on-going Burning Questions series we’re diving into the topics, concerns, and questions that we hear most commonly when we speak with HR professionals and leaders who are embarking on skills management initiatives. This week we’ll be taking a look at a question that most HR professionals and business leaders have grappled with at one time or another: “How do we think about soft skills?”
HR professionals know that soft skills can be just as important as hard or technical skills when it comes to finding, developing, and retaining top talent. In fact, soft skills can often play a huge role in whether a new hire, promotion, or assignment works out in the long run. According to a recent study published by LinkedIn, “92% of respondents say soft skills are more important than technical skill” and “89%...[of] bad hires typically lack soft skills.” With numbers like that, it is no wonder that insight into employees’ soft skills is high on the priority lists of many organizations. The problem is, most don’t know where to start.
Lucky for you, we’ve got 4 things you can do to make sure your organization is tracking soft skills effectively.
Measure Soft Skills as Rigorously as Hard Skills
Tie Ratings Back to Behavior
Get Multiple Opinions
Give Feedback and Put the Data to Work
Measure Soft Skills as Rigorously as Hard Skills
Often, there is a resistance to measuring soft skills within an organization, as some people view them as too difficult to quantify. But, if you do not measure proficiency when it comes to these critical soft skills, how are you supposed to put together a comprehensive view of your people?
Just because it is more difficult to measure a softer skill, such as leadership, than a hard skill, such as Java, does not mean it is not worthwhile. By applying the same rigor to your measurement of soft skills, you send a clear message to the organization and raise them in importance in the eyes of both employees and management.
Tie Ratings Back to Behavior
By defining the rating scale based on observable behavior, organizations provide managers and employees with a clear set of expectations around how they should evaluate soft skills. For example, look at the following rating scale:
1. Has a desire to learn
2. Just beginning to learn
3. Understands, but has not yet demonstrated
4. Basic understanding and cursory involvement
5. Can articulate and demonstrate inconsistently
6. Can articulate and demonstrate consistently
7. Fully grasps and executes
8. Leads, facilitates, and guides others
9. Acts as an official mentor for others
10. Recognized externally as an expert
Each of these proficiency definitions is tied to behavior that can be observed and measured regardless of the skill in question. This type of rating scale is just as useful for a hard skill like regression analysis as a softer skill like public speaking. By tying ratings back to observable behavior, you will be able to get much greater rating consistency across managers and set clear expectations around what each level of proficiency looks like.
Get Multiple Opinions
The wisdom of the crowd can be extremely powerful as a means of nailing down a reliable estimate or approximation of an unknown (or potentially unknowable) figure. Take for instance, the old carnival favorite of guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. A single person’s answer is unlikely to be very accurate, however if you take the average of 5 or 10 people, you are much more likely to approach the true number of jelly beans in the jar. The more individual estimations you add to your calculation, the more likely you are to get close to the actual number (check out James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of the Crowds for more insight into how this works).
At this point you might be asking yourself, ‘what does this have to do with measuring soft skills?’ Well, actually a lot, since soft skills are more difficult to precisely pin down and reliably evaluate. Ideally, soft skills should be evaluated by the employee themselves, their manager, peers, and (if they exist within the organization) any externally recognized experts in that discipline.
Give Feedback and Put the Data to Work
All the data in the world is not worth a dime if your business does not put it to use. Once you have the data, use it to uncover hidden skills gaps, provide feedback to employees in the form of targeted, data-driven development plans, and discover people who have the soft skills needed to thrive in leadership positions.
If you want to learn more about this topic and the other burning questions that we’ve been hearing from people like you, download our new eBook, “7 Burning Questions in Skills Management.”