Why soft skills matter

The business landscape has changed and is constantly changing. I remember a time when one has to work and labor for 10, 20 or even 30 years before substantial job promotions could be experienced. But within those years come knowledge, skills competence and most importantly – experience that would make the newly promoted executive ready to take on the leadership roles.

But not today, just take a look at the BPO-KPO industry. The phenomenal growth of this industry translates into one person working perhaps for one year or so promoting to the position of “Team-Lead” in charge of a cluster of maybe six, eight or 10 others and positions for bigger roles is constantly available for those who are competent and ready.

What growth and immediate promotions offer is that young people today can immediately be handed leadership roles and while many of them are competent in terms of skills, a great more of them are not mature enough to have the experience to handle people and this is not a good thing. In many cases, the promoted leader that is supposed to build the business and the team ends up driving good people away because of the lack of leadership skills.

Expats are not exempted from this. I have had clients covering different industries. From service industries to Call Centers, Technology or Pharma our friends from other countries would come with their leadership roles and in many cases they bring with them their culture and attitude not even taking the time to understand the locals and then quite arrogantly impose their authority on them. This can be disastrous as well.

Many good people have expressed their disappointments and asked for counsel on their decision to leave and look for a better job. It is very noticeable that the issues concerned here has very little to do with competence, skills or even productivity, it deals primarily with a failure to learn, understand and even exercise good leadership skills. And there are clients of mine whose people love them so much because their expat leaders know how to treat them right. You typically hear the people say, “He may be American, British or German but he is typically a Filipino at heart and we love him…”

Truth is this warm comment of acceptance and admiration has very little to do with nationalities or ethnicity but everything to do with right and proper leadership skills.

The good news is that many companies realize this and have invested in leadership training and now they are reaping the good results from it. The sad news is that leadership training is still considered “Soft Skills” and is not worthy of their investments.

This mindset from business owners or top executives may have been spurned by different possibilities:

They have had “leadership trainings” before and have not seen any positive results.

It is hard to measure the ROI or the returns on the investment.

They always think that they can do this by themselves.

They do not respect “Soft Skills” Training.

Being a business owner myself I would sympathize with these kinds of sentiments:

I have had a high ranking business executive tell me that the top honchos were sent to a whole week program and he dozed off through each sessions because they were boring – a waste of his time he says.

There is no immediate and visible returns one can see when an investment on leadership program is made yet truth to tell, a majority of problems in business that has caused damage emanates from “people issues” rather than technical issues. But no one would dare admit this and the chief boss is always the last to know.

By doing training by themselves they are engaged in “in-breeding” wherein the same stories are told by the same people, they preach to the choir and while people politely listen to their lectures deep in their hearts they feel “obligated” rather than “interested” and so the engagement is not there.

How can you respect anything that is labeled as “Soft?” Yet almost every successful business gurus both authors speakers who are practitioners from all over the world I have heard and seen for the last five or seven years in my life has stressed that today: “Soft is hard and hard is soft.”

I guess it is time to have a change of mindset. And as businesses begin their business planning and prepare their training budget for the year to come, they will have to put a considerable amount of interest in training their people on leadership skills and training their associates or direct reports on values, attitude and behavior.

(Bring your leaders to Seda Hotel, BGC and experience two inspiring days of leadership training with Francis Kong in his highly acclaimed and updated Level Up Leadership this Aug. 23-24. For further inquiries contact April at +63928 559 1798.)