Why are they called soft skills when it’s so hard to do them right? It seems that whenever you hear someone talking about the importance of soft skills it sounds like they’re apologizing. Hard skills are the ones that get all the respect. Selling. Programming. Statistical analysis. These are hard skills, the ones that are hard to master and require constant upgrading and training to maintain proficiency. Soft skills are, well, soft. Fuzzy. Intangible. Less important.

Well it’s time to turn that notion on it’s head and it starts with the terminology. Soft skills are neither soft nor easy. They are critical and cut across all functions. They are Strategic. To be effective in any of the functions mentioned above you need the Strategic skills of communication, leadership, teamwork, influencing, adaptability, and so many others. The so-called hard skills are what I call Tactical or Functional skills because they are the ones related to success in a specific function. These are narrowly focused and rarely stretch across multiple functions.

I don’t mean to put them down, but I have long maintained that it’s the strategic skills that make people successful and effective in their endeavors. Certainly you need both. I wouldn’t want an accountant who’d never passed math  But in the long run, it’s the strategic skills, the ones that cross functional lines, that prove invaluable.

Just my opinion. Would be interested in yours.
Only the best,
Ron

My friend Jennifer wrote to me with an interesting, though not uncommon, conundrum. She was asking for help with an employee who is very “defensive” and won’t acknowledge the defensive behavior.  She wrote, “the employee continues to interrupt me when I’m providing feedback, and says she has, ‘a right to substantiate’ her perspective.  I have tried to tell her that, yes she can explain her point of view but she also needs to listen actively to ensure she understand what I am saying. I’ve suggested that while she is listening she is actually building her case to ‘substantiate’ or defend and therefore not really ‘actively listening’, nor willing to ever acknowledge what I am asking her to change. I’m feel like I’m not getting through to her and am getting frustrated. She is at a director level, not a newbie, and I want to just scream at her, ‘Just do your job!’ but I know this would not be effective.  Any suggestions?”

Now, I’ve known Jennifer a long time, I’ve worked with her and I know she’s a terrific manager. But we’ve all run up against people like her current employee. And the good news is, there’s lots she can do.

First off, she needs to stop telling the employee to listen, or listen actively. The employee in question thinks she is listening actively. So pointing out that she may not be (IMHO, she isn’t) won’t do and hasn’t done any good.

Second, Jennifer needs to find a neutral way to talk with the employee about her shortcomings or what she’s doing wrong. But she cannot use the word “wrong” with her or she will likely feel attacked and respond with a “fight or flight” reaction. And we know this employee will dig in her 3-inch heels and fight! I’m sure Jennifer is not attacking her employee but that is certainly how she’s being perceived.

Describe specifically what the employee is doing that is not acceptable. That’s the “what.” Then describe why it’s a serious issue that needs to be addressed. That’s the “so what.” So named because of times when I’ve described a problem or shortcoming to an employee and they responded with, “So what?” Then finally the “now what.” This is the change you expect to see and when. If the unacceptable performance is a deficit of knowledge, then the person needs time and training to rectify it. But if it’s a deficit of performance due to attitude, then when you finish describing the performance you expect to see, you will often end with, “and now!”

It’s finally happened. It seems that the pressures of the recession, the economy and the relentless business cycle have gotten to the one person we thought was invulnerable to all this, Superman.

It seems that Superman is considering leaving, may have already left, the Daily Planet to become a blogger! He just can’t take the pressure of today’s workplace. Is this the right career move for the Man of Steel? What will he do for health care? Is he eligible for unemployment? How many Twitter followers does he have? Has he effectively branded himself to go out on his own?

And what about your organization? Are you taking care of your superheroes, the employees who give everything they can and then some, or are you wearing them out? Is burnout destroying morale, exhausting your staff and accelerating turnover? What would you do if your ace reporter, I mean, employee decided to bag it?

http://www.workforce.com/article/20121029/WORKFORCE90/121029964/superman-says-i-quit-after-being-humbled-by-workforce-supervillain

Employees, you may have daydreamed about quitting your job and striking out on your own. No boss, the freedom to say what you want, the liberty to pursue what you want to do. But before you hit the “Send” button on your “seeya” e-mail (did you remember to “cc:” the entire company?) think about what the reality might be like. Ask yourself the questions above.

And managers, take a look around your workplace. You may have more to fear than Kryptonite.

A question crossed my desk recently. What do employees really want from their managers?  What employees want most from their managers is COVER. No, I don’t mean they want their managers to cover for them, or to cover up their mistakes (that’s how we learn).

Employees want COVER, as in:
Clarity: defined, achievable objectives
Opportunity: to grow and develop their skills
Variety: don’t ask them to do the same rote tasks forever
Empowerment: allow them to do their jobs and don’t micro-manage
Resources: to get the job done whether that means time, money or people

Women still make less than 80% of what men do when doing the same jobs. The Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963. The Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009. Yet we still have discrimination in compensation against 50% of our population. Legislation will not close this gap. Enlightened management will. Managers need to recognize two things. First, when people are doing the job, regardless of gender, pay them what the job is worth. Second, there will be a backlash against companies that discriminate in this manner. And as skilled workers become harder to find, as they will, the companies that have maximized their profits at the female workers expense today will find it nearly impossible to make any in the future.

As detailed in this article from BusinessWeek, in the past three years, wages for women in comparable jobs to men has clawed its way from 78 cents to 79 cents for every dollar men earn. What will women do with all this extra cash? While there are a few positions in which women actually out earn men, this is not the norm. And it is not acceptable.
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-25/wage-gap-for-u-dot-s-dot-women-endures-even-as-jobs-increase#p1

This is the real storm threatening our economy.

I had a wisdom tooth removed this week.  I know this is something you usually do when much younger, but I never had a need to. Until now. I spent the day of the extraction in a pain-killer induced haze, and was back at work, albeit on a limited basis, the next day. Two days after the surgery, I hit the desk early to continue catching up and get fully back up to speed. In fact, that’s when I’m writing this, less than 48 hours after the surgery.

I bring this up not for sympathy but to make a point. My 21 year old daughter had the same surgery less than two weeks prior to mine. Same oral surgeon, same tooth, same procedure. And she was out of work for six days. She was swollen and could not have solid food for five days after it was done. I had crusty Italian bread with dinner last night.

The lesson here is that people are different, even those in the same family. We reacted completely differently to the same experience. Managers sometimes make the mistake of thinking that all workers can be treated and managed the same. They do the same job, work in the same place, have the same goals. But just like my daughter and me, everyone reacts to a set of circumstances differently.

When given a new task or protocol, some workers will latch onto it immediately and others will be loathe to give up the old way of doing things. Some people are willing to learn by trial and error and others need to read the manual and feel completely comfortable before they try something the first time. People are different.

This is perhaps the greatest challenge of managers: pulling together a disparate group of people and getting them to work cohesively toward a single goal or set of goals. And you don’t get to do it the way you’d like to all the time. You don’t get to manage them the way you’d like to manage, you must manage them the way they need to be managed. And invariably, you are asked to manage different people in different ways at practically the same time. It’s enough to strip your mental transmission. The best way to keep your sanity is to remember, and this is the phrase I used as my mantra when managing, one size does not fit all.

Turning away from better managers, let’s take a look at another facet of HR.

Hiring.

I saw a discussion recently about how recruiters make hiring decisions or recommendations and for me it comes down to the age old question of “build it or buy it.”

We’re talking about speed [to hire] and skills [to do the job]. Recruiters have to know their organization’s philosophy of “buying,” hiring someone with the skills to hit the ground running who will get up to productive speed very quickly but will cost you more at the outset versus “building,” hiring someone with less experience or skills but with the potential and willingness to learn. The latter will take longer to reach “productive flying altitude” and will cost less to hire, but the cost will be expended in training. Bottom line is you have to know where your organization likes to spend its money. This often means where the management team sees a greater ROI.

To work effectively with hiring managers and best serve your organization, you have to know your organization’s operating philosophy.

Next post, I’ll talk about how to most effectively work with the hiring manager.
Til then,
Only the best,
Ron

Have you ever noticed that some managers are loathe to praise their employees? You’d think they had to pay for every compliment out of their own pocket! We’ve learned that praise, positive reinforcement, has proven to be one of the best ways to motivate stellar performance yet we still find managers hiding behind these classic excuses.
“I don’t have to praise them. Their pay is their praise.”
“So long as I’m not getting on their case they know they’re doing a good job.”
“I don’t have time to praise them!”
And perhaps the scariest of all, “Hey, nobody’s praising me!”
Talk about symptoms of a dysfunctional workplace!

There are some people who don’t like or are uncomfortable with praise. It’s important to recognize if you have someone like this on your team, but for the most part, people want praise the way teenagers want the iPhone5. People are feedback junkies and once they’ve gotten a taste of it, they want more. I knew someone who said he’d work harder for a thank you than a hundred dollar bill. Because he’d forget what he spent the hundred on but he’d remember the praise for years. Another worker described in detail how one time at a corporate event, an executive vice president clapped him on the shoulder, called him by name and thanked him for something he’d done on the job earlier that week. He described it so vividly, I asked when this had happened. He told me it was seven years ago. Time hadn’t diminished the impact of this reward. He still talked about the time Frankie T. had called him by name.

There are few more effective things managers can do to improve employees’ performance than to praise them. Managers worry that the staff will become complacent, but that’s just another excuse. As Steven Covey put it, “Catch them doing something right.” Recognizing your staff when they do something good and complimenting them on it is like making deposits in a managerial credibility bank. Then when (not if) you have to give constructive feedback, it will be surprisingly easier. Don’t worry that they’ll think you’re being hypocritical. So long as you are sincere when you give praise and honest when giving constructive, your staff will be dedicated to a manager who treats them with respect and is honestly looking out for their best interests.

This may sound odd but too many managers get promoted for the wrong reason. They get promoted because they’re good at their job. The problem is that they don’t get promoted because they’ll be good managers.

This can have a seriously detrimental effect on their businesses. Let’s say you have a really good salesperson and you promote her to be a sales manager. The very skills that made her good at sales contradict the skills necessary to be a good manager. Good salespeople tend to be solo operators, Lone Rangers. They are motivated by closing the deal, winning recognition for their sales numbers, large commissions, and praise for their sales acumen. They are interested in personal glory, winning, beating out the competition. They’re the rock stars. Now let’s look at the skill set of the sales manager.  Y’know, the one responsible for herding all those rock stars into a band.

The sales manager must be good at team building, collaboration, self-sacrifice,  and making sure everybody gets across the finish line successfully. Exactly the opposite of everything that made this person successful in their past job. So what happens? The polar opposite of win-win (funny how nobody ever talks about “lose-lose”), which is zero sum. And zero is what you’ll wind up getting from the team unlucky enough to have this prima donna as the manager. Because now you have an unprepared manager who is poorly motivated to manage the team and you’ve lost your best salesperson to boot!

You do need someone with good sales skills, or whatever technical skill in which the department is involved, to have the credibility to lead the team. Look just a little further down the food chain. Pick your second or third best salesperson. Do whatever necessary assessments you have to do to find out which one might be motivated more by the success of the team instead of individual recognition. Make that person the new manager. Then, to make sure your top person doesn’t feel snubbed, meet with that salesperson and tell her that she wouldn’t have wanted the position anyway because she couldn’t afford the cut in pay!

“There ain’t much to being a ball player, if you’re a ball player.” – Honus  Wagner

I thought of this quote recently when talking with Marty, another consultant who is a friend of mine. He does fiscal consulting for non-profit groups, and is often a amazed at the degree of bad management he witnesses. “Is it so hard to be a good manager?” he asked.

“There ain’t much to being a good manager,” I replied. “If you’re a manager.” Marty had been blessed during much of his working career to have managers who were talented, motivating, understanding people. Some served as mentors. Some advocated on behalf of employees. All of them directed him in a way that allowed him to reach his potential and made him remarkably successful. Since “retiring,” he travels extensively sharing his expertise. But more and more he’s encountering people who have no idea how to run a team, motivate a workforce or assemble a group of people capable of achieving more than any of them could individually. “Why are there so many bad managers?”

Like teachers who “teach to the test,” there are too many managers nowadays who manage only to the bottom line. Now don’t get me wrong, I love the bottom line and am dedicated to making it look good. But how to make that bottom line look good is where too many of today’s managers go awry. They think the only way is to cut heads, cut expense, or drive their people til they drop. The idea of treating people well, offering them flexibility, respecting them as valued assets instead of commodities to be used (and then discarded) is unknown to them. Sometimes this is because they are the second generation of bad managers. They have never experienced a good manager who treated them well and developed them, motivated them, and simply, knew how to manage. So they are reinforcing and repeating the sins of their managers.

This has to stop.

This is not a sustainable model. We need to get back to making manager an honorable profession. So many of today’s workforce do not even want to be managers. As they rise in their organizations and get closer to where they could become managers, and perhaps learn how to be managers, that’s when they bolt. They branch out on their own and become entrepreneurs. Because they simply do not want to manage.

Fine. Don’t make them managers. To keep them, let them be the subject matter experts they may want to be. Find the people who have the necessary skills to be good managers. Find the people who may not be the best technical experts but understand the business and have the skills to communicate with people, listen to their needs, mold a group of people into a team, and achieve the results organizations need. These are the people who will be the next generation of great managers. These are the people who are excited by the prospect of seeing a group reach a goal. They are not as interested in individual greatness. They derive satisfaction, even joy, from seeing the team succeed.

And when you see them doing all this, if you ask them about what they’ve done, they won’t brag . They’ve done it because they love it, because they relish seeing the team succeed. They may even be humble about it. If you ask them about their success, they talk about their team, not their managerial prowess.

Because there ain’t much to being a manager, if you’re a manager.