Soft Skills the Increasing Complexity

Soft Skills

The increasing complexity of today's business environment demands from managers a wide range of skills. Traditionally, management positions were earned on the basis of sound fundamental skills. Authority derived from these hard skills was sufficient for the business to succeed. However, as the business world grows larger, and the needs of organizations become more complex, it is increasingly important for manager's to develop a wide range of soft skills as well. Part of this shift is a result of increasing emphasis on people as a key organizational input. The move to a knowledge-based economy places increased emphasis on the ability of manager's to extract non-physical performance from their employees. Moreover, globalization and increased communication has resulted in increased emphasis on a wide range of interpersonal skills. The result is that in recent years, soft skills have become the most important set of skills a manager can possess.

Hard skills are defined as the technical or administrative procedures that are related to the organization's core business. These types of skills still have significant value in the business world, but soft skills are rapidly emerging. Soft skills refer to communicating, problem solving, conflict resolution, teambuilding, motivating and other similar skills. These soft skills are typically interpersonal skills and are often difficult to measure. Yet, an absence of them will be reflected in poor organizational performance. This is especially true in today's knowledge-based organizations. Such firms typically rely on less formal structures, teamwork, and a reduced emphasis on bureaucratic control. In this type of work environment, motivation is very different than in a bureaucratic type of environment. The commitment of the employees to the organization's strategy objectives must be earned. This requires the organization and its managers to properly communicate the strategy and the employee's role as it pertains to that strategy.

Thus, communication is one of the most important soft skills for a manager to develop. The sense of purpose and motivation that managers feel towards the organization must permeate throughout the company. In most firms today, this cannot be done simply through dictatorial means. In fact, the company will be stronger if this sense of purpose and motivation is developed from within each employee. Communication skills are also essential in many of the other key soft skills, such as conflict resolution and leadership.

Leadership is one of the most difficult soft skills to identify. At once, leadership skills must combine communication and motivation with strong personal charisma. Leadership skills have become more essential are formal barriers between organizational layers become broken down. In many small companies, for example, there may only be one layer between the leader and the bulk of the staff. Even in larger organizations, the entrepreneurial archetype has found favor, as the rapid pace of technological change has resulted in increasingly dynamic business environments that resemble the entrepreneurial type more than the traditional big business type. Strong leadership plays an essential role in this archetype, because the firm's objectives and strategies are subject to constant flux. Communication of these shifts is essential because roles and responsibilities will change frequently. Without strong leadership, the firm is likely to become subject to confusion, a lack of direction and be filled with employees who have little sense of purpose and poor morale.

It has been identified that a move towards knowledge-based business has fostered this increase in demand for managers with strong soft skills. The management of knowledge itself is another soft skill. Traditional knowledge consisted of skills that could be trained. In many firms today, the most important skills cannot be trained. One of the most important facets of knowledge management is the capture and transformation of knowledge into a corporate asset. This requires managers who can identify sources of tacit knowledge and elicit that knowledge to improve the company. The same can be said for sources of organizational wisdom. The emergence of the importance of soft skills reflects a business environment where intense competition places high emphasis of managers' abilities to utilize all of the organization's assets. There is no formal means to identify and extract the sum total of the organization's information, knowledge and wisdom - to do so requires acute understanding of the people within the organization.

One technique that has been used extensively in recent years to help accomplish this task is the use of teams. The use of teams is essentially an attempt by larger companies to replicate the ability of entrepreneurial ventures to capture the sum total of the organization's capabilities. Within the team context, the goal is adapted to the sum total of the team's capabilities. Yet, effective team management is another unique soft skill that managers must learn in order to be most effective in today's operating environment. The outcomes of effective teambuilding are evident. The members of the team are able to synthesize their combined information, knowledge and wisdom in order to achieve optimal results. For the manager in charge of the team, this requires the ability to do several things, the most important of which is to build trust among team members. Furthermore, the manager must facilitate effective team communication. In today's business environment, the team may be very diverse demographically. Thus, managers must have the soft skills required to foster communication across even the most diverse groups, no matter how different the communication styles and business cultures of the different members may be.