The Soft Skills Most Essential to Business Leaders
Have you ever noticed that many Fortune 500 CEOs seem… interchangeable?
CEOs often move not only from company to company, but from industry to industry with few complications. Alan Mulally went from the airline industry (Boeing) to the automotive industry (Ford). Bob Wright ventured from finance (GE Capital) to media (NBC) and then back to finance (Lee Equity). Rosalind Brewers joined Walgreens Boot Alliance as CEO in March 2021 after serving as Group President of Starbucks from 2017 to 2021. Before this, she was President/CEO of Sam’s Club for five years. And Peter Moore jumped from videogames (EA) to real-life sports (Liverpool Football Club). In fact, a recent study by the global executive search firm SRI showed a 45 percent increase in executives moving between sectors from 2015 to 2019.
How is it possible for so many top business leaders to slide effortlessly from one sector to another? Is it their technical skills? Their expert industry knowledge? No, leadership is not about being able to do a job. Rather, it’s about getting other people to do their jobs. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs puts it in Aaron Sorkin’s eponymous 2015 biopic, “Musicians play the instruments. I play the orchestra.”
In other words, it’s about “soft skills.” Investopedia defines soft skills as “character traits and interpersonal skills that characterize a person’s relationships with other people,” noting, “soft skills have more to do with who people are, rather than what they know.” (Emphasis mine.)
To this point, Business Insider has listed 20 soft skills every leader needs to be successful. The extensive list includes these highlights:
Being a great communicator.
Being a great listener.
Being able to deliver bad news as well as good.
Being able to find solutions that work for everyone.
Being able to criticize constructively.
Being able to quickly adapt to change.
Knowing how to delegate…and to whom.
As employees are becoming increasingly restless—and assertive—in what is being called The Great Resignation, top leaders with superior soft skills are in greater demand than ever. To keep employees on the job and productive, heads of organizations need to understand what their workers want and how to satisfy these desires in pragmatic ways that keep their companies profitable.
To see this in action, consider a recent survey by Microsoft. It found 73 percent of employees want “more flexibility” in the post-pandemic world. At the same time 67 percent wish to receive more interaction and collaboration with their peers. On the surface, these requests would seem to be at odds, since working-from-home and variable office hours would seem to decrease, rather than increase, opportunities for in-person collaboration.
But then, finding solutions to such Gordian Knots is what modern leadership is all about. What’s more, developing one’s soft skills can not only enhance professional effectiveness and professional market value in the short-term, it’s also likely to increase long-term employability. This is true whether someone remains in their current sector or moves to a different industry altogether.
Understanding this phenomenon couldn’t be more critical—or timely—due to ongoing technological trends. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to make major inroads over the next decade, replacing as many as 85 million workers worldwide within the next four years alone. The jobs AI is particularly targeting are those involving rote, repetitive, predictable, and systematized processes. This includes not only such obvious industries as transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and customer service, but also such specialized professions as law, medicine, and accounting. Fields least likely to be impacted by AI are those requiring creativity, intuition, problem-solving, empathy, negotiating, and motivation. (In other words, the things computers are weakest at.)
Obviously, AI, no matter how advanced, can’t energize a room of frustrated salespeople, be a sympathetic sounding board to a distressed worker, provide a needed ego boost to a discouraged manager, or create an exciting vision of future success to a meeting of skeptical investors. Put another way, AI can do, but it can’t determine what to do. It can often answer the question how, but it can never answer the question why. Only a human being can do that. Only a leader can do that.
Like so-called “hard” skills, soft skills require time, training, and experience to properly develop. Even people who seem to be “born leaders” usually acquire their abilities through years of trial, error, and feedback. As with musicianship or athletic ability, possessing good genes helps, but even native talent must always be forged, molded, and tested time and again to achieve its true potential. Of course, receiving expert guidance and support is essential to success in any endeavor.
At Conover Consulting, we specialize in helping business leaders at all levels develop the soft skills they need to maximize their success. We have more than 25 years of experience and hundreds of success stories testifying to our effectiveness. If you’d like to know how we can help you develop the soft skills so essential to success in the post-pandemic economy, contact me today at laura@conoverconsulting.com.