Skills can be broken up into two categories - Hard Skills and Soft Skills. Hard skills represent job-related knowledge and abilities that a person needs in order to perform their job or activity effectively. If you are looking for a software engineer, you would expect that anyone fulfilling that role has some level of experience or knowledge around developing software in general and has some type of understanding of the environment they will be working within.
Soft skills represent personality traits or behavioral cues that shape how you work either individually or as part of a larger team.
So many times people tend to focus on the hard skills. If you look at any job application or talk to anyone who is looking for help with a project, they can talk at length on the hard skills they are looking for. Not only the skill itself but the amount of time a person has been using a particular skill. In terms of an assembly line, they look at hard skills as the necessary building blocks a resource needs to have to be successful. If you stopped to think about that, it really is quite counter-intuitive. By focusing on the job-related skill needs they are ignoring what I think is the most important part.
No matter how much a person knows about a specific subject, there will always be times when they will run into the unexpected and need to manage the results of abnormal operations. Problem solving and troubleshooting from a hard skill perspective will have them focus on the patterns they have used in the past to resolve unexpected outcomes. It is these unexpected results where the most innovation is stored. Someone with a strong toolset of soft skills will find ways to better understand the problem and create solutions that utilize everyone's skills to recover from the problem. Even in times of smooth processing, the individual with a strong base of soft skills will get the most productivity out of the organization.
When I am building a successful team, I focus specifically on the soft skills. I can train someone in the technical aspects of a job, that kind of training is easy to find as long as the candidate has the ability to learn and implement what they have learned (both soft skills by the way). What is much more difficult is to train someone how to creatively problem solve or effectively communicate what needs to be done so that all the dissimilar pieces fit together. Of all the soft skills, I focus on two specifically: Leadership and Vision
Leadership
Leadership is one of those terms that everyone thinks they know but it is amazing how many different versions of the definition there are. For the sake of this discussion, leadership represents the ability of an individual or a team to influence and guide people and organizations to an end goal. Notice that no where in that definition does it describe the social standing or job title of the individual. When talking to people on leadership, I have found it is a common misconception that in order to be a leader you must have a managerial title. It is important to call out the distinction between managing and leading.
When you are placed in a manager role, it is your job to assess the resources in your charge and make sure that they are moving forward on the team and organizational goals. Let me reiterate, managers have subordinates. They are by definition authoritarian. That doesn't mean they are dictatorial, it simply means that they are placed in a managerial role and given a level of authority over those assigned to them. Their interaction with subordinates tend to be transactional. They give assignments and expect them to be carried out.
Leaders on the other hand do not necessarily have subordinates (but the can), rather leaders have followers. Leaders tend to have more of a transformational relationship with others they are working with. They tend to have a more people focus than being task oriented. That doesn't mean leaders are not goal oriented or do not have specific deliverables. What it means is that they tend to look at a problem space from a people perspective understanding that a task can be the most successful by identifying the skills the team has and utilizing them to provide the most efficient and effective methods for success.
Good leaders tend to put the team first, assisting where possible to motivate everyone towards the final goal. While leaders may lead from the front asking others to follow them, great leaders empower those on their teams and set the individual up for success. The team receives the accolades for meeting goals, it is the leader's job to provide guidance and direction then to get out of the way and let those with the right skill mixes do what needs to be done.
Vision
Organizations by nature are hierarchical. That is by both design and necessity. It is difficult for a team to be highly effective if everyone is pulling in their own direction. During my career I have had the opportunity to be involved with several companies and within each company with several teams. Within these teams I try to understand the dynamics and determine what impediments are facing each group from being successful. In nearly every instance "lack of direction" falls within the top five issues. Conversely, when talking to management to understand where they saw impediments almost always "poor execution of organizational direction" is listed.
What these two both describe is a void of vision. Vision in this sense is the application of imagination to describe an end state where the company or team should be. That though is just the starting point. Having an idea is similar to having a dream. It will remain unobtainable unless the details are identified with a pathway of how to get from the current state to the target state. This is where things break down in my opinion. Management or executives may have taken the first step of defining where they want the company to go but do not take the time to identify how to accomplish that goal. Or they may define the intermediary steps but fail to acknowledge the obstacles that must be overcome.
A true visionary is someone who not only understand the "why" of setting direction but also represents the "how" to get from point A to point B. Having proper vision is describing the goal and the journey in such detail that those involved feel as if they have time travelled into the future and seen what success is. This is not a one time event or place. So many times executives will get together and hash out a vision statement that can be posted on bulletin boards or made into t-shirt slogans. Those types of exercises fail as soon as the last period on the statement dries.
A visionary is very similar to an evangelist. They passionately describe the future state and engage everyone who will be important along the journey. It is a continual dialog as more details are known once they reach interim milestones. There are course corrections but those corrections are a result of re-evaluating the path towards the end state. If a boulder blocks a path it may require a change in direction to get around the rock or in some cases may require demolition to eliminate the obstacle. In either case the end state remained the same, it just took an adjustment. Having this level of vision is imperative for long term success an job satisfaction of the team members. The challenge becomes how do you move from being a dreamer to being a visionary?
The deeper I have gotten into my career the more I have realized that the traits of leader and visionary are extremely rare. Some may have the foundational pieces to be a leader but either lack the ambition or confidence to take that leap. It is important to remember that being a leader is not a job function or something you are assigned. We each have the ability to lead in our own person context. Being a visionary is even more elusive. It requires imagination and creativity in order to really be successful. But more importantly it takes passion. The vision you describe needs to be in such detail that everyone around you can see it and it feels so real you can touch it. Those that possess that capability are a joy to work with. Those are the people that change the world. Those changes could be monumental or the context could be much more localized.
This is but a high level overview of soft skills and in particular leadership and vision. It is provided to hopefully be thought provoking and make you stop to ponder how you view each of these attributes and whether they hold the same set of value that I have placed upon them. Please feel free to reach out if you would like to discuss either of these or have questions. I am always interested in these kinds of discussions.
Back
