There is nothing soft about soft skills: They are human skills, and they matter more the higher you rise

Apparently, strategy, finance and operations are hard skills. But persuading 12 intelligent people with competing agendas to agree on something? Soft. I'd like to meet whoever came up with this classification.

'Right, Rajiv. Restructuring 14,000 employees: hard skill. Telling Sanjay that he needs to listen more: soft skill.' Sanjay has been interrupting people since 2009. Nobody has told him. Maybe that's because there is nothing particularly soft about soft skills.

Also read: 10 Essential Leadership Skills Every Manager Should Develop


Try calming down an angry client. Motivating someone whose promotion has just gone to somebody else. Giving honest feedback to someone who describes themselves as 'very open to feedback'. Explaining to a high performer that being brilliant doesn't compensate for making everyone else want to resign. Telling the CEO that the problem with the strategy might be the strategy.

Then, try Excel, supposedly a hard skill. Excel may occasionally produce #VALUE! But at least it tells you there's a problem. People are more complicated.

A spreadsheet doesn't arrive at work having argued with its spouse. It doesn't secretly resent another spreadsheet for getting promoted. It doesn't interpret, 'Can we talk?' as evidence that its career is over. And it has never replied, 'Fine,' when things were very clearly not fine. Yet, somehow the skills required to navigate all this ended up in the soft category. I suspect that's because technical skills are easier to see.

You either understand a balance sheet, or you don't. You can build the model, or you can't. You know how the supply chain works, or you're still saying 'end-to-end optimization,' and hoping nobody asks a follow-up question.

Human skills are harder to measure. There's no Excel formula for knowing when the person across the table has stopped listening. No dashboard tells you that your team agrees with you only because you're the boss. And PowerPoint still doesn't have a button marked, 'Make them care.' Although I'm sure Microsoft is working on it.

As a stand-up comedian, I've learnt that the most important skills are often invisible. Reading a room, listening, timing, adapting when something isn't working and understanding why one person is engaged, while another is wondering whether jumping from the third-floor window would technically count as leaving early.

Comedy teaches you these things rather brutally. If the audience isn't with you, they let you know immediately. Sometimes out loud. Occasionally while leaving and maintaining eye contact all the way through.

Which may explain why I've never understood organisations that treat human skills as the decorative part of leadership, the garnish you add after somebody has mastered strategy, finance and operations. But as you rise, you go from managing the business to managing the people who manage the business. That is an entirely different skill set.

In an orchestra, when someone gets better at playing the violin, they get promoted to more important violin-playing jobs. In a corporation, when someone gets really good at playing the violin, we promote them to conductor. We don't necessarily check whether they can conduct. We certainly don't teach them. We just take away their violin, hand them a baton, and wonder why the orchestra sounds terrible. Congratulations. You've lost an excellent violinist and acquired a sub-standard conductor.

Eventually, you need other people to believe, follow, challenge, and trust you, and execute things you cannot do yourself. At that point, your technical brilliance has acquired a rather inconvenient dependency. Humans. And humans are notoriously difficult software. They require listening, empathy, judgement, influence, and occasionally an apology. And, at the most advanced levels, of leadership, allowing another person to finish a sentence.

Also read: Leadership excellence and strategic decision-making: The leadership advantage in an age of constant disruption

Maybe the problem isn't 'skills'. It's the adjective 'soft'. Calling them 'soft skills' makes them sound like something you learn at an offsite between lunch and the trust fall.

They are not soft skills. They're human skills. And the higher you rise in an organisation, the more your supposedly hard job depends on them. In an age increasingly defined by technology, they may well be our greatest human advantage. After all, nobody has ever resigned because Excel failed to make them feel valued. Although Excel has certainly made me want to resign.

(The writer is a stand-up comedian and creator of The Human Advantage)