Why the hardest skills in leadership are the ones we’ve typically called soft

Leaders undervalue ‘soft skills’ at their own peril.

[Source Photo: Magnific]

In the late 1960s, the U.S. Army made a distinction between the skills necessary for machinery operations and those used in service of people management. Hard skills, as the Army framed it, were the competencies that involved working with hardware—operating tanks, repairing radios, or what the lead researchers Paul G. Whitmore and John P. Fry called “weapons of aluminum and steel.” Soft skills, on the other hand, were the ones that involved working with people, such as inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, and other social matters. The army wasn’t making an evaluation between the two skillsets, per se, but rather, delineating what mastery was required for each.

However, somewhere between then and now, this delineation became a hierarchy, where the half of the work that didn’t use machinery somehow lost half of its importance, despite Whitmore and Fry’s intentions. This might very well be one of the most consequential misnomers of modern work because, in fact, the hardest skills in leadership are the ones we’ve spent 50 years........

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