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

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 calling soft. So, we invited Dr. Becky Kennedy onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast to help us appraise the value of soft skills, and tally the cost of undervaluing them. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Inside, one of the largest parenting platforms in the world. Her work in parenting provides a useful proxy for the application of “soft skills” in management. As she reports, Good Inside members who join the community to manage their three-year-old’s tantrums, for instance, often realize months later that these same skills helped them become better managers in their work. Not because the skills transfer, but because they are essentially the same. Helping people feel seen and validated are core tenants of Dr. Becky’s work and, as it turns out, the mainstays for the not-so-soft skills of leadership. Her business case is sharp, and any CHRO reading this should sit with it for a minute. Dr. Becky described the hiring pattern every leader has watched play out. You recruit for the hard skills: the cohort analysis, the AI workflow, the PL chops, whatever the role’s machinery might be. The candidate demonstrates them. The offer goes out. Six months in, the team is somehow worse. Not because the new hire couldn’t write a deck but perhaps because they are defensive when receiving feedback. They blame others when things get hard and, consequently, the culture around them quietly shifts in a direction nobody planned. None of those issues were measured as a part of the interview process but, eventually, they show. And that’s the rub, we hire for one set of competencies that are easier to evaluate (the hard skills) and undervalue the ones that disproportionally impact the business (the soft skills), not because it’s unimportant but because it’s harder to measure. The truth of the matter is that these soft skills become increasingly more paramount as a leader ascends in their career. The more senior the leader, the less of the hard skills they use. They’re no longer responsible for the operations of the machinery; they’re now responsible for the operators. Their work scales as does their impact. Be that as it may, when MBA students enroll in prestigious business school programs to acquire the critical skills of management, they come looking for the hard skills—finance, accounting, and strategy—and tend to blow off the soft skill courses. They want frameworks, equations, and calculations. Important as these skills may be, I have never once in the almost twenty years since I graduated from business school called a classmate to ask them about how Little’s Law worked. I have, however, reached out to bemoan the challenges of navigating a manager who didn’t seem to recognize my contribution or a direct report who won’t step up or a team member who’s been quietly checking out for the last three months. There are no frameworks or equations to quantify these scenarios, yet they make all the difference of how work actually works. These skills are intangible, yes, but by no means are they soft. They are hard because they’re difficult to master. They’re hard because they aren’t easily detected—of course, until it’s too late. They’re hard because they are often unspoken, unlearned, and underappreciated, so we ignore their import, erroneously, and, therefore, suffer from the repercussions. Fifty years ago, the folks who invented these labels—hard and soft—warned us of the distinction’s folly. The least we can do now is finally listen and get to work on the real hard skills. In the meantime, check out our full conversation with Dr. Becky Kennedy on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.