I was 23 years old, with a cherubic face that looked more like 16, all of 5 feet tall, when I assumed the mantle of Managing Director of my family’s door manufacturing business. I struggled with how best to lead the group of 70 hardened and rambunctious male employees, well aware that I needed to be seen as strong, assertive and no walk-over. But fresh out of university, I had no guide nor template and certainly no experience:
“I graduated from the University of the West Indies with an honours degree in Management, my experience in the family business positioning me ahead of my classmates. I thought I knew so much: marketing, accounting, finance, operations, business law, organizational behaviour. But books, projects and classes, lecturers with doctorates and little practical experience provided only a scrap of what I would now need.” – excerpt from Chapter 5 of my book “Forget It! What’s the Point? Letting Go and Claiming Joy”
Desperate to assert myself and aware of the urgency of taking control, I sought examples of successful leadership, whom I thought I could emulate. I had heard about one of the most respected business leaders in Jamaica who would every now and then rant and rave with a few choice curse words. So one day I tried it – I dropped the “F” word in a loud, aggressive tone, eyes blazing, back rigid and erect as if I were Napoleon himself. I can still see the mouths of the men dropped to the floor in shock. It had the effect. But it felt so wrong to me. I never repeated it.
“Soft skills” have emerged as a very valid, empowering and effective way of leading that gets, and even exceeds results expected. The term originated in the USA in the 1960s, surprisingly from that most traditionally masculine of places – the military. The top brass began to realise that the key skills for effectively mobilising soldiers lay less in the technical skills i.e. the hard skills of managing machinery, and more in the skills of collaboration and interpersonal relationship building. Over time, the term has become popular in the corporate world. Better yet, the practice has become more prevalent with the emergence of Emotional Intelligence as conceptualised by Daniel Goleman. Goleman identifies 5 competences of Emotional Intelligence:
- Self-Awareness
- Self-management
- Motivation
- Social awareness or empathy
- Social skills which very closely align with soft skills
I do not think it’s an accident that the ascendance of these skills has happened at the same time as more women have climbed the ladder of leadership. There is an implicit assumption that soft skills come from a “naturally” female type of leadership that demonstrates what are perceived as traditional female qualities of nurturing, teamwork, flexibility, collaboration, compassion and patience, and a way of leading that honours the follower. What it is not, is the type of leadership that has been associated with strength – autocratic, top-down, command and control.
Yet many of my female clients report that they still encounter challenges with their use of soft skills being perceived as:
- Easy, when indeed they take very hard work
- An addendum to leadership, not the core
- Showing weakness
- Taking too much time which delays getting the job done
- Inferior to “hard” skills
None of these are true, as witnessed by the research that quantifies the value of Emotional Intelligence. Workforce.com reports that “Emotional intelligence is responsible for 58 percent of performance in all types of jobs, and 90 percent of top performers are high in EI”. My own observation and experience leads me to conclude that the higher one climbs the ladder, the greater the importance of soft skills, as one delegates the hard, technical skills.
This International Women’s Month, which also marks the anniversary of our universal pandemic lockdown, is an opportune time to consider how we lead, and to dispel these notions about soft skills. We are now being called to lead in a different way – a way that honours humanity, respects all life, and acknowledges our role as stewards of the earth rather than exploiters. It behooves us to remember the words of Lao Tzu in the ancient classic Tao Te Ching:
“The softest things of the world
Override the hardest things of the world”
