The people who got ahead the fastest had the strongest “soft” skills.
A few weeks ago I described how to use the Hiring Formula for Success shown in the graphic as the foundation for interviewing anyone for any job.
The formula can be used as a guide during the performance-based interview by digging into a candidate’s major accomplishments getting examples of each of the factors in the formula. Making the comparison on the fit factors in the bottom of the formula involves assessing how well the candidate’s abilities and motivating interests map to real job needs, how the candidate and hiring manager’s style will mesh and how well the candidate fits with the culture. We suggest using a talent scorecard to capture each of these factors to more accurately predict pre-hire quality of hire.
However, after using this approach for more than 20 years for hundreds of hires (more than 75% were promoted within a year or two) I noticed something remarkable. The people who got ahead the fastest had the strongest “soft” skills. These are captured in all of the fit factors, in the team skills and organizational factors and in the critical motivation to do the required work trait. In fact, these soft skills are so important they should not be called soft. Instead they should be called “The Essential Traits of Success.”
Just look at this list. Collectively, these traits define greatness.
The Essential Traits of Job Success
Proactive in taking ownership of a job and doing the right things without having to be told.
Assertiveness in pushing the status quo.
Courage in challenging bad ideas, bad decisions and bad processes.
Influencing others who are not direct reports especially peers, people in other functions and executives, to make difficult decisions.
Coaching and helping others especially when they’ll get no credit for it and when it takes extra time.
Managers who spend extra time to build, develop and motivate their team members to get better.
Consistently making commitments and taking responsibility for delivering. And without making excuses when things go wrong.
Collaborating, negotiating and reaching agreement with cross-functional teams on challenging and competing objectives.
Problem-solving, creative and strategic thinking skills that address root cause and best solutions given the constraints.
Organizational and project management skills to ensure complex team tasks are completed successfully.
Taking the initiative and doing more than required with limited direction.
Communications skills to present ideas clearly and distinctly to the required audiences.
Customer service skills including being cooperative, supportive and understanding, regardless of who the customer is.
Cultural fit with the hiring manager’s style, the pace of the organization and the values of the company. Flexibility in dealing with changing situations and with different people.
Resilient in handling the all too frequent setbacks.
Continuous self-development recognizing that if you’re not getting better you’re falling behind.
Having the vision to see what needs to get done and then getting it done. When combined with all of the above it’s called leadership.
Listening and withholding judgement until all of the facts are heard.
Willing to change an opinion based on new facts.
Openly willing to take criticism and be coached and adjusts and improves behavior accordingly.
I’m sure this isn’t the full list of essential traits but no one in the world would ever call any of them soft. What’s surprising is that while these skills are obviously important for on-the-job success, most hiring managers aren’t too good at assessing them. That’s why I suggest they become the primary fact-finding probes in the performance-based interviewing approach I advocate. Here’s how this works in practice.
Once you’ve prepared a performance-based job description describing the top 6-8 performance objectives required for on-the-job success, have candidates describe a comparable major accomplishment for each of the major performance objectives. As you clarify the person’s role ask for examples of when the person demonstrated the essential skills on the list above. The video explains this process. Assign different interviewers different accomplishments and different traits to focus on using the same interviewing approach. The sharing of different pieces of evidence will increase assessment accuracy when the group comes together to complete the Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard.
By assessing the essential and technical skills as a part of a major accomplishment it’s easier to measure performance and fit with the actual job. Harvard Professor Todd Rose, the author of The End of Average, refers to this as context. Without this context, according to Professor Rose, the assessment will be flawed. As an added plus, by observing the trend of growth over time of both the accomplishments and the essential success traits you can observe how people grow, develop and interrelate. As you’ll discover when you start hiring people who have these essential traits in abundance, they do define greatness.
In a recent post I made the contention that soft skills are too important to be called soft. Whatever you call them, most rational people would consider the following not-so-soft soft skills the catalysts for fully enabling a person’s technical abilities.
Non-technical, Business and Leadership Skills Essential for Job Success
Assertiveness in pushing the status quo.
Courage in challenging bad ideas, bad decisions and bad processes.
Influencing others who are not direct reports - especially peers and executives - to make difficult decisions.
Making commitments and taking responsibility for doing what you said you would without making excuses.
Collaborating, negotiating and reaching agreement with cross-functional teams on challenging and competing objectives.
Problem-solving, creative and strategic thinking skills that not only uncover the root cause of any problem but also figure out the optimum solutions.
Organizational and project management skills to ensure complex team tasks are completed successfully.
Taking the initiative and doing more than required to meet expectations.
Communications skills to present ideas clearly and distinctly to the required audiences.
Adaptive customer service skills regardless of who the customer is.
Cultural fit with the hiring manager’s style, the pace of the organization and the values of the company.
Leadership skills to not only figure out the best course of action but also to marshal the resources to deliver the solution.
While these skills are obviously important for on-the-job success, most hiring managers aren’t too good at properly evaluating them. The following is our recommended approach, but candidates need to take control if they’re not being assessed properly.
How to Use Performance-based Hiring to Assess Soft Skills
Before the interview prepare one or two personal examples for each of the non-technical skills listed above that best demonstrates the ability. You’ll be describing these throughout the interview.
Prepare a short write-up (a few paragraphs) for each example that includes lots of specific details (i.e., names, dates, facts, results, numbers and percentages). Writing them down is a great way to remember them.
Reverse engineer the job during the interview by asking the hiring manager (very) early in the interview to describe some of the challenges and problems the person in the job is likely to face in the first 3-6 months. This is a great way to demonstrate assertiveness and confidence, too.
Provide an example of something comparable you’ve accomplished that best demonstrates your ability to successfully handle the problem, task or challenge.
Include in your example not only some specific facts and details but also how you used some of the non-technical skills to get the results.
Start asking questions about some of the most significant problems to demonstrate your ability to get to the root cause of a problem. This is a great way to demonstrate your technical and process problem-solving and thinking skills.
Describe at a pretty high level the plan of action you’d take to implement the best solution if you were to get the job. This is a great way to demonstrate your strategic thinking, organizational and planning skills.
Get into a give-and-take dialogue to not only better understand the circumstances and issues involved and to demonstrate your listening and communication skills.
Express an interest in the job if you are, and then ask about next steps. If vague, ask if the interviewer believes there’s something missing in your background and, if so, use the above techniques to disprove it. This is a great way to demonstrate persistence and your negotiating and influencing skills.
Just by forcing the interviewer to ask you the right questions you’re demonstrating you possess most of the required soft skills. You’ll prove you have the rest with your detailed examples and the follow-up questioning approach suggested above. As you can readily see, these are not soft skills, since without them nothing will get done. However, with them, you’ll not only get any job you deserve but also excel at it.
No one can tell me that successfully negotiating a critical series of product requirements with a team comprised of accounting, marketing, manufacturing and engineering that meets all of their competing needs is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that consistently meeting time and budget goals is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that presenting a monthly business review to a team of managers and company executives is a soft skill. Especially when the results missed plan and the person doing the presenting did a masterful job of knowing the details behind each variance and had already implemented an action plan to get back on track within 30 days.
No one can tell me that developing a personal development plan for each person on a manager’s team and then implementing it throughout the year is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that proactively coaching and helping peers become better without any responsibility to do so is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that volunteering to handle a difficult project that will require lots of overtime and where there’s a high probability of failure, is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that being fully responsibile for meeting goals and successfully completing them month in and month out without making excuses is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that influencing a person’s manager or some senior executive to change his/her mind on some important course of action is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that having the confidence and guts to stand up for some idea or complain about some shoddy process or wrongful action is a soft skill.
No one can tell me that being flexible, changing direction and staying motivated under a new set of business conditions is a soft skill.
For these reasons and the dozens more you can think of yourself, I contend we should ban the term “soft skills” and stop trying to peddle their importance in some soft, diplomatic manner.
Hardball is a better game to play when it comes to measuring these “soft skills.” Soft is just too soft a term to describe skills that are often far more important than technical skills.
Renaming them might help as a start. Leadership skills might work since collectively that’s what they are. It’s certainly a far better term than soft skills. So are the terms “management and organizational skills” and “non-technical skills.” Regardless, whatever you call them, don’t call them “soft skills” when they’re collectively essential for getting results, developing people and successfully growing and managing any business of any size.
Embed All Non-technical and Leadership Skills into Performance Objectives
Not only do I have a distaste for the term soft skills, I have a bigger distaste for job descriptions that emphasize a laundry list of these soft skills combined with a longer laundry list of technical skills, experiences and academic requirements.
I suggest both problems can be eliminated by creating a performance profile listing the top 6-8 performance objectives in priority order describing the actual job requirements. These profiles combine the technical and non-technical skills as a series of objectives and tasks. For example, for a product marketing person one major objective could be, “Lead the joint development of a product requirements document with the engineering, manufacturing and financial analysis groups.” Here’s another example of combining a technical challenge with project management skills: “Within 45 days evaluate the production challenges involved in meeting the planned launch date and present findings and solutions to the management team.”
Preparing these types of performance-based job descriptions allows all of the technical and non-technical skills to be described as outcomes rather than generic requirements. During the performance-based interview process I suggest, candidates are asked to provide detail-rich examples of comparable accomplishments describing how the technical and non-technical skills were used.
While I have a great distaste for the term “soft skills” I have great admiration for the skills themselves since they’re the collective drivers of individual and team success. Without them, failure is assured. However, by recognizing their importance and describing how they’re actually used in combination with the person’s technical skills in actual on-the-job fashion, something that’s normally soft and squishy becomes clear and measurable.
And that’s how you play hardball and, more important, it’s how you win when it comes to hiring.
In the 1980s and 1990s I placed hundreds of people in management positions. A few dozen got quickly promoted multiple times. I met up with one of them last week who's now an EVP with an F250 company. Many of the hiring managers who hired these people had similar track records of success. Coincidentally, I was at a business conference with a number of them last month. These two events got me thinking about all of these people – the hundreds and the dozens – and what they had in common.
The big aha was that once the person passed a reasonably lofty threshold of technical ability, his or her soft skills are what drove their upward success. In fact, since soft skills are so critical to personal performance, “soft” is too soft a word to describe them. Regardless of what one calls these “non-technical” management and business leadership skills, here’s what those who progressed the fastest had in common.
Focused Work Ethic. Part of this is working hard, taking the initiative, doing more than required and going the extra mile. The other part is working smart. Working hard needs to have some purpose and direction to it. Consistently achieving the required results is the primary bigger purpose.
Operational Leadership. I wrote a post last year titled Leadership = Vision plus Execution. In summary, it means you need to have a clear vision of what needs to get done and then you need to marshal the resources to do it. Then you have to do it.
Strategic vs. Tactical Worldview. When I was sitting in a boardroom many years ago as a rookie financial analyst, the CEO of an F50 company lambasted a group president saying, “Strategy drives tactics. Your strategy is flawed, so the quality of your tactics doesn’t matter.” Those who got ahead the fastest seem to naturally understand this.
Zooming. This has to do with the ability to zoom in on a problem to figure out the root cause and then zoom out to see all of the possible solutions.
Multi-Functional Thinking. This might also be called business acumen. Despite a functional expertise, the best people could see beyond their own department’s requirements to balance the needs of growth (sales, marketing and product development) vs. operational efficiency (operations, engineering, IT, HR and finance/accounting).
Persistence. As Winston Churchill said, “Never, ever, ever give up.” Sometimes things go wrong, so following the PM’s advice is essential.
Influence. This is the ability to convince those in authority to agree to their proposals (the vision part of leadership) and the ability to get the people working with and for them to agree to willingly participate. This is related to team skills and EQ, but influencing others is the visible outcome.
Proactivity. This has to do with anticipating a problem before it becomes a problem and then taking overt action to address it in a logical and businesslike manner. It’s more than planning, but planning is part of this.
Leveraging Team and Resources. This has to do with efficiency, achieving more with less, figuring out how to avoid or overcome unnecessary obstacles and getting more from their team than would be considered normal.
Organizational Skills. Whether they’re individual contributors, part of a team or running a team, the best people can organize the resources to deliver the results on time and on budget on a consistent basis.
Responsible and Committed. When the best people say they’ll do something, they do it. And when things go wrong, they don’t make excuses or blame others. Getting it done is typically more important than perfection, which is a common flaw of the over-techie.
Comfortable Swimming in the Deep End of the Pool. Throw people in over their heads and see if they can swim. The A-Team can not only swim, they don’t mind being thrown in over their heads since it builds confidence. In fact, they ask for these types of assignments.
Couragein Decision-Making. Not only does a person need to make the right decisions, he or she often needs to make them with limited information or lack of time. Which, surprisingly, is most of the time.
Situational Fit or Adaptability. Sometimes these people were not successful but were savvy enough to extricate themselves proactively. Circumstances play a big role in any job, most often they’re dependent on the quality of the relationship with the person’s peer and manager. Sometimes it’s a mismatch on culture or values or a disagreement on focus.
These characteristics, and the few that might have been missed, can all be assessed using the most significant accomplishment question in the Performance-based Interview I advocate. The idea is to look for these characteristics in the person’s major accomplishments and map the accomplishments to the actual performance requirements of the job. Done properly, this is how you hire people for the A-Team.
Lou Adler (@LouA) is the CEO of The Adler Group, a consulting and training firm helping companies implement Performance-based Hiring. He's also a regular columnist for Inc. Magazine and BusinessInsider. His latest book, The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired (Workbench, 2013), provides hands-on advice for job-seekers, hiring managers and recruiters on how to find the best job and hire the best people. His new video program provides job seekers inside secrets on what it takes to get a job in the hidden job market.