Perspectives on Talent | Assessing hard skills vs soft skills for today’s leaders

My name is Ryan Moore. I am the VP of Executive Search for North American EMEA here at Wilson.

Today we're gonna be talking about hard skills versus soft skills and how that market has changed when we think about candidates and leadership and the emergence of two key soft skills, both empathy and agility in the leadership capacity.

So if we think about sort of hard skill versus soft skill. So typically I'm going to use a chief revenue officer as an example. It's a nice easy one because they're often very quantifiable skill sets that we're looking for. We saw sort of pre-COVID, even through COVID to some degree when we went through the great resignation and hiring was sort of at its peak pace. ⁓ We saw where hard skills became sort of the core element. And when we think about those, it's how were you able to drive 3X revenue in 18-36 months? How were you able to affect EBITDA by 20 %? They were very quantifiable in nature to where candidates were able to say, yes, I've done that in previous roles. No, I've not. I was only able to 2X a company, which by the way is not bad. That's still really good. But it starts to give you the idea of the hard scales became yes, no, almost from a criteria perspective.

And with the shift we've seen is those hard skills, we're still being asked to find candidates or companies are still looking for candidates as they should that have those same core skill sets. Have they driven similar growth? Have they 3X'd a company in three years? Have they refined process that they improved retention by 75 %? Those sorts of very quantifiable skill sets in a chief revenue officer will always be there.

What we're seeing on the backend now is that the sort of rise of soft skills, and this starts to push into even to values of we're hearing the agility come into play, empathy come into play. How do you talk about integrity in an individual, which often sort of pulls back into somewhat empathy or values? So those softer skills are more the sort of human element to the leader versus the hard skill of what have they achieved in their career and what have they been able to drive?

I think what's sort of come up or become really important in conversations I'm having with organizations when they think about the leadership today or in the future is the concept or how we position hard skill versus soft skill. For a very long period of time, we'll start sort of pre-COVID and even through COVID, it was very hard skill dominant. We were looking for very specific hard skills and leaders.

It was about, have you achieved X? Have you done X? What sort of growth have you driven in businesses? And it tended to be all focused around five or six core hard skills. And what we've seen sort of transition out of COVID and into sort of the last year and a half is the rise of the soft skill and what that means for a business and the struggles around how do you vet a candidate on a soft skill? What does it mean to have that soft skill? And why is it critically important to that candidate's success when they step into a new role. And when we're having those discussions, it's very much story and example driven. When you think about how do you elicit soft skills, it is examples of, me about a time, how have you handled these situations? And you're wanting to dig in to really understand from a historical perspective, how has the candidate showed that soft skill or developed that soft skill and leveraged it in an organization similar to yours trying to do a similar growth pattern.

The two sort of key soft skills that we're hearing a lot about are empathy and agility. They are easily the top two soft skills that I'm having conversations with organizations about when we're thinking about hiring leaders, as well as even private equity when we're talking about what is important for leaders for them to be putting into their portfolio companies to help drive the growth they're looking for. And it comes back to those two of empathy and agility which is a really interesting rounding out of a skillset that we haven't seen typically become dominant in conversation around sort of leadership. so empathy starts to play into we are now in a world where global mandates are more and more common. You're managing a team that is remote hybrid in office. You're managing, if I'm not mistaken, I think there are now five generations in the workforce.

So you need to be able to understand all of those nuances in what is currently sort of economically challenging markets. And you've got very dispersed teams with very different styles and you as a leader need to be able to flex and not sort of hold the team tight to one particular brand of communication. It becomes really critical that the leader has that empathy and understands how to have a different conversation with different people in their team, in their organization, that still helps them all drive that to the goal or the right end ⁓ and being able to really resonate with the team. think we came out of a period of where we could just say, this is what it is and that's how it works. And we've now moved into a period more of where there's understanding and you have to be able to communicate and be able to create transparency and trust.

And that all builds off of empathy and being able to sort of be a genuine leader and human ⁓ in the nature and the way that you communicate in the way that you lead. With that empathy then becomes agility as the sort of secondary soft skill. This has really come out of, we've had a bit of a trying market for the last couple of years, economically speaking. What that requires is agility from leadership that have been through similar situations before. So you've been through a scale up, you've been through, you know, unfortunately, there's a lot of discussion around still reduction in headcount and what that means. And leaders today are being asked to do more with less. And how do you do that? And I think the idea of the leader who sat and created a strategy, put that five year strategy in place, and then kept that plan concrete and in action for that five year period and pushed it, no longer works in market today. You need that leader that is extremely agile, that understands this is my strategy, but within that strategy, I'm able to flex and move very quickly. The leader needs to be elastic in nature of when the market is hot in a particular period of time, you need to be able to scale your strategy and your team and ramp very quickly. And then as it starts to shift in downturn, you need to be able to move equally as quick to re-vector so that you're not losing momentum and you're not affecting the growth pattern, you're not affecting the bottom line. So it really does require the person to be very much in the business from a tactical perspective and understand how do you make those key strategic moves, when do you make them and how do you make them quickly? ⁓ Those become really key for that person when we think about agility, being able to move fast.

With agility comes creativity. You've got to be comfortable testing and failing very quickly, changing that and moving the business forward. Thinking about creative markets or side areas that the business can move into to help stabilize revenue, if that's an area of the business that's struggling. So it really does require that person that's comfortable sort of being in a state of flux and how do you manage through that and how do you push a team through that?

And that's sort of the backend of agility that ties into the empathy pieces. How do you manage a team when everything is changing very quickly, potentially from a perspective and how do you keep the team up to speed and that empathy plays into, you have to understand that sometimes it's going to take other people faster or longer to adopt change and how you're shifting. Others will make that shift very quickly and you've got to sort of work with the team to be able to do that.

So we're seeing those two soft skills become critically important, almost to the point of where they're now sitting at level, if not slightly above some of the hard skills. Because if we don't have those two soft skills, sure, you can drive a team to a number. But the question is, what effect does it have long term on the business? Are we losing and turning head count? Are we losing clients? Is our retention rate dropping, there's a whole lot of things that come off the back end of that if we don't sort of see that empathy and agility tied in today.

If you're trying to showcase empathy or how do you learn empathy, I think it's potentially a difficult soft skill to learn. I think how you start though with that is dropping personas. I think often leaders try to be very stoic or try to be very sort of guarded in their approach and how they communicate.

If you want to be a truly empathetic leader, that's got to melt away. You have to be genuine. You have to be real with individuals. Sometimes that means you're going to have really difficult conversations. And I think that starts to build empathy. When you can have those difficult conversations and be honest and genuine about them, you start to make traction around empathy. I think if you want to sort of look at where's an easy place to start, get to know your team on a personal level outside of the sort of standard work conversations you have, get to know them as individuals, what makes them tick, what do they like to do? Build those personal connections and then sort of carry the conversation through that. And I think from my experience and through conversations I've had with a number of candidates, empathy can start to also build off of... talk about your failures. think as leaders, often guard that and don't want to talk about the fact that we've made a misstep or we've failed. I think being able and confident enough in who you are and what you're doing and the success you can bring, being able to talk about a failure or saying, hey guys, that mistake's on me, starts to build that empathy and it creates an environment where the team then starts to feel comfortable talking about things that they would have naturally sort of guarded or not.

For more information on skills-based hiring, check out our website for additional resources.