1 SOFT SKILLS IN A DIGITAL AGE
Over the past ten years, the phrase “soft skills” has increasingly entered public discussions in various forums including the media, business (often in human resources and skills training), elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education, as well as in peer-reviewed research journals.1 As often happens when a phrase begins to appear so frequently, its use is often a direct reflection of some form of crisis, debate, or change in the wider society.
In the case of soft skills, speaking anecdotally, I began to notice around 2010 that the phrase was cropping up in discussions with my colleagues at a
WHAT’S COVERED IN THIS CHAPTER?
In this chapter you’ll learn:
• A multifaceted definition of soft skills
• What employers and researchers have said about soft skills
• Whether or not soft skills should be considered a “moral reform” movement
1. Examples of recent soft skills coverage includes Lister (2019) “Corporate Canada Is Facing a SoftSkills Deficit” www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/leadership/article-corporate-canadais-facing-a-soft-skills-deficit-what-can-we-do/; King (2019) “Wanted: Employees Who Can Shake Hands, Make Small Talk” www.wsj.com/articles/wanted-experts-at-soft-skills-1544360400; Brett (2018) “Future Graduates Will Need Creativity and Empathy: Not Just Technical Skills” www. theguardian.com/education/2018/dec/20/future-graduates-will-need-creativity-and-empathynot-just-technical-skills. Similar examples abound in the business press, and in peer-reviewed education, psychology, and organizational behavior journals. Some of these peer-reviewed sources are discussed later.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003212942-1
large urban community college. At the same time, the phrase began to appear in various think-tank reports as well as in newspaper business sections. Upon first glance, I could see that the phrase was being used in one of two ways. First, it was being used by employers to name a group of sought-after skills they thought weren’t being displayed effectively enough by employees (the “complaint” or “gap/deficit” view of soft skills). Second, it was being used by journalists, educators, and skills trainers to name a group of sought-after skills that employees and potential employees could and should master, in order to be successful (the “self-help” or “competency” view of soft skills).
As you begin your exploration of soft skills, let’s agree to resist easy definitions of the term. You’ll find it more productive to start thinking of soft skills as an elastic and relational term. By this I mean when it comes to defining soft skills, besides saying that it’s “a noun that refers to a group of skills that are sought-after in today’s world”, the phrase also has several other meanings. For one, as we saw earlier, it can refer to a complaint that exists in the world about the way people behave. For another, it can refer to techniques you can use to improve these poor behaviors. In other words, a key aspect of the phrase soft skills is that it’s always both referring to the problem that it solves and at the same time embodying the solution. “Soft skills” is one of those terms like “values” that signifies both a problem and a solution.
Going a bit further down this path, when I say that soft skills both refer to a problem and embody the solution to that problem, I’m getting close to answering the question that’s implied whenever the term “soft skills” is mentioned: why do we need soft skills? We need them, I’d argue, because they offer one useful solution to a current challenge facing many parts of the Western world. The challenge, simply put, is how to manage vast amounts of change in the make-up of society and in how society functions, knowing that many people’s natural tendency is to be conservative (not necessarily in the political sense), that is, to like things the way they are.
The changes I’m speaking about are, on the one hand, rapidly increasing amounts of diversity in our societies, both racial and ethnic and genderbased, as immigration increases to fill the demographic decline in places like Canada, the United States, and Western Europe, and as new definitions of gender become normalized. 2 At the same time, rapidly increasing amounts
2. Examples of rapid demographic change include Ballingall (2017) “A Majority of Torontonians Now Identify Themselves as Visible Minorities” www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/10/25/a-majorityof-torontonians-now-identify-themselves-as-visible-minorities-census-shows.html; Poston, Jr. and Saenz (2017) “U.S. Whites Will Soon Be the Minority in Number, But Not Power” www.baltimoresun. com/opinion/op-ed/bs-ed-op-0809-minority-majority-20170808-story.html; Dawar (2013) “White Britons Are Now a Minority in 4 Towns and Cities” www.express.co.uk/news/uk/370013/WhiteBritons-are-now-a-minority-in-4-towns-and-cities. Discussions of acute generational conflict include “The Clash of the Baby Boomers and Millenials” www.forbes.com/sites/nazbeheshti/2018/11/29/ the-clash-of-the-baby-boomers-and-millennials-how-can-we-all-get-along/#64a24f81f9e2; “Generational Differences at Work Are Small: Thinking They’re Big Affects Our Behavior” https://
3 of technological disruption exist in our lives, by which I mean all the new and changing tools, gadgets, apps, and digital modalities we encounter in our home and work lives such as Zoom, texting, Slack, office-hoteling and many others. 3 It’s these twin disruptors – diversity and digital technology – plus a third disruptor I haven’t yet mentioned: sharp generational differences in society –that seem to be causing the world we live in to be, to some degree, destabilized. Here we can pause to add another provisional way to approach thinking about soft skills. Soft skills invoke a small-c conservative movement for managing rapid change by creating and upholding agreed-upon standards for behavior. In a world of disruption and change, it makes sense that a somewhat fuzzy concept – soft skills – should emerge as one potential method of restoring things to “normal”. An example will illustrate what I mean. Let’s say a large organization in the financial services sector was challenged recently with how to reconcile its need for employees who can communicate effectively and its commitment to diversity. A young employee complained to her manager that she felt “exposed” and “threatened” when giving presentations. She further stated that in her culture, speaking openly in front of other people was something women were discouraged from doing and that she would therefore prefer not to have to do this at work. Her manager’s private feelings were understandably conflicted. The employee in question was a member of a visible minority, and his department had for many years been working to increase its number of visible minority employees.
At the same time, the manager was surprised by his employee’s complaint, because speaking to co-workers, clients, and other parties (whether in a conversation, a meeting, a presentation, or a seminar) was a bread-and-butter aspect of the job, for people of all genders and backgrounds. In fact, the employee had talked up her own strong communication skills when she was interviewed for the job! And on top of that, “effective spoken and written communication” is the first requirement listed in all of the department’s job descriptions – considered so important that it appears before the more technical, hard skills tasks like spreadsheet use, risk management assessment, or financial planning capabilities. What was he supposed to do? How to reconcile the diversity-based request (i.e., I’m uncomfortable speaking in front of people for
hbr.org/2019/08/generational-differences-at-work-are-small-thinking-theyre-big-affects-ourbehavior; Cotton (2019) “Millenials Cause Generational Conflict in the Workplace” www.business leader.co.uk/millennials-cause-generational-conflict-in-the-workplace/60389/.
3. Representative coverage of rapid technological change includes Jackson (2018) “Reports of Rapid Tech Change Causing the Demise of Traditional Employment Are Greatly Exaggerated” www. theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-reports-of-rapid-tech-change-causing-thedemise-of-traditional/; Porter (2019) “Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two” www.nytimes. com/2019/02/04/business/economy/productivity-inequality-wages.html; and Partington (2019) “Things Are Changing So Fast” www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/30/changing-fastbenefits-dangers-robots-uk-workplace.
cultural reasons) with necessary workplace norms (i.e., speaking in front of people is a foundational part of the job)?
Clearly this example is stark, and not likely to occur frequently. That said, less stark and dramatic versions of the clash between established norms and new points of view are happening every day; otherwise we wouldn’t be hearing all the noise we have been for ten years about the “lack of” or “gap in” soft skills. Perhaps one way out of this dilemma is to examine briefly another way in which soft skills can be approached, and that is, by reference to its binary opposite of “hard skills”. In the same way that “soft skills” is elastic and relational because it refers both to a problem and to the solution to that problem, so too is it elastic and relational because it is always referring, if only obliquely and subtly, to its opposite, which is “hard skills”. Like all binary opposites (good/bad; beautiful/ugly; rich/poor; gay/straight; etc.) liberalminded academic commentators have long argued that seemingly neutral binary oppositions like hard skills/soft skills are not neutral (or natural) but rather culturally produced. And what’s more, they’re produced in a dishonestly “equal-looking” form (i.e., the binary) that serves to mask the reality, which is that one term in the binary is always valorized, or held in higher esteem, compared with the other term.4
In such a cultural analysis, it’s customary to destabilize or deconstruct the binary to show, for example, how the less equal term within it is as valuable or even more valuable than its opposite. In another form of this type of analysis, you can demonstrate that there are categories that stand apart from, between, or outside the binary that are just as valid (e.g., today the gay/straight binary is rarely invoked without recognizing the validity of bisexuality or trans identities and the oversimplification, in terms of sexual orientation, of the original binary). If you were to perform such a destabilizing analysis of the hard skills/ soft skills binary, you might begin by agreeing that “hard skills” has traditionally been the valorized term. It points to the specific, technical, skills-based abilities – often stemming from years of education and training or else natural talent – that employees demonstrate as part of their job, and which set them apart from others who don’t have these abilities.
Historically, soft skills were thus the less valorized part of the binary. These skills, variously known as “professionalism”, “people skills”, “ability to get along”, “confidence”, “communication” among many other synonyms, were
4. Helpful discussions of binaries and their deconstruction in various forms of analysis include Wilcox (2015) “Deconstructive Literary Criticism” https://medium.com/@brettwilcox/deconstructiveliterary-criticism-e2fcf9b2e848; Thomassen (2010) “Deconstruction as Method in Political Theory” https://webapp.uibk.ac.at/ojs/index.php/OEZP/article/viewFile/1369/1063; Kau (2001) “Deconstruction and Science” http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~stetza/ph407H/Deconstruction.pdf; Balkin (1987) “Deconstructive Practice and Legal Theory” https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7061&context=ylj. Similar sources can be found for numerous other aspects of human culture or endeavour including religion, society, culture, education, etc.
assumed to come with you into your job. In other words, the assumption was that soft skills were part of our upbringing, our culture, our way of doing things. No extra education or study was required, and any professional employee or person aiming to be a professional could tap into these already-existing parts of themselves, or know when and how to deploy and perform these skills. Some people today, when speaking candidly – educators and employers among them – still believe this. As a result, when soft skills behaviors are not obviously deployed and performed, a crisis is invoked.
Funnily enough, it hasn’t required a cultural analysis to destabilize the hard skills/soft skills binary. Two very real-world phenomena of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, globalization and automation, have done the job for us. Broadly speaking, for many years between the Industrial Revolution and the immediate post–World War II decades, the Western world was the heart of manufacturing, as well as of the various forms of innovation and ancillary functions that go together with making things, such as research, design, marketing, finance, etc. The past 30 years have altered this picture. Manufacturing is becoming skewed toward Asian and in some cases Latin American countries, and even the ancillary industries supporting manufacturing are beginning to shift their geographical locus.5 The impact this has had on the Western world has been profound. We’ve experienced on the one hand an economic shift to “knowledge economies” in which labor is more about creative, problem-solving skills than about mass producing things (this is the positive end of the spectrum) to, on the other hand, a political shift toward nationalist, populist governments whose base of support comes from populations who feel “left behind” by the knowledge economy shift (this is the negative end of the spectrum).
What you’ll want to be able to trace is the effect of this shift on the skills required for success in the world. Clearly, the move toward people-centered, knowledge-related work in much of the Western world has meant that soft skills, which were previously nice-to-have’s (with the exception of certain areas such as nursing or counseling in which they’ve been consciously needed for a long time), have now become must-have’s across a much wider section of the economy. The binary has been upset, or righted, and we now find ourselves in a place where soft skills get much more notice than hard skills. It’s not uncommon to hear employers and human resources consultants saying things like: “We can train new employees to use the software/sell the product/code the software, etc. but they need to be team players and problem solvers!” It’s now soft skills that are in demand, and hard skills are taking a back seat, at least for the moment.
5. The somewhat contradictory evidence about the global manufacturing shift from West to East is discussed in Ferdows (2020) “Five Myths about Manufacturing” www.washingtonpost.com/ outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-manufacturing/2020/08/28/ba8199a8-e7da-11ea-970a64c73a1c2392_story.html. Changes in research and development spending are highlighted in Congressional Research Service (2020) “Global Research and Development Expenditures” https://fas. org/sgp/crs/misc/R44283.pdf.
As you move through this book therefore, remember that “soft skills” is a term that’s in flux, and that’s ok. It defines a problem that exists in society, it encompasses the solution to that problem, it invokes a conservative impulse to uphold standards in human behavior, and it exists in a fluid binary opposition with another set of skills – hard skills – that, while still very important, is currently in the shadow of the more necessary soft skills.
What Are Soft Skills?
Despite the request made of you earlier not to be too concerned with a neat definition of soft skills, it’s inevitable (and obviously helpful) that we should move towards a precise description of the parameters of what the phrase means. One of the most thoughtful definitions I’ve found so far is by Hurrell et al. (2013). Soft skills, they claim, are the skills that help you deal with others and manage yourself and your emotions in the way your workplace requires. This means honing inter- and intrapersonal abilities to create a “mastered performance” in various contexts, such as customer service, teamwork, etc. Beyond this definition, there are other ways of looking at soft skills, some of which I’ll describe further.
Another approach to defining soft skills is to say they include aspects of our personality. This definition of soft skills is reminiscent of what I said earlier when I talked about the relatively widespread belief that soft skills are innate, waiting in store to be deployed or performed in certain situations. As we’ll see in the second section of this book, a personality view of soft skills is one with deep roots in human culture, including both ethics and psychology. That said, a personality explanation of soft skills hinges on some problematic truths.
First, if soft skills are aspects of our personality (e.g., likability), then they are also already part of our make-up as adults – in other words, they’re a relatively fixed thing. Second, if soft skills are innate personality traits, it’s possible that some people will be luckier or more successful than others at demonstrating soft skills and this might not be a changeable situation.6 Finally, if soft skills are part of our personality, then how do we account for our negative personality traits? Everyone agrees our personality includes negative aspects as well as positive ones – does this mean there are some negative soft skills or behaviors? Isn’t this an oxymoron? For the time being, let’s hold on to the helpful part of the soft skills-as-part-of-our-personality definition, which is that every person has a unique set of positive personality traits that are part of their overall make-up.
6. Recent research into personality change in young adulthood shows that under certain circumstances, including workplace experience, young adults will modify their personality. See the literature review section in Le, K., Donellan, M. B., & Conger, R. (2014) “Personality Development at Work: Workplace Conditions, Personality Changes, and the Corresponsive Principle”, Journal of Personality, 82.1.
If “personality” isn’t the perfect synonym for soft skills, what about soft skills as a set of habits? There’s something logical and helpful about moving the definition away from personality and towards habits, for a couple of reasons. First, by definition habits are habitual, meaning they happen regularly. To me this is closer to the notion of soft skills we’re trying to develop because it includes the concept of repetition over time. For example, if you’re in the habit of smiling at people you encounter at work, chances are this happens at well-defined times (e.g., in elevators and stairways, in the morning as everyone’s getting in, etc.).
The idea of soft skills-as-habit is thus more precise than the amorphous idea that likability (to name one soft skill) is a mark of your personality. How would we know this? When and how would you show this?
Another reason why soft skills-as-habit is attractive is that habits, again by definition, are learned. We’ve all heard the phrases “I picked up the habit”, meaning I learned to act in this way at some point in my life, or, “Old habits die hard”, meaning it’s challenging to stop a behavior you’re used to displaying. The learnability of habits moves us in a more positive direction than personality, which is seen by most experts to be innate (though as we see in footnote 6, able to change under certain circumstances). Of course, we should acknowledge that as with negative personality traits, so too are we all guilty of having negative habits that we cannot let go. This complicates an easy solution to our definition problem. It’s not as simple as saying that soft skills are a type of habit, because habits can be negative (not just positive), whereas soft skills are always positive. For now, let’s hold on to the helpful idea of habits as learnable and as occurring regularly as we build our definition of soft skills.
Personality and habits get us part way toward a satisfactory definition of soft skills, so where else can we turn? I would suggest the most useful way to conceptualize soft skills is to introduce the concept of performativity, which is hinted at in Hurrell et al.’s definition quoted earlier. Recent scholarship on the intersection of performativity and strategy, for example, shows that performativity can be used to help define soft skills. If we accept that, like strategy, soft skills is an instance of an organizational “performative utterance” or “performative discourse”, in such utterances and discourses, the words used by the people involved (as well as their gestures, tone, vocabulary, etc.) can “bring about the reality they describe” (Cabantous 2018).7 In other words, using accounting lingo and jargon properly is, to a certain degree, what makes a person an accountant.
7. See Cabantous, L., Gond, J.-P., & Wright, A. (2018) “The Performativity of Strategy: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead”, Long Range Planning, 51.3, pp. 407–416. Building on the foundational work of John Searle and J.L. Austin from the 1960s, many scholars (including Gond and Cabantous) are now working in the area of performativity as it relates to, for example, nursing education, or strategy and management or engineering or prison work. Gond and Cabantous summarize the state of the field succinctly in their chapter titled Performativity in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy in Organization Studies (New York: Routledge, 2016).
What this means in practice is that in any given sub-discipline of business, for example marketing or human resources, the discipline is constituted by its discourse: the way people talk about it and talk within it (including vocabulary, jargon, etc.). Naturally there are tangible tasks requiring expertise that need to get accomplished (besides discourse) that do get done by people in these fields, such as drafting a performance review document, completing an organization’s audit, coding software. However, when looked at closely, many of these tasks (e.g., doing research, writing proposals, holding meetings, giving presentations, etc.) are common across many fields. To a significant degree, then, according to the performativity concept, it’s the actual correct use of the relevant words and behaviors while doing these tasks (e.g., “creative brief” or “performance management strategy”) that actually “proves” that people are part of a given field.
What I’m arguing is that soft skills can be seen as another such performative discourse – a series of words, gestures, and behaviors based on discrete pieces of culturally inflected knowledge, history, theories, etc. – that together signal your competence in a given field. And the field we’re talking about is that of ideal workplace behavior. In fact, you could argue that viewing soft skills also as a field of knowledge (with its own performative discourse) is the missing piece of the soft skills definitional puzzle. For this reason, the second section of this book is devoted to describing the contours of an emerging academic discipline of soft skills, which is grounded in a handful of earlier disciplines, namely ethics, psychology, and interpersonal communication.
Soft skills mean all the things we’ve said so far: a complaint on the part of employers about missing skills, a self-help regimen for gaining these needed skills, a conservative impulse to manage rapid change, the currently-morevalorized inverse of hard skills, a leveraging of our personality traits, a series of positive habits, a performative discourse. Crucially, it should also start being seen as an academic field or discipline like any other you’d find at a university or college (French, geography, hospitality, nursing, etc.) with its own classic texts, procedures, controversies, and students and teachers.
You now have a multi-pronged working definition of soft skills that not only gives you a rich understanding of the term, and which should help you in situations you may run into where someone says that “soft skills” is a term that can’t be easily defined. It can be defined, but it’s not definable in one pithy sentence, which is, again, okay. You may be curious at this point for specifics. What does a performance of soft skills actually look like? A lot has been said about this very question, and we’ll look briefly in the next sections at the two groups who’ve had the most to say: employers and academics (though journalists are also quite interested!). It’s not giving away a big secret to say that a careful reading of the literature produced by these two groups shows two things: the term “soft skills” means performing interpersonal effectiveness (being effective with other people) and it means performing personal effectiveness (being effective on your own). While there are many specific examples of these two kinds of behavior,
9 as I’ll show later (based on research completed at my institution), the needed soft skills behaviors can be helpfully summarized into six main types.
What Do Employers Say About Soft Skills?
If you search online using keywords like “workplace and soft skills”, you’ll likely get thousands of hits such as the recent article from The Globe and Mail titled “Corporate Canada is Facing a Soft Skills Deficit: What Can We Do?” ( Lister 2019). This article (similar ones have been published over the past ten years in leading newspapers across the Western world, including the New York Times) provides an example of the “complaint” view of soft skills I spoke about earlier. The short answer to the question posed in this section’s title, then, is that employers are concerned that the candidates they’re seeing (and perhaps as well their current employees) don’t possess the right soft skills. Therefore, according to employers across the Western world, a soft skills gap or deficit exists.
The Globe article is based on research carried out by LinkedIn Canada and the Labour Market Information Council, one of many employers or arm’slength government associations (others include Conference Board of Canada and Canadian Federation of Independent Business) that have published reports or studies on the soft skills “deficit” or “gap”. Similar reports have appeared recently in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, among other countries.8 What unites these reports, besides the framing device of a soft skills gap or deficit, is, oftentimes, a checklist (usually based on employer surveys) of the specific soft skills employers would like employees to possess and/or demonstrate.
A typical checklist comes from the job site Workopolis ( The most sought 2014). According to Workopolis’ research, employers are looking for five important soft skills: dependability/reliability, communication, motivation, enthusiasm, and flexibility/adaptability. Hundreds of similar checklists exist in the online universe, and as we’ll see later, this is one reason why the academics studying soft skills have bemoaned the lack of a standardized definition of soft skills. Still, if we look carefully at even the short list from Workopolis, we’ll notice that the soft skills mentioned in this particular survey of employers fall nicely into the overarching two-part structure I’ve already mentioned: behaving effectively with others (communication, enthusiasm) and behaving effectively on one’s own (dependability/reliability, motivation, flexibility/adaptability). I would argue that all lists of soft skills can be broken down in this way.
8. Report examples include The Value of Soft Skills to the UK Economy (2017, UK) https://pacelearning. com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/The-Value-of-Soft-Skills-to-the-UK-Economy.pdf; Soft Skills for Business Success (2017, Australia) https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/economics/articles/ soft-skills-business-success.html; Auckland Plan 2050 (2018, New Zealand) www.aucklandcouncil. govt.nz/plans-projects-policies-reports-bylaws/our-plans-strategies/auckland-plan/opportunitiesprosperity/Pages/importance-soft-skills.aspx; Bridging the Soft Skills Gap (2017, United States) www.uschamberfoundation.org/reports/soft-skills-gap
What Do Researchers Say About Soft Skills?
In the past ten years the pace of academic research and publication on the topic of soft skills has grown substantially. The Google Scholar database shows more than a tripling in articles published on soft skills in 2019 (roughly 17,000) compared to 2010 (roughly 5,000). Reviewing a sample of the 2019 articles shows that there are recurring themes in the literature, including attempts to more precisely define soft skills, to investigate whether or not they can be effectively taught, and to more closely relate soft skills to employer needs. Incidentally, this book adds to all three sub-themes. It provides an expanded and nuanced definition of soft skills (in the earlier part of the Introduction), it adds to the literature that says soft skills can be taught at the postsecondary level (in the Conclusion) and again in the Conclusion it provides evidence that employers continue to find soft skills highly attractive and necessary.
The first area of significant academic inquiry is into defining soft skills. A number of researchers remark that “soft skills” remains a somewhat ambiguous term without a widely accepted definition (Cimatti 2016; Matteson et al. 2016; Landine 2018). One researcher goes so far as to claim that the sheer number of commonly cited soft skills makes it “impossible to think about them as a coherent whole” ( Toulomakos 2020). At the same time, others are happy to provide common-sensical definitions, if not always as fulsome as the one I’ve provided earlier. For example, Hurrell et al. (2013) define soft skills as “nontechnical and not reliant on abstract reasoning, involving interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities to facilitate mastered performance in particular social context”. Hurell et al.’s focus on inter/intrapersonal abilities is helpful, as is their recognition that “soft skills” is performative. Surprising, however, is their decision to not include personal abilities that don’t involve interaction with others, such as a decision to demonstrate likability, problem-solving orientation, a good work ethic, etc.
A second group of studies delves into the teaching strategies that best support and best elicit successful soft skills in post-secondary institutions (Anthony & Garner 2016; Brown 2018; Martin 2019). One interesting thing about such studies is their attempt to pinpoint the assignments students find most helpful in learning soft skills. Students report that learning soft skills is best facilitated through guest speakers, followed by self-analysis and journal article research, with soft skills videos being least helpful. Counter to what you’ll hear later about the soft skills course at my home institution, in which case studies with simulation and behavior modeling are seen as the most effective way to learn soft skills, the students in the studies listed earlier have either not been exposed to this method or don’t see it as helpful. Only one meta-review of soft skills pedagogy was identified ( Lee 2018). In it, the author examines a number of methodologies used to teach soft skills to postsecondary students, including intervention programs, courses, and workshops. She highlights the “scarcity of current studies that address adult soft-skill
Soft Skills in a Digital Age 11 acquisition, particularly among . . . undergraduate learners”. The Conclusion to this book will offer just such a study, with positive results.
A third area of significant research is into the need for soft skills in contemporary digital workplaces. There is a large group of studies (e.g., Carvalho & Rabechini 2015; Ravindranath 2016; Thompson 2019) that seek to explain soft skills necessity in specific fields. These studies are often about sub-fields of business (e.g., project management, hospitality, IT) or else healthcare (e.g., nursing, medicine). The conclusions of these studies regularly locate a direct link between high employer need for effective soft skills and relatively low employee demonstration of such skills. A counterintuitive and refreshing study is Hurrell (2016). In “Rethinking the soft skills deficit blame game: Employers, withdrawal, and the reporting of soft skills gaps” Hurrell posits a contrarian hypothesis, that the soft skills gap so regularly discussed in the media and by academics is being looked at the wrong way, that is, as a gap/deficit among employees. In fact, Hurrell demonstrates, it is as much a weakness in employer recruitment strategy, lack of employer soft skills training, and contradictions between stated soft skills required by employers and authority granted to employees to actually display such skills that explain the soft skills deficit. As Hurrell concludes, “Soft skills gaps caused by deficient HR practices do not, for example, require the changes to skills and education policy that employers frequently demand”. Such a conclusion could be a wake-up call for what we might provisionally label the “soft skills industry”: the journalists, researchers, employers, and educators who spend time thinking and writing about issue.
Is Soft Skills a Moral Reform Movement?
Even without the benefit of Hurrell’s critique of soft skills (i.e., that it’s as much or even more an employer issue than it is a gap or deficit shown by employees), the idea may have begun to cross your mind that the soft skills debate of the past decade bears a resemblance to a recurring human event known as a “moral panic”. Whenever behavior changes in significant ways in society, or is perceived to be doing so, a portion of humans tends to react negatively by denouncing such behavior change.9 The 20th and early 21st centuries have experienced their fair share of such episodes. For example, the conservative backlashes to first- and second-wave feminism, to the increasing use of marijuana, and to the increasing use of alcohol have caused moral panics at various points since the 1880s. More recently, moral panic episodes have come from the left of the political spectrum. Rape culture (called out by the Me Too Movement) and police violence against Blacks (called out by the Black Lives Matter Movement) are also examples of moral panics.
9. See Matthew Wills’ “The First Moral Panic: London, 1744” for a short introduction to the topic at https://daily.jstor.org/the-first-moral-panic-london-1744/.
Whatever their political inspiration, moral panics follow a similar cycle that includes protest against the offending behavior, which is picked up on by the media that then labels the protest a movement. The impetus for these movements has been analyzed as either stemming from some form of status discontent (i.e., I’m unhappy about these people who are getting something I’m not getting) or else as a conscious cognitive judgment based on an individual’s background (i.e., knowing what I know about behavior, I don’t think this is correct behavior) ( Wood & Hughes 1984). While the soft skills gap hasn’t caused protests in the streets, other aspects of its trajectory follow the moral panic formula, especially the media’s co-opting of the issue and adding a simplifying and magnifying spotlight to it.
The types of moral regulation movements that occur after moral panics have been well documented, for example, the early 20th-century moral regulation movement of prohibition/temperance as a response to the moral panic of alcohol abuse. Scholars who study moral regulation have some interesting things to say that are pertinent to my argument that we can perhaps view the recent soft skills debate as an instance of moral panic. Corrigan (1981) shows that moral regulation seeks to accomplish a number of goals, but mostly, “through its reproduction of particular (proper, permitted, encouraged) forms of expression it fixes (or tries to fix) particular signs, genres, repertoires, codes as normal representations of ‘standard’ experiences which represent human beings.” Commenting on Corrigan’s definition of moral regulation, Valverde and Weir (2006) stress the performative nature of this kind of regulation: “Corrigan [analyzes] moral regulation as the privileging of certain forms of expression. ‘The establishment of proper public ways of performation’ results in the subordination of other expressive behaviours”. This is another way of saying that moral regulation (e.g., via the widespread “need” for soft skills) may be one way of tamping down forms of expression that are beginning to appear in the workplace but that are not the preferred form of managers, owners, or shareholders.10
While in one way the lens of moral panic/moral regulation seems tailormade as a way to describe the phenomenon of the soft skills gap/deficit and its resulting “need” and “requirement” among employers for excellent soft skills, we should be careful to distinguish between a true moral panic (which is about an individual behavior that’s physically as well as morally detrimental in some way) and the less dire nature of the soft skills situation. While it’s true that the soft skills situation includes a type of policing by employers of their employees’ behavior, it’s also true that the vast majority of employees (and postsecondary
10. For more on this argument, see for example Zamudio, M. M., & Lichter, M. I. (2008) “Bad Attitudes and Good Soldiers: Soft Skills as a Code for Tractability in the Hiring of Immigrant Latina/os Over Native Blacks in the Hotel Industry”, Social Problems, 55.4.
Soft Skills in a Digital Age 13 students) tend to agree with employers about the need for civility and teamwork and good communication, among other soft skills. While I understand Hurrell’s wanting to turn the tables and lay some blame on employers for the supposed soft skills gap, this is less an employer versus employee situation than it is an us versus each other situation. All of us who inhabit workplaces – employers, employees, customers – have reciprocal responsibilities to each other to maintain a basic level of interpersonal and personal effectiveness.
What This Book Does
Any time you invoke a “basic level” of understanding of something, you are in essence talking about a combination of knowledge and skill. For that reason, the rest of this book expands on a couple of the important soft skills definitions I discussed earlier. First, soft skills is a body of knowledge, a field, and a discipline. You may not be used to thinking of it in this way, but you need to if you’re going to ground your behavior in something more than a subjective and non-theorized “Behave like X in situation Y” type of logic. “Soft skills” is not the same as the conduct manuals that proliferated from the 17th to the 19th centuries that explained how various audiences (e.g., young men, young women, married women) should behave. One reason so many “self-help”- or “conduct”-type books on soft skills available today leave readers feeling lost is that they provide almost no context for why the skills that are about to be described are important, helpful, or where they come from. It’s as if soft skills just appeared in 2010 and no one in the earlier, long history of the world ever thought about these things. The context for the concept of soft skills is undertheorized, under-developed, and under-historicized.
I propose that you’ll find a grounding for a new soft skills discipline in three well-established places. The fundamental grounding for a soft skills discipline is in the ancient branch of philosophy known as moral philosophy or ethics, which is the study of right and wrong behavior. Any discipline with human behavior at its core must reckon with classic concepts and theories from ethics. Another fundamental grounding for the discipline of soft skills is in the human science of psychology, the study of our mental processes. Psychology takes ethical ideas (how should humans be with each other) and, using the scientific method, confirms a number of hypotheses about how we tend to learn, how we tend to behave with each other, how we tend to deal with stress, among many other aspects of human experience. A final classical grounding for an emerging soft skills discipline is the study of interpersonal communication. A relatively recent and still evolving field, dating from the 1960s, interpersonal communication studies the process of communication not just for its information-transmitting capabilities but for its relationshipbuilding capabilities.
Together, ethics, psychology, and interpersonal communication offer conceptual and theoretical heft that the until-recently relatively “thin” concept of soft skills increasingly requires. For this reason, Part 1 of this book su mmarizes the important aspects of these foundational disciplines to the study (and eventual practice of) soft skills. The next sections of the bo ok, Parts 2 and 3, a re all about practice. Earlier I showed how any list of soft skills can be broken down into two common denominators. One common denominator in soft skills lists is the group of skills that demonstrate your ability to act effectively with others. Another common denominator is the group of skills that demonstrate your ability to act effectively on your own. Using an in-depth survey of 350 employers conducted in the Toronto area in 2013, my colleagues and I were able to discover the six statistically signif icant soft skills that are being asked for by employers. Under the “ability to act effectively with others” heading, we found effective communication, effective teamwork, and a positive customer-service orientation. Under the “ability to act effectively on your own” heading, we found a positive problem-solving orientation, effective productivity and work ethic, and likability to be statistically significant.
What’s left to do is to investigate the words, phrases, gestures, and actions that best elicit a performance or modeling of effective soft skills. Therefore, in Parts 2 and 3, one chapter is devoted to each of the six soft skills mentioned earlier. In each of these chapters, the skill is defined and explained and current research into its deployment is summarized. Then, a realistic case study is offered in which this skill is clearly being used ineffectively. Reminding yourself of the concepts learned from your Part 1 immersion in ethics, psychology, and interpersonal communication, you’ll work toward an analytical solution to each case that both identifies the poor soft skills behaviors but also explains why these are poor behaviors. Then, you’ll be asked to demonstrate an improved performance of the soft skill in question, using language, gestures, and actions. You’ll do so by scripting the improvements and ideally, by role-playing/modeling them in person or by filming yourself. Each of these six soft skills chapters ends with a short checklist of actions that can be taken to elicit these soft skills in the real world. Along the way, practical activities are provided to help you become an expert modeler of the top six soft skills.
In the Conclusion I look at a community college that decided a number of years ago to develop a mandatory soft skills course for all students at the undergraduate level in its Business school. Through a conscious choice of active-learning pedagogy grounded in realistic case study analysis twinned with scripting, role-playing, and modeling of improved soft skills, the instructors in this course have come up with a successful model that research has now shown is effective in delivering soft skills results. Students report high intention to use soft skills in the workplace, and employers of these students
Soft Skills in a Digital Age 15 (the ones who’ve been on a work term placement) agree that the students are demonstrating high levels of soft skills effectiveness – higher, in fact, than similar placement students from other institutions who have not taken the course.
SUMMARY
In this chapter you learned that:
• The definition of soft skills is multifaceted, meaning there’s not one simple way of explaining the concept. Still, most people would agree that soft skills are those that help you deal with others and manage yourself and your emotions in the way your workplace requires. They involve a “mastered performance” in various contexts including customer interactions and colleague interactions.
• Another lens through which to look at soft skills is to see them as extensions of positive personality traits or habits you are already practicing. And yet another lens through which to see soft skills is as the latest in a long historical line of “moral reform” movements, in which part of society attempts to reform another part of society by changing/improving what it sees as a problematic social behavior (e.g., drinking alcohol, overcrowded jails, etc.).
• Employers have tended to see a “soft skills gap” among young or new employees – in other words, a lack of inter- and intrapersonal skills. Academic researchers on the other hand have tended to concentrate on definitions of soft skills, pedagogies for teaching soft skills, and identifying precisely what soft skills are required in various professions. A minority academic view is that there is no soft skills gap and instead it’s employers who need to properly train their employees to demonstrate required soft skills behaviors.
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