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Leadership & Talent Developers: Stop Avoiding Hard Skills and Instead, Embrace Them

HARD TRUTHS FOR LEADERSHIP AND TALENT DEVELOPERS

  1. As long as investors and the market hold the Board of Directors and top management of any private or public company accountable for achieving certain financial, operating and strategic business objectives each fiscal year and over the long term, the practical reality of today’s real business world is that leaders must have BOTH technical/hard skills and soft skills as outlined in the above mix.
  2. Covering soft skills almost exclusively in your programs has not been successful from the perspective of most CEOs and top-line management.
  3. Line management, especially at the senior and upper levels, value hard skills more than soft skills so you should include both of them in your programs.
  4. Line managers typically feel that soft skills do not directly help them achieve their business objectives and plans for which they are accountable to top management.
  5. You cannot effectively teach soft skills in a vacuum, devoid of their associated hard skills.
  6. For leadership and talent programs to be effective, hard and soft skills should be TAUGHT TOGETHER in a workshop approach within the practical context of the leader’s real world, actual business objectives, plans, challenges, and risks. This approach is a much more preferred practical application of BOTH skills.

If relevant hard skills are not incorporated into your program content and relevant soft skills are taught disassociated from them, Leadership and Talent Developers are likely to commit the sins of the past and continue to develop programs that the CEO and line executives will reject because they do not help them to operate the business in any practical way.  If you want top management support for these and other programs, YOU must change as they likely will not!

LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT TRAINING PROGRAM EXAMPLE

For maximum effectiveness of any leadership development training program at the middle management level and above, hard skills and soft skills should be taught together.  The design of any such program should commence with a thorough understanding of the leader’s business objectives with them and their line management superior(s) so that the relevant hard and soft skills needed to achieve the business objectives can be agreed upon.

The LD or TM staff can develop the hard skill portion of the program content by working directly with various line management experts. Such experts can come from outside consultants, business school staff, authors, and inside experts within the company, among others.  These experts should be highly knowledgeable in the best-of-the-best successful and innovative business practices so that the attending leaders can learn the new practices and discuss their applicability in achieving some of their business objectives.  These experts, with the assistance of the LD or TM staff, will be responsible for developing AND presenting the hard skill portion of the program content.

Let’s take an example of a training program for a group of General Managers who are operating a $100 to $150 million per year business.  A business objective to increase sales by 15 percentage points over last year has been established based on a significant product software enhancement with greatly improved functionality that needs to get to market two months ahead of schedule.

The relevant hard skills for this program might be to learn the new and/or improved features of the product’s functionality, to train sales personnel on how best to sell those features to the existing or new customer base, to achieve the desired delivery performance ahead of schedule through improved project management, to improve customer service’s responses on the enhanced product’s typical service issues and implement the entire project within the cost parameters in order to achieve the profit goals.

The relevant soft skills for this program would be developed simultaneously and might be to motivate the entire workforce regarding the greater competitive advantage the enhanced product will provide, build a higher level of trust amongst employees in the enhanced product, to achieve better teamwork and coordination between field sales and customer service employees and to teach project management skills for improved delivery performance.

Though this approach will likely increase the cost of the program by an estimated 20% to 25%, the program’s return on investment to top management will be greatly enhanced and easily offset by the product’s improved financial and market performance.

ADVANTAGES OF TEACHING HARD AND SOFT SKILLS TOGETHER

  1. The company and division’s ability to achieve some of its important business objectives and strategies will be greatly enhanced.
  2. The practical business value of appropriate leadership and talent development programs will be recognized by line management executives as a practical way to help achieve some of its important business objectives to which they are held accountable by the CEO and the Board of Directors.
  3. By providing practical business value in the appropriate leadership and talent development programs, HR and LD functions will clearly demonstrate their ability to be equal business partners to their line management peers.
  4. Line management is taught HOW to implement the relevant soft skills in a practical, real-world business setting by applying the relevant soft and hard skills TOGETHER in an effort to achieve one or more of their important business objectives.
  5. With the improved reputation of LD programs covering the relevant hard skills as they relate to a particular business objective, line management support for these programs and those that deal solely with soft skills will be greatly enhanced.
  6. By covering the relevant hard and soft skills in relation to the line management leader’s business objectives, the leaders and their superiors will value the time and effort they invest in the program and future programs much more than they currently do and consider it as a worthwhile return on that investment.

CONCLUSION

Since the inclusion of relevant hard skills into any leadership or talent development program is not likely to fall within the skills set of the vast majority of current purveyors, the primary responsibility for implementing this major paradigm shift rests with HR and Leadership Development management.

If the subject content of appropriate leadership and talent development programs is not changed to incorporate such hard skills, the historical pattern of top management seeing little or no practical business value in these programs is likely to continue and the HR and LD functions are doomed to repeat its failed program content over and over again.

It seems to me that the leaders of the HR and Leadership Development functions are facing a critical crossroad regarding its lackluster reputation in the eyes of their ultimate customer (the CEO and line executives) and the future funding for its programs.  However, this crossroads offers a historically significant and pivotal opportunity to make a major paradigm shift in all program content, but especially for those designed for middle and upper management.

CEOs and line executives will gain a much more favorable view of the HR and LD functions when, and only when, they see that their programs for middle and higher management directly help the company to achieve some of its specific business objectives that facilitate improved profitability and strategic success.  The only meaningful way to do that is to teach the appropriate mix of hard and soft skills together in a workshop setting that pragmatically helps the leaders to achieve some of their actual business objectives within the practical context of their associated real-world plans, challenges, risks, and strategies.

As stated in the first paragraph, it is simple!!!

If you want your ultimate customers to respect the pragmatic business value and worth of your programs while improving your reputation as an equal business partner, incorporate hard skills into the program content.  This major paradigm shift can be implemented by developing or updating several key programs or more every fiscal year.

If you do not, don’t complain about the lack of top management support for your soft skills programs!!!

Jack Bucalo
Jack Bucalo
JACK has led the Global HR function for a Fortune 500 and 1000 international company and several other large international companies. With four years of line experience complementing his HR experience, he believes that the CHRO or HR Leader should play a more direct role in helping the CEO to achieve the company's business objectives and strategic goals, while effectively implementing its administrative duties. In doing so successfully, the CHRO or HR Leader can become an equal business partner with his/her line management peers while becoming more directly involved in the company's operational mainstream, rather than being just an administrative afterthought. As a pragmatic practitioner, Jack publishes detailed and actionable articles on a wide variety on critically-important HR issues on BIZCATALYST 360°. He is also on the advisory board for other web sites. Jack's over 20 years of executive-level HR experience for which he was responsible for company, executive and Board-related matters, form the basis for most of viewpoints.

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