Program Tactics #007 - Soft skills don't exist

“The soft skills are the hard skills.” - Amy Edmondson

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Estimated reading time: 3 mins

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​Soft skills aren't real

You've probably heard that program managers need soft skills in order to thrive in their role. In fact, I'm guilty because I often say they are one of the fastest ways to grow your career.

The truth is soft skills aren't real, yet we're all expected to do them.

We all know what hard skills are: they're tangible things like project management, technology, certificates, tooling, processes.

The soft skills are... well how do I say it? Soft?

Soft skills are micro-skills

Soft skills are several micro skills stacked on top of each other.

Let's put 3 minutes on the clock and I'll dump a quick list of micro skills that make up soft skills.

Micro skills:

1. Smiling at someone when you greet them
2. Shaking their hand
3. Acting friendly
4. Being interested in the other person
5. Listening to understand
6. Inspiring confidence
7. Communicating your competence
8. Knowing when to use brevity and depth
9. Noting when the listener loses interest
10. Observing body language to take a cue
11. Learning how to tell a story
12. Speaking in different tones (avoiding monotone)
13. Using your hands to illustrate your point
14. Using touch to build connection
15. De-escalating conflict
16. Giving feedback
17. Influencing others
18. Negotiating for what you want
19. Creating trust
20. Building a safe environment

If I told you to do any of these things on the list, you'd be able to.

Soft skills: a container for micro hard skills

When we demystify soft skills into a series of micro skills, they're not so soft anymore. This is because they're now tangible, learnable, and measurable.

The "soft" part of soft skills is the fact that there's no exact way to say that you have enough of them.

Let's say there were 100 micro skills available in the soft skills bucket (probably more out there by the way).

• If you do 0 of the micro skills, you could say that you have no soft skills.
• If you do 100 micro skills, you could say that you have excellent soft skills.
• What about in between?

How many should you do?

• Making a presentation to executives? Ideally you can bat over 50% usage.
• Talking shop with engineers? You probably don't need to bat 50% usage, and with some people, maybe you don't need any at all (don't we all know one person like this?)

The thing is, if you do 0 micro skills in the soft skills bucket, you're basically behaving like a robot. Which is probably fine when the AI robot overlords take over.

Who do you want to be?

Soft skills operate on a gradient.

The real tactic here is to continue to be observant of others who have great "soft skills" and picking up which micro skills you want to add to your repertoire.

Collect enough of them, and soon enough you'll be the person with the good soft skills that everyone else models.

So they're not real, but do them anyways?

Will I still use the term 'soft skills'? Absolutely.

It conveys what I'm talking about in the sense that describing many trees could be simplified to the word "forest."

But let's not forget what they are-- a collection of tiny skills.

There's no right number, but there are better numbers.

Just keep increasing your count, and you'll be on your way.

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