What are hard and soft skills?
Hard skills are measurable, specific, and teachable abilities or technical knowledge gained through education, training, or experience, which is often directly related to a particular job or industry. Examples include data analysis, programming, graphic design, accounting, dancing, painting… They are usually the core of a profession, particularly the part of it excluding interaction with other people. On the other hand, soft skills are mostly defined as “personal attributes, interpersonal abilities, and such characteristics that come into action when you interact with others, such as communication, teamwork, adaptability, leadership…”.
What is the differentiation?
This differentiation is seen in multiple settings of professional life (academic, corporate, industry…), entertainment (TV shows, movies, books…) and even “science” and psychology (see I.Q. vs E.Q.). Although E.Q. is not as popular, in the past ~50 years the term has been gaining popularity, particularly since 1995 when popularized through Emotional Intelligence. In this book, Goleman bring up that emotional intelligence is as important as IQ for success, including in academic, professional, social, and interpersonal aspects of one’s life. The book itself is a step in the right direction in recognizing the importance of social skills. However, it does it in a way that sets a differentiation between soft and hard skills, implicitly stating that they are much more separated than they'd look. Since we differentiate them, even attempting to measure them separately with EQ vs IQ, we are inclined to think that we can just excel at one of them and can be excused from displaying severe gaps in the other. This severely limits our growth and fulfillment, not just as a whole but also in the particular one we chose to focus on, since these skills are complementary and synergistic, not opposed.
We have all seen this differentiation at some point in life to various degrees. For example, often in school, students that obsessively focus on getting the best grades often end up stunted in their social skills and often don’t end up excelling in their professional life, often due to limited sense of curiosity, ability in dealing with ambiguity, communication with other people... In professional settings, we often see countless examples of people focusing on becoming better at their Hard Skills without realizing that what is holding them back are the “politics they don’t play”. The expectation that their work “will just speak for itself,” the unclear communication of their expertise to their partners… Lack of soft skills is a fantastic recipe for career frustration. Communication in particular is such a force multiplier as to count as practically a life cheat for someone who is already doing good enough at hard, technical skills. It allows you to handle conflict with your bosses, customers, teammates and build great relationships out of doing so. Many of your best relationships are likely to come out of situations where you will initially be on the opposite side of a conflict with a person.
With great communication skills, you can drive the conversation towards having both sides understand and sympathize with each other. To most professionals, this allows you to handle larger, more complex, and impactful projects and get clients and stakeholders to support your needs rather than see it as conflicting with theirs. Your “workplace fre-enemies” will not focus anymore on protecting their interests if they see they have no need for it since you’re already striving to see the disagreement from their point of view. They will, more often than not, use their energy in trying to see the conflict from yours and often trust you more.
On the other hand, going through life focusing only on soft skills hits just as much of a wall as relying mainly on hard skills. Most people love working with pleasant teammates that listen attentively, understand, and display a constructive, positive attitude. They do so all the way until those same members keep messing up the work, missing deadlines, creating low-quality results that someone else has to fix… Regardless of how good you are at dealing with people, at the end of the day there is a job that needs to be done. Although soft skills bring you a long way in your career, you should think of them as force multipliers of your achievements through your hard skills.
Then how to think about the soft and hard skills?
The most popular understanding I see is that it is the sum of these skills that makes up our overall effectiveness (Effectiveness = HardSkills + SoftSkills), hence enabling us to focus only on one and getting entirely complacent with the other, and still meeting certain. A better, still oversimplified, formula is the following: Effectiveness = HardSkills*SoftSkills. If we add to this the fact that most skills (hard or soft) have diminishing returns on time invested, then we can see why it is not optimal to focus exclusively on one at the cost of the other.
It is difficult to go from being an 8 to a 10 in any given skill, and much easier to go from being a 1 to an 8. Being an 8 in Soft and Hard Skills ends up Effectiveness= 8*8=56. Now imagine someone else investing all their time in being perfect in their hard skills while not doing anything about their soft skills Effectiveness= 10*1 = 10. Although the math is oversimplified, it serves to show the value of investing in areas that are lagging rather than pursuing ever diminishing returns trying to get to be a 10 at something that you are good at or enjoy. In engineering, for example, one’s career usually takes off after you one sees the value of communication, writing, and collaboration instead of continuing to invest in learning even more in your area of expertise.
But, wait, how did we get here then?
This mental model has been popular for more than half a century. Historically, technical and social talents were tied much closer together. The differentiation between soft and hard skills began in the U.S. military in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was developed to categorize the various abilities required for military personnel. Some of the earliest works on this topic come from psychologist Paul G. Whitmore, a key figure in originating the terms. “Hard skills” used to refer to “the operation of machinery and weapons—concrete, technical tasks that were relatively easy to measure”. “Soft skills” were defined as job-related abilities that involved little to no interaction with machines. The U.S. Continental Army Command (CONARC) held a “Soft Skills Training Conference” in 1972 to formally explore the concept, although the distinction continued being considered vague, and a recommendation was made to “discontinue using the terms due to potential confusion”. However, the terminology did take hold, like a meme, and continued to be used, getting even more popular after Coleman’s Emotional Intelligence.
We can see this same distinction make it's way into popular culture with Movies/TV Shows that often show Intelligent characters go out of their way to behave, often counter-productively to their own goals, like jerks or entirely out of touch with “normal people”. Big Bang (Sheldon), House (Dr. House), Death Note (L Lawliet), Good Will Hunting (Will Hunting), Mr Robot (Elliot)… A particularly egregious example is that of The Imitation Game, where they portrayed Alan Turing as arrogant, insufferable, and obnoxious when in reality, he was very kind and empathetic. There are multiple TV Tropes that we can see demonstrating this emphasis on Hard Skills vs Soft Skills (example one, two, three…).
Historical figures, commonly assumed as meeting these tropes, often are great examples of social skill, demonstrated repeatedly within their personal and professional lives: Leonardo da Vinci – He thrived in courtly life, was a great conversationalist, a brilliant performer of music and spectacles, and cultivated powerful patrons through his charisma.
Leonardo da Vinci – He thrived in courtly life, was a great conversationalist, a brilliant performer of music and spectacles, and cultivated powerful patrons through his charisma.
Galileo Galilei – often depicted as the lonely scientist persecuted by the Church, he spent most of his life corresponding widely with intellectuals, leveraging patronage systems and navigating complex politics in the Church itself.
Isaac Newton – usually imagined as a cold, obsessive recluse interested only in physics, he was actually Master of the Mint, President of the Royal Society, in general someone who navigated power structures quite successfully. On the side, he also lost tons of money in a stock bubble, showing that he was not that great at ALL the hard skills. It does make me feel better for loosing cash on stocks...
Benjamin Franklin – often imagined as a “quirky inventor” in simplified portrayals, he was immensely socially skilled. He was a great diplomat in France, a great writer and very popular person in his time. He was a founding father for a reason.
Albert Einstein – often reduced to absent-minded professor caricatures. In reality, he was witty, socially charismatic, gave public lectures worldwide, and was politically outspoken (civil rights, pacifism).
Richard Feynman – as Einstein and Franklyn, many would imagine a Nobel-winning physicist as being socially inept. In fact, he had great skill communication, which is straightforward to corroborate by seeing many of his lectures, where you will be amazed at how well he explains extremely complex scenarios. A great example.
J. Robert Oppenheimer – In real life, he was a magnetic leader, quoted poetry in multiple languages, and inspired fierce loyalty among students and colleagues. Although many of his later life problems come out of mistakes in social interactions, this is also easily understood when taking into account the large number of social interactions on challenging subjects he had through his life. He did not fail politically due to lack of skills but rather due to the immense complexity he had to deal with.
The opposite is also true, where very often we can see in TV and Movies the Trope of the highly skilled social animal that knows nothing else which is just as exaggerated…
These tropes define our own approach to life and how to think about it. is one of our oldest mechanisms to remember lessons and share them with our people. The division of Hard Skills vs Soft Skills is a highly pervasive trope in current storytelling that was not as present in myths and older stories, where we often see protagonists display great skill at both without clear division. For example, one of the most famous Greek heroes is Odysseus, who is largely known nowadays for being a lying, cunning individual that tricked Polyphemus (the Cyclops) into releasing him and his men. Yet he is largely described as one of the strongest Achaeans (Greeks), great at fighting with spear and sword, swimming, running, and the best wrestler amongst the Achaeans. After Achilles’s death he fought and won against Ajax to gain Achilles’s armor, showing he was the best of all the Achaeans at wrestling. In this same story (the Iliad, the Odyssey) most of the heroes are described as being great (or at least good) across the board, at a variety of things that to modern eye would seem contradictory. Heroes such as Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greeks, are also shown to be capable musicians, poets, and deeply reflective figures, men who can slaughter on the battlefield yet weep openly for fallen companions.
This separation has been taken to the extreme in the past decade with the recent glorification of personality disorders that, for most people, are not clinically diagnosed. We’ve seen many individuals (particularly working in tech) stating autism/asperger… which often is accompanied by “cute” quirks and social immaturity, expected to be the excuse of rude, self-centered, and attention-seeking behavior. Real autism and its many degrees bring a lot of suffering to the people affected by it and their families and should not be trivialized as a collection of quirks that you can turn on and off to bring attention to yourself. Is the separation of soft and hard skills reflected in science? The closest personality categorization to be remotely scientific is the Big Five Personality traits. None map against technical competency, but rather show how different people wish to live their lives and interact with each other and at what proportion of their time. None of these traits predict success in dealing with people. Being more extroverted does not make you better at soft skills, just makes you more obnoxious when you’re not good at it. Similarly, being introverted does not automatically make you insightful and deep by default. Although there is a degree of correlation between extroversion and soft skills and introversion and hard skills, this often occurs simply due to opportunity. Extroverted people get more frequent social interactions to practice their social skills, and introverted ones get more free time to focus on their individual interests, getting better at it. Often, Introverted people’s interest is actually observing and understanding other people, leading to great understanding of human nature due to the propensity to listen and observing social dynamics and moods, instead of expressing their own.
How does that reflect in practical terms in day to day?
By now it probably shows that I write from the perspective of a person that is aiming to complement his hard skills with soft skills, where I gave far more examples of the latter, as they have been on my mind more frequently, than the former. I have seen this to be the most frequent case though, where the current culture seems to overvalue the hard skills more due to academic measurement via tests, corporate measurement via KPIs, industry measurement via outputs…
In my experience, I have seen far greater growth in my career due to this change, as well as greater satisfaction in my work AND my personal life once I started focusing on soft skills as just that, skills that are to be developed and learned in the same way as hard skills can. A series of insights that I would like to discussion are the following:
Do not undervalue the complexity and of soft skills. In my experience, “hard skills” problems (in my case, Systems Designs, Programming…) are often easier to solve than “soft skills” ones. (Mentoring a junior engineer, managing upwards, defining requirements with clients, managing team conflicts between highly talented engineers who are sure they’re right…). “Soft skills” problems have an unlimited ceiling of complexity as humans’ mindsets and personalities are very different from each other, to which you add the different goals that different people have plus negative traits such as incompetence, arrogance, politics, selfishness…
Do not see it as that different from “hard skills” problems. When you deal with a concrete “hard skill” problem in your profession (e.g., fixing an electricity installation, painting a car, diagnosing a disease…) you’re following a personal approach to problem-solving that you developed through your training or experience. Often, you clarify your main objective (paint the car a certain color…), your standards (paint should be high quality, be water-resistant so the rain doesn’t wash it away…), a series of steps to get to it (buy the material, remove current painting from the car, remove scratches first… I don’t really know much about painting cars, and it shows), troubleshoot (paint is not sticking correctly, why? what’s special about this paint? what’s special about the car’s metal?). Soft skills problems are the same. You clarify your objective (I want to convince this person to support my idea, buy my product, agree with me…), standards (I don’t want to lie to them, I want to continue having their trust after this is closed), steps (I should listen first to their point of view, take notes and reflect on it, find how I can help them get what they need/want and then find how I can map that to what I want, or maybe adapt what we both want so we can both get something close to our initial desire), troubleshoot (They don’t seem to want to share what they really want, need. They may not trust me yet, why? Oh, I’m new to the company, why would they share that with me, maybe I should earn their trust first…).
Do not undervalue its importance, even if your main focus is to just become better at your profession. “Soft skills” enable you to leverage your hard skills that you may be so proud of to a much more impactful degree. The “best” engineer, if socially inept, will just be one sitting in the corner of the office working on isolated problems because they don’t know how to lead, communicate or deal with others. A good engineer with good social skills will be taught better and learn faster, know how to ask clarifying questions, be reached out with ideas, be put in leadership positions because they can resolve conflict, delegate and mentor effectively. A good engineer will end up making great products, while the “best” will be just solving some really concrete issues in the back of the office that, hopefully, do not make him interact with the rest of the company. Great communication also enables you to understand your own problems better. As Albert Einstein put it: “You don’t understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” Explaining difficult things makes us better at understanding those same things and seeing them from different perspectives, which usually helps in solving problems. How often has it happened to you that when you’re describing your problems to someone else, you’re actually the one coming up with your own solution as you speak?
Conclusion
Reality is much more complex than what we usually see in fiction. It is straightforward to fall in this trap of separating soft from hard skills, since it’s also emotionally satisfying to tell ourselves that we’re not succeeding because other people are holding us back, instead of seeing it as a problem we’re not solving correctly. We should not make a caricature out of our personality based on tropes and memes, but rather focus on becoming better as humans overall. We're not insects, we don't specialize at such levels.