If you are a manager, vp, or executive in an organization, there's a good chance you earned that position because of your underlying technical skills. A lawyer with a great knowledge of the law and its application may be promoted to partner. A sales rep with the largest book of business may be promoted to manager. A vp of finance may be promoted to CFO inside a software company due to their department's stellar KPIs and balanced budgets each year.
There is nothing wrong with being promoted for being adept at the technical stuff in your industry. In fact, it is a good prerequisite to have when you become a manager of people in order to garner respect from your peers and subordinates. It would be hard to imagine any of the promotions above occurring without a fair amount of proficiency of the industry they are in.
But once you get the promotion and begin to manage people from the front line supervisor to the organization's Chief officer of "x", it becomes less about technical skills and more about the soft skills.
True leadership in any organization or social system is about the effective use of soft skills to motivate others to take action on the toughest challenges. Soft skills like empathy and compassion, as well as active listening and curiosity are essential to standing out amongst a sea of technically skilled candidates and peer managers.
To put it another way - Who would you rather work for? Someone who was very good at their job and had great people skills? Or someone who was the best at their job but had the people skills of a wet blanket?
Technical skill alone does not make a great leader. The addition of soft skills does.
Who we choose to authorize to act on our behalf should be weighed based on both technical skills and soft skills. Soft skills go beyond just the use of the authority bestowed upon them. It requires the use of informal authority amongst one's subordinates, peers, and higher-ups to truly make progress on tough challenges in the workplace. If all it took was a technically skilled genius with the power to get things done, the human experience might be easier ... but somehow I doubt it (if you believe the words of Lord Acton).
We have people in authority for a reason. Their technical skills in that position include the ability to use their authority to get certain things done (ex. approve budgets, hire people, fire people, open new offices, etc), as well as their technical expertise in their industry. But it is the blend of using technical skills and soft skills that make a great leader effective, as well as admired and respected by their peers/subordinates/higher-ups.
So how does the balancing of technical skills and soft skills look in action? Let's use an example to illustrate this:
"The customer service department manager for a retail chain is takes on the responsibility of scheduling the staff each week for their respective shifts. During a meeting with their direct report supervisors, the manager asks for input on how to fill the frequent vacancies on each supervisor's team. The discussion became off-topic in a matter of minutes, leading to nearly an hour's worth of complaints from the supervisors on how overworked and underpaid the staff is.
There has been growing tension between the customer service department and the higher-ups in the company which has led to them feeling under-appreciated. Supervisors get call-outs and PTO requests last minute, which causes the supervisors to take on the role of covering the phones themselves between shift changes! The supervisors also feel the stress of their employees and are hesitant to deny PTO or talk with employees about last-minute call-outs due to fears of losing staffing even further.
The meeting ends, leaving more questions than answers for the customer service department manager. The manager wants to say "Just figure it out, it is your job" to the supervisors but knows that has not worked in the past when she was a supervisor under a less-than-successful customer service manager from the past.
The manager talks to her mentor about this situation, and asks for advice on how to handle it."
Let's play the role of the mentor, and help the manager out.
Based on the information provided in the example we can identify opportunities for both technical skill and soft skill application.
On the technical side, we can advise the manager to use their authority to set the schedules based on the information available. That is not a decision that needs to be put up for a committee to vote on or deliberate about. If you use the authority you are given, it may help clear up any ambiguity amongst the staff regarding how to enforce other rules within their own purview, such as adherence to the rules of planning PTO more than a day in advance.
On the soft skill side, there appears to be an opportunity to listen to the staff's voices on the current state of the customer service department's culture. People in the department are feeling overworked and underpaid - what is the backstory behind this? People are also stating they feel under-appreciated in their roles within the company from the higher-ups - why is that? These are questions that may not come with easy answers that authority and technical expertise alone can fix.
Using soft skills like empathy, active listening, and curiosity with the front line and supervisory staff will be a tremendous help on what the underlying human capital challenges might be. The use of soft skills ultimately requires engaging with other people to better understand their viewpoints, find common ground, and ultimately motivate them to work with you (not for you, there's a key distinction there) to take on the challenges set forth in this example - i.e low morale, rifts between frontline and higher up management, and potential burnout. From there, you can determine what further use of both your technical skills and soft skills is needed to make progress.
Think about a challenge within your organization - what are the opportunities to use both your technical skills/authority and your soft skills to tackle it?
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