Our professional mission is always to lead them towards an adequate balance that calibrates the management of these two skills.
In our work as consultants, when we intervene in a group of leaders, we find, in principle, two large classes: those who have a predominance of hard skills and those leaders with greater preeminence in the management of soft skills. Our professional mission is always to lead them towards an adequate balance that calibrates the management of these two skills. That is, taking some academic license, we have to collaborate and facilitate change processes to soften the hard ones and harden the soft ones.
We can say, in general terms, that hard skills are related to the management of the concrete aspects of leadership, and soft skills are related to the more abstract issues. When we talk about specific aspects on which leadership must be based in a first stage to build effective power, we are referring to the management of tangible information that arises from a link with the leader in charge, as well as the processes and operations that they develop.
When we say hard data about a person, we refer, for example, to their age, marital status, hobbies, career, family composition, number of contributors to their household, etc. When we talk about hard data in work and operations, we are referring to role responsibilities, activities, objectives, formal processes, management indicators, etc.
When we talk about soft data, we talk about more abstract, intangible or invisible variables; such as the thoughts, emotions, feelings, personality characteristics and temperament of our leaders. We could mention confidence, perseverance, worries, impulsivity, anxiety, fears, empathy, anger, sociability, introversion or extroversion; all aspects that affect the quality of the decision making of our collaborators. But what is significant is knowing that behind hard skills hide soft skills that are functional or dysfunctional.
As an example, we can say that poor time management and disorganization could be connected to an emotional issue of anxiety and/or impulsivity. Conversely, a soft skill hides hard data that makes it sustainable or unsustainable. We could infer that, in some circumstances, fear or insecurity is due to an absence of technical training or training in a specific subject or that the current confidence of our team is related to the achievement of a specific result.
From this approach, we ask ourselves: Where do we stand? Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there?
These are the questions that invite us to reflect and put our knowledge into action. Finally, we reiterate that for leadership to exist, changes in the performance of the individual and the collective must come together. Now, performance cannot be generalized, it has its specificity, a curve and stages; This means that we must distinguish at what stage of the performance curve a leader is. These stages are: knowledge, growth, stability and decline. Depending on which phase our leader goes through, functional leadership should focus on personal and work characteristics (hard and soft) in connection with the work or professional performance curve. This is one more advance to make leadership more specific and functional.
Leadership specialist consultant. Counter. Mg. Business Adm. Author of the book “360° Leadership”.
Source: Ambito
