Leaders undervalue ‘soft skills’ at their own peril.
In the late 1960s, the U.S. Army made a distinction between the skills necessary for machinery operations and those used in service of people management. Hard skills, as the Army framed it, were the competencies that involved working with hardware—operating tanks, repairing radios, or what the lead researchers Paul G. Whitmore and John P. Fry called “weapons of aluminum and steel.” Soft skills, on the other hand, were the ones that involved working with people, such as inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, and other social matters. The army wasn’t making an evaluation between the two skillsets, per se, but rather, delineating what mastery was required for each.
