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Myth: Soft skills aren't really as important in running a business, heading a department, or leading an organization as hard technical skills.

By now one would think this myth would have been completely debunked. However, virtually every week or two of the year I run into persons in the workforce who are not effective leaders because they do not recognize the importance of interpersonal skills, communications skills, and emotional intelligence.

Over the past few months we have been engaged in several leadership development initiatives. Very often the projects have involved some type of assessment of the leaders or prospective leaders, followed by resources and activities to help them address their developmental needs. Recently we completed an assessment and met with each leader individually to discuss his/her individual evaluation. I was struck by one manager (let's call him Joe), who told me he felt like writing a book entitled "How to be Right and Lose." He admitted he had learned - - the hard way - - some difficult lessons about the importance of interpersonal style and sensitivity in achieving goals. He recounted several examples of times when he had had the facts on his side but couldn’t persuade anyone else. He believes his success as a leader has suffered, and that career opportunities have passed him by as a result of his neglect of "soft skills."

Over the years I have coached many executives as they try to come to terms with factors that are holding them back from achieving the successes they desire for their organizations and for themselves. My coaching style is to assist them in sorting out the variables that may be affecting their performance. More often than not, they have been held back by undervaluing the importance of factors such as sensitivity to others' perspectives. Unless they are willing to face up to their own shortcomings, they will continue to believe they should have earned the trust of their colleagues merely by virtue of their position of power.

I wish that I could take Joe with me to talk with all those other managers and executives who continue to ignore the soft skills. As a result, they are sabotaging their own potential for truly successful careers.

How do you react when your manager asks you to do something that you are fairly certain will not address the problem he or she is trying to fix?  Do you follow orders or do you first  provide feedback to the manager about your concerns?  This dilemma is widespread and complex.  I know -- I have been in the consulting field for 27 years and have been in a similar position with my clients many times. 

I have found that managers tend to be impatient when they discover performance problems - especially if the problem involves an entire team.  They want quick fixes and who can blame them?  After all, they are accountable for achieving results.  Nevertheless, their impatience can lead them to waste time and money on solutions that don't address the real causes of the problems.  

I believe that those of us who proceed with implementing 'solutions' when we know that they won't work share the blame with the requesting manager for the failed attempts.  Frequently all we need to turn a lose-lose scenario into a win for all is the guts to push back -- at least a little!  Collect some data (quickly when necessary) on the real causes of the problems.  Organize the results and prepare your feedback for the manager carefully. 

I respect managers' rights to make the final calls on how to handle the problems that fall under their charge.   At the same time, I am committed to providing them with the best information I can gather in a practical format to increase the probability of their really fixing the problems.

What are you willing to do to create an organizational culture that embraces change?  If you are like most of our clients, the price you pay when people resist change or, worse yet, sabotage it, is way too high!  By investing some time and resources into setting the stage for change, you may avoid the costs of resistance and reap the benefits of an organizational culture that is change-ready.  We have found that doing some work up-front is the key to successful change initiatives. (See Organizational Culture and Leadership by Edgar Schein for additional reading). 

I talked with a client a while back who described a situation in which his employees' positive reactions to change truly exceeded his expectations.  With great delight he described his extraordinary experience with a major organizational change.  Upon hearing the details, I acknowledged that most of the change efforts that I have witnessed fell short of his accomplishments.  When confronted with the need for change in his organization, he created a culture that was open to it.   How did he do it? 

His first step was to form a steering committee of his senior management team to lead the change. He assigned them the task of designing a game-plan for implementing the changes.  He insisted that the steering committee include a detailed communications strategy as well as a training plan.  He expected the change leaders to think through who was concerned about what and who needed to know and do what.  He asked them to craft specific communications and training tactics, both formal and informal, for addressing the employees' concerns.  Likewise they were go develop a training plan that would equip employees with the knowledge and skills that they needed.  

Believing that change takes place one person at a time, he firmly requested that the communications strategy include some face-to-face, informal dialog in addition to the formal web casts, memos, and town-halls.  Likewise, he encouraged the team to develop training strategies that were practical and went beyond the common but not always effective  instructor-led classroom training.  He believed that the company could do a better job of matching the training methods to the realities of the jobs at stake. 

He expected each of his senior managers to play active roles in implementing the communications strategy.    Likewise, he expected them to enlist others to assist. He made it clear that they were accountable for the success of the communications and training operations.   
 
He believed that the key to creating a change-ready culture was to stay close to employees, hear their concerns, over communicate key messages face-to-face whenever possible, and demonstrate clear and timely support for their learning.  He said that the change wasn't without its hiccups, but that it was the smoothest initiative he had ever undertaken.  He was glad that he had invested the time, energy and resources up-front to ready the organization for the changes.  His return on investment for the up-front planning proved that he was right! (See Launching Organizational Initiatives for more information on how to plan for change.)

Employees excel when they are motivated, skilled and supported.  They need the right tools and an organizational culture that facilitates achievement.  Over the 27 years that I have been consulting, I have been asked to address performance problems with solutions that wouldn't even come close to improving employees' accomplishments.  When my clients call me about an individual or team performance problem, generally they have jumped to a conclusion about what is causing it and, therefore, what will solve it. 

Often they call and ask for us to train or retrain the individuals or teams in question.  While I am a great supporter of providing people with training, so many times the performance issue is not due to lack of skill or knowledge -- the only causes that can be addressed adequately with training.  However, managers and their employees are familiar with training and comfortable with training solutions.  Training events are concrete, frequently not too expensive and require little effort from the manager and the individuals involved.  However training will not solve problems that are due to a negative organizational culture, lack of clarity around goals and expectations and other circumstances outside of the control of the performer.

Sometimes the clients are convinced that the employee(s) in question are just not up to the job and want us to coach them out of the organization.  Usually, if this is the client's agenda, they do not state it as such when they contact us.  They will tell us that they would like for us to work with the employee(s).  However, when we question them about the issues, we can tell that they have already given up on any real improvements in performance.  

What many of us fail to see when we look at the behavior and performance of others is how situational factors including our own behaviors may be affecting the behaviors and performance of others.  This is especially true for those of us who are in leadership positions.  Performance is affected by our expectations for others and how we communicate to them.  Likewise performance is influenced by the degree to which we support the performers.  We should ask ourselves whether the poor performers have the right tools and an environment that encourages them to use their knowledge and skills. 

Think about those times when your own performance was not up to par.  How would you describe the causes?  According to research (fundamental attribution error research), in comparison to how we explain the behavior of others, we are more likely to attribute our own behavior to external circumstances.   Thus rather than saying that we just didn't have the skills or try hard enough to perform acceptably, we might say that our managers didn't communicate their expectations clearly enough, or didn't give us the support we needed to get the job done.  On the other hand, when we consider the causes of others' poor performance, we are more likely to attribute it to their lack of know-how or motivation. (See Chris Argyris's article entitled Teaching Smart People How to Learn).

So how do we sort out the real causes of performance problems?  A first step is to become aware of and avoid falling prey to our own biases in making attributions about the causes of behavior.  We might also take a second, somewhat more complicated step.  We can analyze the performance problem for the root causes (frequently referred to as performance analysis.  See Performance Analysis Tool Kit). 

While any kind of root cause analysis takes effort, if the problem has serious consequences for you, the individual performers, or the organization, it is worth the time and energy to sort it out systematically.  Think of the time and money you will save if you come up with the right solution to the real problem!

We had just added a new tool kit to our website on how to analyze and address performance problems (Performance Analysis Tool Kit )  when I saw the headlines about the stock market plunge.  My immediate impulse was to call my financial adviser and tell him to do something -- anything with my portfolio. 

The first article I read about the plunge attributed it to the Tuesday sell-off of stocks in China which, according to the journalist, seemed to portend ominous global economic conditions.  This speculation was followed quickly by those who blamed Greenspan's comments about a possible recession in our economic future.  The media spun many theories for the decline before and shortly after the NY Stock Exchange closed on Tuesday. 

Subsequently, clearer heads addressed the possible reasons for the poor performance of the stock market in a more thoughtful and systematic way. Articles such as Jon Markman's Is This a Market Meltdown, and the Wall Street Journal article A Shanghai Education were thoughtful and informative about how to think about and analyze the meaning, if there is any, of Tuesday's plunge. 

About now you may be asking what all of this has to do with analyzing performance problems in the workplace.  I believe that often we are  too quick to jump to faulty conclusions about one or two instances of poor performance at work.  We may decide to take quick action and reprimand or, even worse, remove the employees from the team or the project because of one or two missteps.  Or we may decide that an individual or an entire team needs training. We might take hasty steps before analyzing whether the situation calls for any response at all, let alone what action would improve the performance.  In most cases, we would save ourselves and our organizations a lot of time, money and stress if we took the time to examine the situation with a cool head to determine whether we should act, and if so, how.  

As with knee jerk reactions to the stock market fluctuations, if we act before we understand we might feel better in the short term.  Acting tends to relieve anxiety for some.  However, we may actually create more severe problems for ourselves and our organizations in the long term.  In most cases, the best thing to do is to take a deep breath, step back and look at the situation and the players in it before taking action.  This process is called performance analysis. 

Many times more than one cause is at work when performance goes awry.  To turn performance around, we need to analyze the situation and choose the solutions that are most likely to solve the problems.  Most of us do not have the time or the money to throw away on problems that don't need to be solved or on solutions that won't solve the problems that are important. 

My financial adviser tells me to look at the long-term when I decide how to respond to the stock market.  Likewise, I advise you to look at the big picture when deciding whether and how to address performance challenges at work.   

"Cheney won't back down....."  I read this headline while browsing the MSNBC portal this morning.  I chuckled while trying to count the number of times I have read similar news headlines regarding Cheney over the past few years.  I have observed this combative, heels dug in  style in the workplace frequently during my 27 years of consulting.  Many times the people exhibiting it truly believe that this style is universal.  They believe that  everyone is equally  combative.    The really ironic aspect of this world view is that their aggressive and often stubborn behaviors frequently elicit the same from others who normally are more collaborative.  Thus they see combative behavior in everyone.  Ah, how interesting is the fallacy of the self-fulfilling prophecy!

When leaders demonstrate this 'tough battler' style in the workplace, they create organizational cultures in which fearful and/or angry people do not perform to their maximum levels of excellence.  Instead of behaving in the interest of organizational success, they will hide information from leaders, engage in covert schemes to work around the leader, or display other counterproductive behaviors that lead to  less than optimal work results. 

Anyone who uses this combative style consistently, whether a leader or not, is likely to find him/herself isolated in the long-term.  These people tend to make many enemies who are only too willing to find ways to render them powerless if not actually 'do them in.' 

Communicating the hard messages to clients is not an easy task.  Likewise, from the client’s point of view, hearing the hard messages is not painless.   This raises the following question for me:  What is the psychological contract between the coach/consultant and the client?  My 27 years of experience in the consulting and coaching field tells me that the implicit contract frequently differs from the explicit.  Like all competent consultants, I work with my clients at the beginning of a coaching relationship or project to clarify their needs and our respective roles.   However, I have found that many of my clients are not prepared to hear bad news or information that would imply that they must change to achieve their personal, professional or organizational goals.

Few of us really welcome the experience of confronting our own weaknesses.  Changing our perspectives or, even worse, our behavior is difficult for most of us.  We like to think we are open to change until confronted with the real need to do so.  

I remember the first time I was told that I needed to lose weight.  My first reaction was to deny it.  I kept telling myself that I was older and that of course I would gain weight with age.  When I found that my jeans didn’t fit, I finally acknowledged that I might be overweight.  However instead of changing my exercise and eating habits, I looked for a quick fix.  I tried crash diets and herbal weight loss remedies.  When that didn’t work, I merely went out and bought new jeans! 

Although I was working hard to avoid the reality of my weight gain, I kept hoping that my actions would solve the problem without a real behavior change on my part.  Of course I would have succeeded in looking and feeling better more quickly if I chosen to change without delay once I received the initial feedback about my weight gain.  Instead I wasted my energy fighting the “messenger” and the personal changes that I needed to make.  On the other hand, the “messenger” could have delivered the feedback more effectively.  I felt pushed and, therefore, became resistant to the change that was implied.  I focused more on discrediting the messenger than on considering the validity of the message.  

Advice to Consultants

So how do we consultants and coaches assist clients who don’t want to change?  First, we must acknowledge that our clients may not be ready for change even if they have procured our services to help them.  One of my colleagues is a therapist.  Recently she said,  “Kathy, just because a client comes to my office with a fistful of money and asks me to help her stop smoking doesn’t mean that she is really ready to give up cigarettes.”  Second, even if clients are motivated to change, they are likely to experience ambivalence that will lead to fluctuations in commitment.  If we push too hard when they are experiencing ambivalence, they may merely become more resistant.  Thirdly, we must realize that we cannot make our clients change.  The choices are theirs to make. 

I believe that our role as consultants and coaches is to deliver the hard messages to our clients clearly yet unemotionally.  Then we must step back and let them make their own choices.  If we really believe that the client must change his/her behavior in order to achieve stated goals, we should say so.  We can help them explore the ambivalence that they will feel when hearing these messages.  We can help them envision the possible consequences of the various courses of action that they could take. However we must be dispassionate enough to allow them the latitude to make their own decisions. 

Advice to Clients

If you are the recipient of the hard messages my advice is to watch for the resistance traps.  Emotionally intelligent people have enough self-awareness to catch themselves before they ‘shoot the messenger’, deny, resist, or engage in thoughts or behaviors that will undermine their achieving their goals.  Accept the natural ambivalence that will always accompany change.  However, don’t allow yourself to get lost in it.  Push through to a conclusion that will provide you with the results that you desire.  Once you have chosen a path to follow, develop a personal action plan.  I like to advise my coaching clients to list realistic steps that they will take each day or each week as they pursue the changes that will lead them to achieve their goals. 

Culture in the work place can have a dramatic effect on one's overall happiness and success.  In an article entitled Five Signs of a Lousy Job  found on MSN's Careers page, Kate Lorenze summarizes some key points from Andrea Kay's book, "Life's a Bit*ch and Then You Change Careers."   According to the article, many of us dread going to work each day due to issues such as our uneasiness with the company culture or a bad relationship with the boss.   Inevitably, these negative feelings about work, work place culture and bad bosses affect performance on the job.

Last week Challenger, Gray and Christmas issued their annual warning about the huge losses in worker productivity that result from idle chatter and party planning at Super Bowl time.  An AP article on Super Bowl Slackers, indicated that the Challenger firm estimated a loss of $820 million during the week before the game. 

In spite of my alarm over such a hit on productivity this week, I can't help but think about the more serious, long-term issues at stake in the work place.  The productivity loss occurring the week before the Super Bowl surely cannot compare with the hammering productivity takes every week when people dread to come to work because of company culture or a bad boss.

My recommendation to leaders is to worry less about the short-term Super Bowl disruptions and more about the steady erosion of performance due to dysfunction in the company culture.  If leaders really want to improve productivity or keep it from deteriorating, first they should assess the culture of their work places.  Does it promote worker dedication, commitment and loyalty, or does it thwart employee initiative and engagement?  Leaders hold the cards for creating a culture that supports high performance and productivity.   Never mind the Super Bowl!