By Si Beales, soft skills speaker, trainer and consultant
According to Stanford University, 75% of long-term job success in industry and commerce depends on soft skills and just 25% on technical skills. And LinkedIn recently reported that the majority of employers now value soft skills over hard skills. But what are they and how can we begin to integrate them into the legal profession?
There is growing evidence that connected soft skills are fundamental to business success – particularly in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Forbes magazine recently proclaimed that they are ‘essential to the future of work’.
Yet, when I tell people that I specialise in helping people and businesses with developing their soft skills, they tend to look at me a little quizzically. As if I’m promoting something a little squidgy and unbusinesslike.
Perhaps it’s me. Or perhaps it’s the name. Soft doesn’t quite have the right ring about it. It doesn’t sound very commercial. Over the years, there have been various attempts to redefine them. Transferable, life, people, future skills, but none of them have quite stuck. So, soft it is.
Ironically, given their tough reputation, the term was originally coined by the US Military. Hard skills being things like driving a tank, and soft skills being things like motivating your troops.
Both were seen as equally fundamental to a successful organisation, yet because of the name, soft skills are often seen as opposite ends of the spectrum, when actually they are complimentary. There’s no point driving the tank if you don’t know where you’re going.
But what exactly are soft skills and why do they matter?
It’s a little simplistic, but I like to describe them as the innate skills that we are born with and that we develop throughout our lives. Whereas hard skills are acquired, sometimes abandoned, and honed along the way. To me, it’s soft skills that make us human. That empower us to fulfil our potential.
Essentially they can be seen as the skills that enable you to contextualise, challenge, create, communicate, collaborate, control and complete your work. And your life.
And they all support the primary purpose of any business – complex problem solving.
In a previous life as an academic, I decided to develop a simple, habit-based, model to help demystify and simplify them. I’m not claiming it’s infallible. As the statistician, George Box, once said ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful’, so it’s a start.
The 7C’s model of soft skills
Curiosity
How to find inspiration and insights
Critical thinking
How to question and challenge
Creativity
How to have better ideas and be more innovative
Collaboration
How to successfully work with others
Communication
How to persuade and influence
Character
How to be positive, resilient, and rigorous
Complex problem solving
How to combine these skills to develop meaningful, impactful solutions
I’ve found the 7C’s useful in my work, and I was delighted when one of my former students contacted me to say that, struggling in an interview, she had suddenly remembered C for Collaboration and started talking about her teamworking abilities. She got the job, and I couldn’t have been happier.
The model is also helpful in teaching, because education focuses on grading, measurement, and performance. If you have a model, then it gives you scaffolding and structure, so that you can learn more deeply. Supercharging pedagogy.
But why are soft skills so important when it comes to the legal profession? And how can we help people and organisations to develop them effectively?
Well, if you look at the 7C’s above, you can see that every single one of them will apply to your work. Whether you’re a barrister, in management, support services or marketing, every day you will be utilising the skills above. The trick is to identify them and then work on improving them. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an old hand or new blood, everybody can develop better soft skills habits. But how?, I hear you ask. Well, there is plenty more we could talk about, but here are two habits that you can adopt straight away.
Be more T shaped
Essentially this is about going broader as well as deeper with your curiosity, critical thinking and creativity.
As professionals, we all tend to focus on the leg of the T. This is our primary interest. Being a barrister, an accountant, a consultant, a student. This is useful but also can be narrowly focussed and exclude new ideas, innovation and alternative perspectives. But if you broaden your interests – the arm of the T – then you will find new and different insights, that you might have missed.
Take Artificial Intelligence. There is no question that a tidal wave has already started, which will utterly transform the way that we do business. As a barrister, you could look at your own sector but, and I mean this politely, you’re not renowned for being at the cutting edge of innovation and technology. So, what are professional service firms doing? Accountants, architects, advertising agencies. What are they doing in the USA, or Canada or Japan? Who is gaining a competitive advantage, winning awards, getting great PR? What can you learn from them? What can you adopt and adapt? How can think out of the box, run ideas up the flagpole and knock it out of the park, as it were?
Be prepared to fail.
I understand that this can seem a little counter-intuitive but to learn and make learning stick, you need to learn by doing. You need to feel secure and safe in the knowledge that if you make a mistake, then you can learn from it, change your approach and try again. This is a tough one, as our education system and business culture often defines failing as, well, failure. Yet, over the pond, failure is often seen as an integral part of future success.
As Einstein wisely said ‘failure is success in progress’. Or as basketball legend, Michael Johnson, says: ‘I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ But how can you fail in practice? By creating a culture that allows people to speak up. To feel psychologically secure that they are able to posit ideas, make suggestions and challenge assumptions. That may sound impossible but it’s not. I use a simple piece of technology in my sessions that means comments and suggestions are not attributed. It empowers people to open up and it’s amazing how effective it is. That’s just one idea.
So, I hope that this very brief journey through soft skills has been useful. I genuinely believe that they are the future of work. And that by defining them, promoting them and supporting them, we can empower every member of any organisation to fulfil their potential. And there’s nothing soft and squidgy about that.
Si Beales is a soft skills speaker, trainer and consultant. You can see more about him at www.sibeales.com