Most of us know the story of so-called soft skills. The remnants of character that help us get along with our colleagues, take care of customers, and, more importantly, the manners that help us disagree with our colleagues. When soft skills are championed and taught best, there is not false harmony but positive, creative friction that supports change in the best way. At their worst, soft skills were disregarded as a program to help people be nicer, but generally didn’t get the star power of technical or bossy-command skills.
Now, soft skills are going through a rebrand to durable skills. This was something I talked about at a GRITT Summit. As with most rebrands, if we name it differently, it will be better, right?
In this case, I am optimistic. These durable skills are the skills that will be the most transferrable as we move through employers, jobs, and our side hustles. It will help us move from debate to dialectic, where debate chooses right or wrong. But dialectic weaves ideas together to make better and better ideas. The durable skills help us go from avoiding change to leaning into transition.
It has been my good fortune to work with many great companies. Long before conscious capitalism or culture eating strategy for breakfast, some people understood that the voice of the worker could be leveraged to move a business forward. Further, to unleash the voice of the worker, the worker must have some baseline of social, physical, and mental health. The best employers fostered conditions for success by making space and providing tools for this triple factor baseline to happen, but not to dictate or preach a dogma.
Now, here we are at a place where the average American is experiencing a type of malaise or nihilism. We watch the edges of our politics warp our social media feeds and sometimes take over the brains of our loved ones. Yet, we still need to sell things, provide services, and hire our coworkers. Employers cannot deny what is happening in society and expect humans to check their personal lives at the door, hook into their computers, and then somehow be engaged.
Taking this further, we are on the precipice of a new age of machines and humans. It isn’t just AI but quantum computing. Machines can solve certain problems and write better than many humans can. But, what is far off for the machines is their creativity and ingenuity – this is still uniquely human even if we get an assist from a machine.
Polarizing American politics and advancing machine intelligence. Two undeniable forces.
Workforce advocates will lean into re-skilling and up-skilling for a good reason. The linear jobs will be gone. We know this has been happening for a long time. I am still a small-town gal who has watched the rolling hills of farms be eaten up by economic progress, and farm jobs are gone or have gone through major changes.
Change cycles happen faster, and businesses and employees need to get used to it. That’s change. More importantly, it is about life transitions. There is no work-life balance; there is just life.
During my time at New Belgium Brewing, we had a framework of organizational citizenship. This was primarily in the context of employee ownership, and the objective was to create conditions of success where workers could see the business through the eyes of an employee, a beneficial stockholder, and a stakeholder. It is the horizontal viewpoint with real tensions that conflict with one another. Kim Jordan, our founder and then CEO, would talk about the risks and rewards. The risk part is the important part. Rewards are the easy part. Short-term, mid-term, and long-term horizons with different points of view of consumers, employees, distributors, communities, and legislators were all people in our ecosystem. How to keep it all in balance? You don’t. You figure it out. You have the conversation and invite the nuance.
New Belgium Brewing was not the only business to be ahead on the concept of the importance of human ingenuity and self-leadership; many employee-owned firms make this a core element of their operating strategy. And more are catching on.
The key here is finally getting companies to embrace durable skills as a benefit to employees. It could be a training, but once we put something into an HR-driven training program, it risks being tuned out. At one of my former employers, we called it “the duck and cover .”If we figuratively hid long enough, the trainers would be on to the next shiny thing, and we could breathe a sigh of relief as we avoided days-long training.
If it is a benefit, it puts it in the hands of individuals as a life skill. Benefits ignited by communities create a co-determination to do something and be something together without the perception of managerial overlords goaling you to death. The best employers have figured this out but may inadvertently be limiting it to workplace life and not opening it up to a process of living. Still, unfortunately, I’ve learned that being the best employer is a fragile endeavor. That said, there are great people all of the time, everywhere.
Let’s let go of the malaise and the nihilism and become citizens together.
I’ve joined a non-profit based in Denver for a bit. We are working on something like this to benefit employees, workforce centers, homeowners associations, or any other group that needs to foster community and the ideals of we over me. This is not right or left. It is about getting to us – groups of people with different points of view who want to be great humans so that we can have the creative tension to build better workplaces or a better country. In a twist of irony, the best groups of people start by working on Me to become a better We.
To be a part of the durable skills movement, which we call Super Skills, follow CiviCO and COCO by CiviCO.
