Soft Skills Managers Need

By Paul Uduk

The critical issues facing organizations generally fall into two categories, systems and people. Systems embrace all the procedures, rules, regulations and policies the management puts in place to regulate the organization.

The people aspect deals with shared values – the totality of beliefs regulating relationships in the organization – what have come to be referred to as the “soft” skills of management.

Top management formulates strategy to harness the driving forces in the environment to empower people to use the systems put in place to mine profits.

In great companies, the people aspects dominate the ”way we do things around here”, while the reverse is the case in mediocre companies. As the world continues to shrink, thanks to technology, organizations toy with soft skills that mangers need at their peril.

An elegant story, as told by Hatim Tyabji, Chairman of Verifone until 1998, but at the time CEO, underscores the critical need why managers today cannot do without soft skills.

This story was well elaborated by Tom Peters in his Liberation Management. “I remember introducing myself to a new employee at one of our Asian locations.

He was surprised that I would talk to him – at his previous job he never even seen the CEO. I encouraged him to send me e-mail and let me know what was happening. I left, figuring he agreed with me.

Turned out he was just giving me lip service. About six months later, his supervisor told me he had developed an attitude problem. I decided to have a talk with him.

So the next time I was in his region, I took him out to lunch. He couldn’t believe the CEO would have the time, let alone the interest. I listened to his point of view and told him I was glad he was unhappy, because it meant that he cared. Then I asked how he expected to get anything changed if he kept his gripes to himself, I said.

You’re creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you tell me your concerns and nothing gets done, then you have every reason to be pessimistic. If you choose not to say anything to anybody, then nobody can help you.

He appreciated my honesty and understood exactly what I was saying. After our lunch, I had a changed person on my hands. But that’s not the end of the story. During the course of lunch, he told me that we were fouling up.

We were shipping products from our factory in Taiwan to other Asian factories, where we would modify them to fit each country’s specific needs. This was the wrong thing to do, he said, because there were strict quality controls in the Taiwan factory, and by opening the products up and modifying them on site we were potentially compromising that quality.

He went on to say that he had designed a process that would enable us to make the modifications – not just for those countries but also for most of the world – right at the factory. Well, I listened and I realize that he was on to something.

We implemented his plan, and it led to a profound change in the way we work. Our build-to-order time fell from three months to about 15 Days! The whole thing happened because we created – and kept working on – an environment that encouraged him to speak up. And then we listened.”

Tyabji went on to say, “open communication is one of the foundations of this business. Anyone can talk to me. All they have to do is send e-mail. There’s no recrimination for telling me bad news. When new people come into the company, they’re often skeptical, even cynical, about this openness.

To free them from inhibitions and fear they bring with them is a very difficult, painstaking, never-ending job. But once we do crack through that self-protective shell, the rewards can be enormous!”

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr., in their In Search of Excellence, summarized the dominant beliefs of America’s best-run companies as:

• A belief in being the “best”.

• A belief in the importance of the details of execution, the nuts and bolts of doing the job well

• A belief in the importance of people as individuals.

• A belief in superior quality and service.

• A belief that most members of the organization should be innovators, and its corollary, willingness to support failure.

• A belief in the importance of informality to enhance communication.

• Explicit belief in and recognition of the importance of economic growth and profits.

Ten years almost to the day after the publication of In Search, Peters, in his, Liberation Management, projects a very near future where business organizations as we know it will no longer exist. “Markets are fragmenting. Product offerings are multiplying.

All goods and services are becoming fashion goods.” Welcome to the “new economy” where most of the world’s work will be “brainwork”, done in semi-permanent networks of small (10-20 people!) project-oriented teams, each one an autonomous, entrepreneurial center of opportunity where the necessity for speed and flexibility dooms to failure the hierarchical management structures of the past. Peters boldly declares, “The only skills that matter today are the people skills”.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the Frontiers of Management summarized the soft skills every manager needs to survive in what Tom Peters calls today’s “topsy- turvey world”:

Motivational Skills
Managers must learn how to motivate the best performance from employees who are becoming more independent.

Negotiation Skills
In cooperative relationships, managers work across boundaries with peers and partners over whom they have no direct control. Instead, partnerships call for joint planning and joint decision- making. As a result, negotiation skills more than command-and-control are key to managerial success.

Communication Skills
Open communication to build trust, credibility and an empowering vision of the future is one of the foundations of the new era. Managers must consciously create an environment where people are able to communicate and share information.

Listening Skills
Listening goes beyond communication, it encompasses the ability to hear the unspoken words and the willingness to address issues with openness and candor.

Team Building Skills
All work is done in teams. Managers must build trust. Building trust reflects managers manifest respect for team members. Every manager must allow every team member to discover her or his own greatness.

People Managing Skills
Managers must learn to operate without hierarchical power, using collaborative and negotiation skills instead.

Change Management Skills
Managers must create an environment for engendering change.

Learning Skills
Ability to unlearn methods that no longer work and the willingness to be involved in the process of continuous and never-ending learning.

Leadership Skills
Ability to continually reinvent the business and free people to do their own absolute best.

In 1988, Motorola won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, the highest award for quality in the US. Following that feat, Motorola launched a fast-paced push for the six-sigma – three mistakes in a million operations. This happened because in a 1979 officers’ meeting, Art Sundry, stood up after a three-day RETREAT and told a stunned house: “Good agenda. We’re making progress. But we’re not on the right subject. Our quality stinks.

My customers tell me that they don’t like our quality”. From that day on, Motorola was never the same again. The CEO and everybody else listened. Everybody grappled with quality and the soft issues that drive business.

Twenty three years on, Motorola is a world beater, even if not as agile as Nokia and Samsung in certain segments, because it chose to listen. Richard Branson warns, the illiterates of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those that cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.

As Tom Peters says, ”everything has gone soft, softer, softest”. Equip your people with soft skills or perish.

Paul Uduk is the Chief Executive Officer of Vision & Talent International, Nigeria’s leading learning and performance consultancy, and the founder of Paradise Bookshops, Nigeria’s largest bookshop chain.

He has published and consulted actively in the areas of service quality and design, and teaches in these areas locally and internationally, including for the UNDP. He is the Creator of The Wealth Beyond Your Imagination Audio CD, and his best selling books include Bridges to the Customer’s Heart, and The Gods of Quality Strike Back.

Prior to setting up the Vision & Talent Group, he was a banker with one of Nigeria’s top 10 banks. His current research interest is on forces that engender corporate enthusiasm, agility, and the will to prevail through excellence.

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