Why Soft Skills Are Critical

The world of work has undergone a significant evolution and with it the climates of workplaces. Today’s employees, especially in the United States and western European nations, but also increasingly in the newer leading economies such as those of China and India, are knowledge workers. This means that they are expecting different approaches from their leaders than did the manufacturing generation. For far too long, business leaders held on to behaviors and reward systems that were effective during the Industrial Revolution, when management was first developed as a science. Now that growing numbers of employees are disgruntled and keep exiting one workplace after another in search of the right fit, researchers and practitioners have started studying the reasons why this could be the case. They found that the most common reasons were the behaviors of managers in the workplace and, closely linked to that, the reward-and-punishment system. Rigorous management combined with a carrot-and-stick approach only works well in mechanistic environments in which work is repetitive and non-challenging. However, today’s workplaces are predominantly organic in nature, dealing with high levels of ambiguity and novel challenges daily.