Let's Stop Calling Them "Soft Skills" — and Call Them "Real Skills" Instead

## Let's Stop Calling Them "Soft Skills" — and Call Them "Real Skills" Instead *By Seth Godin | TED Ideas, June 9, 2023* What causes successful organizations to fail? What makes stocks fade, innovations slow, customers jump ship? We can agree that certain skills are essential. Hiring coders who can't code, salespeople who can't sell, or architects who can't design is a waste. But these vocational skills have become the backbone of recruitment — and by over-relying on them, we've diminished the value of something far more important. --- ### The Problem with "Soft" When we call skills like empathy, communication, leadership, and teamwork *soft*, we imply they're optional. We give them less respect. And because they're harder to measure, we deprioritize them in hiring, training, and evaluation. But here's what the data shows: what actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work. The Graduate Management Admission Council found that while MBAs were strong in analytical aptitude and quantitative skills, they were sorely lacking in strategic thinking, written and oral communication, leadership, and adaptability — precisely the skills employers most wanted. --- ### Why They're Not Soft — They're Real Vocational skills can be taught. You're not born knowing engineering or copywriting — therefore, they're learnable. But we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to: - Decision-making - Eager participation - Dancing with fear - Speaking with authority - Seeing and speaking the truth - Inspiring others - Caring and being willing to change things We underinvest in training these skills, fearful they're innate and can't be taught. But they *can* be learned — just as chess or typing can be learned. We absorb them through experience, mentorship, and the collisions we have with teachers, bosses, and the world. --- ### Real Skills Amplify Everything Imagine a team member with all the traditional vocational skills: productive, skilled, experienced. A solid baseline. Now add: perceptive, charismatic, driven, focused, inspiring, generous, empathic, a deep listener with patience. What happens to your organization when someone like that joins your team? The foundation of all real skills is this one: **the confidence and permission to talk to one another.** Not to manage, belittle, intimidate, or control — simply to seek to be understood and to do the work to understand. So let's stop calling them soft. Let's call them what they are: **real skills** — the skills that work, the skills that are at the heart of what we need today. --- *Excerpted from **The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams** by Seth Godin.* [Read the full article on TED Ideas →](https://ideas.ted.com/soft-skills-and-real-skills/)