It’s been years since the soft skills flood the management sections but, ironically, it is in the military field that these “soft” skills saw the light of day, during the 1970s. The American army then wishes to distinguish skills which have no relation with the manipulation of machines, namely human, relational or personal skills. Five decades later, the soft skills (soft skills) are everywhere in companies, even seeming to have relegated hard skills (know-how) in the Stone Age.
Creativity, stress management, empathy, ability to work in a group… The list of soft skills is infinite, a sort of “catch-all in which we put everything we want”, summarizes Olivier Sibony. If this professor at HEC Paris considers them important, according to him we must “take them one by one to talk about them”. The doctor in management sciences Frédéric Faure deplores “a notion often defined in hollow terms”, which excludes everything that is technical. This is “practical but does not make sense because there may be technique in the soft skills”particularly in the ability to collaborate or manage one’s time, underlines this researcher associated with the University of Rennes II.
Despite this lack of a universal definition, scientific research has in recent years established a distinction between two broad categories of soft skills, explains Frédéric Faure. On the one hand, the internal resources that we have within us, that we use or not (cognitive abilities, interests, needs, personality traits, etc.). Here, the soft skills the most objective are cognitive abilities (analysis, attention, memorization, etc.) because, he specifies, “psychologists have designed robust tests that allow people to be compared.” For other soft skills in this category, there is always an element of subjectivity. On the other hand, we have behaviors in situations which, unlike internal resources, are observable. But that does not mean that They are more objective, because we only see what we want to see and what the person shows us. So when they seem to show empathy, it can be calculation In this second category. , only effective behaviors (the ability to convince others, for example) can be reliably evaluated, indicates Frédéric Faure, since here “only the success of the action counts”.
Laurent Cappelletti, professor at Cnam, makes another distinction between, on the one hand, the essential basic behaviors that everyone must possess in a collective (keep calm, tidy up your work space, be punctual, etc.) and on the other hand, on the other hand, non-generic expected behaviors, that is to say specific to certain professions. “If you take the immigration service of a prefecture, that could be mastery of conflict management,” illustrates the economist. It is then up to each manager to put in place precise behavior charts which may vary from one company to another. Refuting the traditional opposition between hard skills and soft skills, Laurent Cappelletti is convinced: what makes it possible to perform sustainably is the complementarity between skills, behavior and energy (by which, mean a stimulating environment). In support of his argument, the longitudinal observation of 2,250 case studies over forty years in companies and organizations, results which are the subject of a work co-written with Henri Savall and Véronique Zardet, published in January by Springer Nature, one of the largest academic and scientific publishing houses. But then, how can we measure on the scale of an organization the contribution of only soft skills ? “We quantify it in the negative: we start from malfunctions at work, such as a poorly made product, quality defects, overtime, and then we go back to the cause and evaluate the hidden costs,” describes the researcher, whose the work indicates that, in half of the cases on average, these dysfunctions are linked to skill defects, the other half to behavioral problems: “We have seen companies which have recruited technically very competent engineers but who, behind, their teams were dropped, which ultimately led to delays in the delivery of the aircraft.”
Beware of excesses in recruitment
At AssessFirst, a company specializing in predictive talent management, we do not measure soft skills as such – “too many people use them without knowing what’s behind them” – but we focus on three dimensions, describes Emeric Kubiak, scientific director, – personality (how the person behaves on a daily basis), motivations (what she wants to do on a daily basis) reasoning (how she thinks), – “which today are based on scientific foundations proven for more than a hundred years in psychology, such as the Big Five model or HEXACO”. When we base ourselves on these foundations, the results on the business side “are quite crazy”, assures this expert in behavioral sciences: “Employers relying on these criteria recruit employees on average 40% more efficient, much more diverse and divide their turnover by two.” Emeric Kubiak, however, insists on the importance of contextualizing these elements according to the position in particular: “We will expect a UI designer to be creative, but the fact that he seeks to convince others will perhaps not have no connection with performance.”
In terms of recruitment, caution towardsoft skills however, seems appropriate. An article from The Economist of 2023 warned against potential abuses: “The soft skills are more fragile than technical skills, making it easier for candidates to cheat throughout the process. They also constitute an area more conducive to recruiter bias.” Frédéric Faure also sees limits when it comes to recruiting people who have a low level of qualification: “It has been demonstrated, soft skills sought for in these positions are often more vague and may amount to discrimination.”
The researcher invites leaders to focus less on people and warns against what psychology calls the fundamental attribution error: “We often tend to consider that results are mainly attributable to the characteristics of the people themselves , but the context plays just as much in the performance of organizations as the capacities and behaviors of individuals taken in isolation. And to come back to a very simple idea: “I don’t know of a better way to evaluate a candidate than to put them to the test.”
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