The modern economy is changing at a rate that has rarely been seen before. New industries pop up overnight creating new jobs and opportunities for people with specialized skills. It can feel like a race to the bottom for employees who have the most niche, specialized technical abilities. However, throughout all of the change and growth, one thing remains constant: the need for soft skills.
Soft skills can protect you and your employees in times of uncertainty and can set you apart in the job search. The only challenge is that they are hard to teach. Keep reading to understand the value of these skills and why your team needs to invest in them.
What Are Soft Skills?
Before you can understand the value of soft skills and their value to business analysts, it first helps to understand exactly what it means to talk about them.
The concept of soft skills can be confusing at first, says business psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic. He explains that a wide range of skills and traits are given the social skills label, “including personality, values, interests, competencies, and transferable skills.” However, these skills are all valuable in the workplace, no matter how you define them and how you measure their value.
“For instance, general learning ability has been linked to higher performance in virtually all types of jobs, though its significance rises with the level of job complexity. Likewise, personality traits - such as extraversion, curiosity, and emotional stability - have been linked to job performance across all industries and occupations,” he explains.
Soft skills are often explained alongside the concept of emotional intelligence, or the understanding of emotions and their causes. Both soft skills and emotional intelligence are needed in today’s workforce, especially in data-centric fields like business analysis.
Soft Skills are Increasing In Demand
More companies and managers are realizing the value of soft skills, leading more employees and potential hires to develop these desirable traits.
Heather Muir, director of marketing at Mandel Communications, addresses the importance of soft skills in an exceedingly data-centric work environment. She points to the shorter shelf-life of technical skills as a primary reason as to why soft skills matter. You can be a master of the latest tools or project frameworks, but they may be replaced with completely new systems in just a few years.
“Soft skills are evergreen,” Muir writes. “At least in the 200,000 years modern man has existed, they’ve never grown obsolete.”
The definition of soft skills is incredibly broad, which is why LinkedIn releases a list of the most in-demand soft skills each year. In 2019, those skills were:
Creativity.
Persuasion.
Collaboration.
Adaptability.
Time management.
All can be found within the business analyst job description. BAs look for creative reasons to explain the data and try to persuade upper management of the validity of their finds. Teams constantly need to collaborate and adapt to product changes within strict deadlines.
“In the new workforce, you are increasingly expected to work with people in different functional roles who are necessary to accomplish your goals,” Dorie Clark, strategy consultant and author of “Entrepreneurial You,” said when asked about collaboration as a soft skill. “You can’t get there by ordering them around, you have to show them that it’s in your best interest to help.”
LinkedIn isn’t the only company that looks to identify the top skills valued by employers. Tara O’Sullivan, chief marketing officer at elearning company Skillsoft, points to a Google report which noted that out of the eight most important employee skills, technical STEM expertise came dead last. Instead, the most valued skills in the company were all soft, ranging from the ability to be a good coach to having empathy toward others.
Your Team Members May Lack Key Soft Skills
Unfortunately, it is difficult to interview potential candidates regarding soft skills. It is hard for them to demonstrate how they might lead in a stressful situation or communicate with others. Some employers skip over the soft skills questions entirely.
“Many employers assume that the most practical of soft skills are standard when it comes to their employees, but this isn’t always the case,” writes Caroline Lawless at business training platform LearnUpon. “Assuming your workforce will simply know how to act in non-technical workplace situations is naive. It’s tantamount to assuming all employees have the same personalities!”
Hiring based on technical ability is easy, but it won’t set your team up for success. If you want to hire potential leaders to reduce turnover and create a succession plan, then you need to consider soft skills and emotional intelligence.
“If there was ever a time when the person with the most technical knowledge was given top consideration for raises and promotions, it’s long over by now,” Harvey Deutschendorf, author of “The Other Kind of Smart,” explains. “Once someone gets promoted, their chances to apply those technical skills diminish since their direct reports take over that firsthand work. Meanwhile, newly minted supervisors’ ability to collaborate with and manage their teams becomes more critical.”
The team at business and technology consulting firm West Monroe Partners found some interesting insights into the role of soft skills in the technology and IT workplace that prove their value. According to the 2018 survey:
67 percent of HR leaders have withheld a job offer from a technically-qualified candidate because they lacked soft skills.
43 percent of employees say soft-skills-related challenges with IT negatively impacted their work.
39 percent of companies lack an employee with a technical background in the C-suite and HR professionals ranked leadership as the least important soft skill for IT professionals.
This speaks to the challenges that business analysts will face as they work to advance their careers while communicating with the current senior leadership. The vast majority of people in the company don’t know what they do or why it is valuable, which leaves it up to the analytically-minded team members to communicate and persuade.
Why You Should Invest in Soft Skills Development
Along with improving hiring practices to focus on soft skills, companies can invest in development strategies to help business analysts and other team members hone their emotional intelligence.
“Soft skills development helps people thrive in their current jobs and prepare for next-level jobs,” explains Deb Calvert, president of People First Productivity Solutions. “Growing talent from inside the organization gives organizations a competitive advantage.”
Even if the company you work for doesn’t prioritize soft skills training, you as a manager can instill these skills in your team and grow the collaboration potential within your department.
Employees with poor soft skills can also be holding your business back, simply from the decisions they’re making. Research consultant Courtney Ackerman says employees with poor emotional intelligence can make decisions that negatively impact the company. They may be driven by emotions like anxiety when weighing options. As a result, they may choose low risk solutions rather than those that are best for the company as a whole. Someone with a higher level of emotional intelligence can identify where the professional stress ends and their personal nerves begin.
When your staff does make smart, strategic decisions, they may not be able to win over executives and persuade them to change their minds.
“You need to get C-level staff on board,” advises data scientist Hamza Bendemra, Ph.D. “Slowly, the results you are contributing to coupled with your ability to articulate the process and value of your work, will snowball and create interest in the rest of the organisation.”
This is to say that you can come up with the best plans and the most in-depth insights only to have them ignored if you can’t present them in a clear and thoughtful manner. You need to communicate your ideas and persuade people to take action based on your findings.
Soft Skills are Challenging to Teach Others
The main reason why so few companies invest in soft skills training is that the results are hard to quantify and track. Barbara Opyt, learning solutions architect at Caveo Learning, puts it this way: “You can teach someone to fish, but you can’t teach them to enjoy fishing.”
Essentially, while you may have entered the business analyst field because you enjoy working with data and numbers sets, you may not have entered the profession because of your love of public speaking and collaboration. However, these skills are an important part of the job, whether you want to succeed in your current position or advance into management.
Leadership and sales coach Ali Cammelletti highlights empathy as an exceptionally difficult soft skill to teach, but one that she has seen employees work on and improve. She watched an employee develop empathy over two years through coaching and through their own personal life experiences. It took time and patience to develop, and was not an easy road, but that employee was more empathetic and understanding as a result.
It is possible to learn soft skills, but you can’t follow the same training processes and testing that comes with hard skill instruction.
“Contrary to what employees from previous generations may have believed, people can’t turn off their emotions when they go to work—nor should they!” Bryson Kearl writes at BambooHR. “The key for business leaders is to strip themselves of preconceived notions about what a boss is supposed to do and approach every situation with a perspective of emotional intelligence.”
Part of learning soft skills is to understand when to use emotions and what it means to tap into feelings of empathy, passion and excitement in a healthy way.
How to Teach Soft Skills to Your Team
There are a few steps you can take to teach soft skills to your team. The first is to focus on accomplishing small achievements, completed in a safe environment.
It’s not uncommon for employees to backslide, notes Jeremy Auger, chief strategy officer at training company D2L. And backsliding is especially common in periods of stress. Auger encourages leaders to create a sense of “psychological safety” where employees can test out their soft skills. He says that team members won’t want to risk using a new behavior if failing at it could cost them their job or a promotion.
Employers can create a feedback loop, so employees can work on their soft skills in small-scale situations and get feedback from peers and management, writes Jon Axworthy at Raconteur. He uses the example of an employee who wants to improve their public speaking taking the lead in daily meetings and presenting lunch-and-learns to other departments. These are low-risk instances that still provide value to that employee. Plus, this creates opportunities for managers to support their teams and help them grow.
As a leader, you can’t launch a soft skills initiative and expect your team members to grow their emotional intelligence overnight. Soft skills training needs to be individualized and safe, and everyone needs to be committed to improvement. Only with dedication and time can business analysts learn soft skills and use them to thrive.
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