Soft Skills for Human Centered Management and Global Sustainability

Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Nicholas J. Beutell, Nureya Abarca, Nicolas Majluf, Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Nicholas J. Beutell, Nureya Abarca, Nicolas Majluf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

This book is part of the Human Centered Book Trilogy, the 2021 volumes of the Routledge Human Centered Management HCM Series. HCM books are pioneering transformation from the traditional humans-as-a-resource approach of the industrial past, to the humans at the center management and organizational paradigm of the 21st century. HCM is built on thetalent and wellbeing of people in the workplace driving work engagement, quality standards, high performance and productivity to attain long-term organizational sustainability in the global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment.

This book was carefully crafted by recognized international human centered scholars fromfour continents. Models presented bridge persistent Soft Skills gaps in management and business and particularly between education and the workforce due to excessive testing and hard/technical skills. In contrast with hard skills, Soft Skills are transferable across jobs, industries and applicable to all dimensions of life. Soft Skills are the common language of empathy, collaboration, team building, resilience and agility transforming organizations. Human and social challenges cannot be solved only with hard skills. This is a "must read Soft Skills manual" for survival and success based on attributes all human beings possess but not everybody is optimizing to excel in life and work.

This and itstwo complementary titles Human Centered Organizational Culture: Global Dimensions and Sensible Leadership: Human Centered, Insightful and Prudent are timely readings for leaders, managers, researchers, academics, practitioners, students and the general public responsible for organizations across industries and sectors pursuing quality standards, organizational transformation and sustainability.

Part I

Soft Skills in Human Centered Management

Operational HCM and the Resilience–Agility Umbrella

1Soft Skills

The Lingua Franca of Human Centered Management in the Global VUCA Environment

Maria-Teresa Lepeley

Soft Skills: Activating Quality and Human Centered Management

My motivation to edit this book on Soft Skills and write this chapter is grounded on three decades of observations of the effects of people using Soft Skills and their positive affects on the attainment of rigorous quality standards that command performance and productivity in organizations worldwide.

The impact of Soft Skills is so significant that I consider them the lingua franca necessary to support the implementation of the Human Centered Management (HCM) model. Lingua franca is a common language that can be easily understood by people who speak other and different languages. Soft Skills are the operational language to put HCM in practice. Moreover, given the explosive information and fast change in knowledge today, Soft Skills expedite communications among people to a much higher degree than hard/cognitive/technical skills, restricted to specific tasks, fields and areas of knowledge (Lepeley, 2001, Samuel, 2016, Lepeley et al, 2020). Soft Skills do not only facilitate understanding in the workplace but are transferable across organizations, industries, sectors and nations, that’s why they are in high demand in the labor force.

After working in quality management (QM) (research, teaching and training) for decades, I became aware of the unequivocal positive effects of Soft Skill. I confirmed the international dimensions of Soft Skills when I served as an examiner for the Baldrige National Quality Awards (NQA) of the US and was an adviser to NQA Programs in five Latin America countries and had connections with NQA programs in Europe (Lepeley, 2021). Those experiences allowed me to confirm: 1) exponential demand for people with strong Soft Skills in organizations leading quality, performance and competitiveness on a global basis, and 2) the big gap that exists between education failing to develop the Soft Sills of students and graduates jeopardizing their options to get better jobs in human centered high-performance, quality-oriented competitive organizations in nations worldwide (Lepeley, 2019a).

Dimension of the Soft Skills Demand and Shortage

A Google search for “Soft Skills” furnished 667 million responses in 48 seconds. The amount of applications is wide and showing fast growth. A search on Amazon for Soft Skills books returned over 100,000 titles, most related to practical applications in the workplace. Routledge, our publisher, has published 6,528 volumes on Soft Skills until 2020. The Harvard Business Review showed 1,298 case studies and 686 articles on a variety of applications including Emotional Intelligence (EI), leadership, workplace effects and Artificial Intelligence (AI), among others. A search for academic articles published in the Academy of Management Journals returned zero results. This indicates the deep gap that exists between academic research and education on Soft Skills in contrast with exponential demand in labor markets.

This book is a unique Soft Skills contribution to minimize the existing gaps in academic research and education. In this chapter, I discuss the challenges that affect Soft Skills studies and call attention to the need to insert Soft Skills studies rapidly in the academic research agenda.

Soft Skills are a critical component in sustainability, one of the functional components of HCM essential to attain quality standards in organizations anchored in the wellbeing of people. In this chapter, I analyze Soft Skills using a comprehensive approach and introducing a master Soft Skills analytical framework I call Resilience–Agility Umbrella (R–AU) that groups all Soft Skills under these two master Soft Skills.

This chapter, as all the HCM publications, is aimed to speed up management transformation from hard skills entrenched in the humans-as-resource approaches of the industrial past, perpetuated in HR HRM, and to advance the importance of the Soft Skills of people embedded in the humans-at-the-center model that underlines HCM. There are clearer indications that the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis affecting people around the world in 2020, has the potential to speed up change and the transition from obsolete HRM structures to the new HCM paradigm with Soft Skills in a predominant role. Constant change and unavoidable disruptions that characterize the global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment are signs that are moving people in organizations to the center stage over inert resources.

COVID-19 2020: A Crisis Pressing for Attitude Change

An old and wise adage, which is supported today by substantial volume of evidence, declares that things cannot change – and improve – if people keep doing the same. Lethargic attitudes that could easily perpetuate the status quo in the slow moving world of the 20^th century and before the advent and widespread use of technology have been eradicated by continuous, deep and unavoidable disruptions affecting the life of people and organizations in the global VUCA environment of the 21^st century. Today, crises are the norm, not the exception. In terms of outcome, a crisis can be a disaster or a blessing; depending on the attitude of people and organizations. In crises, today, people, organizations and even nations will face entropy if they maintain a dysfunctional status quo. But more than never before, people and organizations have opportunities to assume responsibility for improvement by making efforts to optimize outcome changing attitude and adapting continuous change and adopting disruptions as a norm inherent to progress and prosperity. In this uncertain environment, the Soft Skills of people, over hard cognitive skills, take precedent as the common language and the most effective ways of social communications in real life and in high-performing organizations (Lepeley 2013, 2017a).

I am writing this chapter in March 2020, in the middle of the coronavirus, or COVID-19, a pandemic that caught the world by surprise. It is spreading fast and furiously affecting people in nations worldwide. To prevent further infections, governments established rules of social distancing (at least 6 feet or 1.5 meters between people), massive lockdowns keeping people secluded at home for uncertain periods of time, use of mask and special forms of hygiene. People worldwide are worried about how long these precarious conditions will last or when life will get back to normal and return to work as usual. But the viral pandemic disruption is wide and deep and many are saying there will be no back to normal; or at least, to life like it was conceived before this crisis.

A good thing about a bad crisis is that it has the potential to bring change and hopefully progress. In relation to HCM and this chapter of Soft Skills, this crisis is positioning Soft Skills at the center of attention, as the rest of the chapter in this book highlight, in different sectors, industries and countries. Hard times are corroborating the need for Soft Skills that human centered scholars and practitioners across disciplines of knowledge deploy to improve the wellbeing of people. It will be discussed later that Soft Skills are not soft, on the contrary, are strongholds necessary to complement and enhance the value and impact of hard cognitive skills across disciplines and sciences.

I had never lived through something like this pandemic in my long life. It is a learning experience. This global crisis is revealing shortcomings of hard skills. The hard/cognitive skills of experts in healthcare, economics, education and other fields of knowledge are uncertain, often speculative and often misleading. Hard skills seem to be hampering situations and exposing gaps in communications, critical thinking, coordination and problem-solving during these critical times. Lack of Soft Skills among puzzled and confused leaders, politicians and people in general is revealing the inability to offer comfort for calming the natural anxiety of people when scientific knowledge is unavailable or meaningless for confronting disruptive phenomena affecting humankind.

Literature Review

In the March–April 2020 issue, Harvard Business Review published an article on a subject convergent with these uncertain times. The title of Stefan Thomke’s article, a professor at Harvard Business School, was Creating a Culture of Experimentation. Good tools aren’t enough. You need a total change in attitude. It was a premonitory idea before this crisis started. Although ...