If soft skills truly matter, you better have an ROI result. Here's how Dellbrook JKS pulled it off
- Summary:
- Even a soft skills advocate such as myself has to admit: soft skills are too nebulous, vague, and hard to tie back to ROI. Enter Dellbrook | JKS, and a soft skills use case that sharpens the conversation - and the ROI.
One of my editorial pre-occupations is keeping ahead of the robots. Admittedly, it's part-selfish: I don't feel like being outsourced to machine-generated content anytime soon. Central to any conversation about (human) workplace talent is the rising status of so-called "soft skills."
Now, I've been a believer in soft skills as a core enterprise competency for a long time. But there are troubling aspects:
- What if you're super-savvy with people, but you lack industry expertise or tech mastery? Good luck finding a job as a "great person to hang out with."
- Shouldn't we be able to hire folks with exceptional soft skills, and train them in whatever on-the-job or tech skills they lack? Yet most firms still have rigid/inflexible job descriptions, including degree requirements - they don't hire talent to train talent.
- If so-called "soft skills" are so important, why do women, who as a generalized group, excel in these areas more than men, still encounter so many ceilings and hiring exclusions?
- And how do we define soft skills anyhow - isn't it kind of an amorphous catch-all?
Last but definitely not least:
- If soft skills are so important, why is the ROI so hard to nail down?
Nodding our heads and talking about how great soft skills are, while we continue to glamourize jerk startup CEOs and provide inadequate answers to these questions, is, at best, sloppy reporting.
So when I got a pitch from Scratch Marketing + Media that "Soft skills reign supreme in maintaining a skilled workforce," I pushed back with a terse reply:
At this point, I want to talk to companies that are doing this. Not so much those speaking on their behalf. If you run into a company really tackling this, I'd be very interested.
Skills needs have shifted - from the digital to the behavioral
Scratch's Lexi Herosian was more gracious than I probably deserved, and came back to me with some nifty use cases, including the story of a soft skills infusion at construction firm Dellbrook | JKS (Hereafter referred to without the slash). Even better: this story comes with some impressive soft skills ROI. Herosian also sent along an IBM report, The enterprise guide to closing the skills gap (free to download), which frames the rise in demand for soft skills.
IBM has seen a big shift since their 2016 report on global skills, "Facing the Storm." That report showed the high value executives placed on digital skills:
The [2016] report indicates that six in ten cited fundamental and advanced technical capabilities in math, science,
and computing as their most sought-after workforce capabilities.
But in IBM's new skills gap report, those digital skills priorities have given way:
Our latest research reveals that a shift is occurring; executives' views regarding the priority of critical skills have taken a turn from digital and technical to behavioral. In 2018, soft skills dominated the top four core competencies global executives seek.
This graphic tells the tale:
From the IBM report, The enterprise guide to closing the skills gap
How did this play out at Dellbrook JKS? I got that story from Krysta Van Ranst, Director of Talent, Teams and Culture at Dellbrook JKS. Van Ranst was recruited to Dellbrook JKS specifically to enhance their training, coaching, and soft skills development. Van Ranst, who joined Dellbrook JKS from Trip Advisor, was no stranger to the challenges of the construction industry. Based out of Boston, MA, Dellbrook JKS is a full-service construction firm with almost 200 employees in New England. Why did she make the move? As Van Ranst told me:
I was roped back into construction almost four years ago. One of my favorite things about the construction industry is just the people.. Where my strong suits lie is finding the best vendors from a soft skills perspective.
"If they're called soft skills, why are they so hard?"
How do you launch a learning and development department? Van Ranst decided the best way to get buy-in was to get executives engaged, starting with a two-day program:
I required that all of our execs attend first. And I do that for all of our soft skills programs. Soft skills gets a bad rep of almost being an insult.
It's a classic Learning and Development (L&D) dilemma:
If they're called soft skills, then why are they so hard?
And how did those initial programs go?
That two-day program was really important. Everybody was videotaped. They were asked very, very difficult questions that they had to answer without any practice, I think they call it a murder board or something along those lines. We're trying to make sure that those skills are gained.
From there, the momentum grew:
From there, we've offered a plethora of different programs. So that was very successful. Now we've sprinkled that down across the company, and offered it to all levels of employees.
When she launched the Learning and Development department at Dellbrook JKS, Van Ranst made sure that it was structured around business needs. One jumped out with a flare:
One need was that our major losses were at a kind of staggering number. I won't share that here, but they were high. A major loss would be anything over $50,000. When I asked "Why are these losses occurring," it was over and over again, just a lack of communication between the team and the owner. Between the team and the subcontractors; they just weren't getting their points across.
Another business need? Diversification into healthcare, education and commercial sectors. In these areas, communication skills were at a premium:
In order to [succeed in these sectors], we have to win smaller jobs. We have to interview well. With a lot of these projects, there's a piece of it that is about the number. But then they want to meet the actual people that they're going to be interacting with for a year or two.
"Soft skills" have a very wide umbrella. What soft skills did Van Ranst focus on?
Communication was one. Then I would probably have three others. Negotiation was important, because as we said, for us to kind of get into those new sectors, we had to start smaller on smaller projects, and try and negotiate our way into those newer sectors... Lastly, there was a big thing on coaching... We wanted to make sure that [our people] had somebody else outside of the company to speak with about some of the issues.
When you're not a huge company, you might miss out on some outstanding construction degree graduates from the best schools. But Van Ranst's team helped to solve this, via more training of raw talent:
We created a rotational program, and we were okay if they didn't have a construction degree. We felt that we could teach them on-site how to be great construction managers. A lot of what we taught was a mixture of soft skills and technical skills.
And what about results? Soft skills investments are notoriously hard to quantify, but Van Ranst told me their major losses went dramatically down. The exact revenue number is confidential, but it was substantial, and it's now been reduced by 80 percent. That's one way to earn executive buy-in!
The diversification is going well also:
Our education sector in particular last year went from 1.7 million to over 12 million, with some additional education growth projected for this year.
Van Ranst acknowledged that you can't always narrow a business result to one causal factor, but as she says, "If you look at the data, there is a story there."
Another notable point: Van Ranst didn't just rely on internal resources. She also turned to external experts, including the AceUp coaching platform. Early results are convincing:
From a metric perspective, all of the employees who have had coaches reported a hundred percent improvement in their management and leadership competencies. 60 percent said that it was significant, and their direct reports said the same.
The AceUp success was a nice twist for Van Ranst - her past experiences with coaching programs weren't positive. So what was the difference here?
I've just had bad experiences with coaches in the past. With all the processes AceUp goes through to vet all of their coaches, I know that they're going to get a top-notch coach, no matter who they choose. I can just basically send any of our employees, "Here you go," and then they can meet as many people, if they want to do a one-on-one chemistry check. Then they can choose the person and schedule it all on their own.
My take - the soft skills conversation needs to change
I think the measurement conversation has shifted. Thanks to modern survey technology, attribution tracking and better KPIs, we can now more realistically measure "intangible" investments like soft skills or community development. There's a new hurdle now: measuring these successes without dampening our efforts, via performance metrics that sometimes feel more like punitive surveillance than helpful guidelines. Sounds like Van Ranst's team has thought through this well.
I accept the argument that soft skills/emotional intelligence has never been more important to human workers. That said, I think the soft skills discussion is ultimately too narrow. This is really about building so-called "learning organizations." So what is that? It would take a whole different post to sort that buzzword, but two things jump out:
- The ability to hire raw talent from diverse communities, and skill them up holistically, including tech or soft skills, freeing up companies from reliance on limited talent pools and stiff background requirements.
- The ability to support employees as their goals and roles evolve, plugging in continuous/" just in time" training/coaching/mentoring that is intuitive with today's intense workloads.
During our interview, Van Ranst also got into the challenges here, including bringing younger talent on board that might resist the need for classic skills like phone conversations - soft touch skills that can't always be replaced with text messaging or chat streams. Still, it sounds like Dellbrook JKS is well on their way towards those two goals - I look forward to more use cases.