Organizational Development & Measurement Brian Bell, Consultant

So your organization has decided that attracting and retaining the right people needs to be a priority, if not long-term, at least until the workforce expands.  What does it take to cultivate a highly functioning workforce?  Logically, this goal requires a complete understanding of the skills and talents of your workforce and the relative impact of those skills on your organization’s performance. 

While businesses have traditionally focused their workforce attraction and development on technical and cognitive skills, the softer skills and areas of emotional intelligence often have been neglected or under-valued.  This occurs even though most business leaders inherently seek and reward candidates exhibiting such competencies as self-awareness, regulation and motivation social awareness, and social skills.  As the body of evidence supporting the positive impact of soft skills grows, more organizations are smoothing out the rough edges of their workforce.  The data support this approach and perhaps suggest a critical need to focus more effort into attracting candidates with these skills and developing these skills in existing employees.

In jobs of medium complexity (sales clerks, mechanics), a top performer is 12 times more productive than those at the bottom and 85 percent more productive than an average performer.  In the most complex jobs (insurance salespeople, account managers), a top performer is 127 percent more productive than an average performer (Hunter, Schmidt, & Judiesch, 1990).  Competency research in more than 200 companies worldwide suggests that about one-third of this difference is due to technical skill and cognitive ability while two-thirds is due to emotional competence (Goleman, 1998). 

If potentially two-thirds of your business’s performance depends on soft skills, how important is understanding and improving the soft-skill capacity of your workforce?

For global payments firm American Express, improvements in soft-skills correlated with increases in its bottom-line.  Financial advisors whose managers completed an emotional competence training program grew their business by 18.1% compared to 16.2% for those whose managers had not (Cherniss, 2006). 

Prevailing research also explores the costs of ignoring soft competencies.  Research by the Center for Creative Leadership identified deficits in emotional competence as the primary cause of derailment in executives.  The research cited three primary areas of concern: difficulty in handling change, inability to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations (Cherniss, 2006).

So how do you measure your organization’s soft skills? 

Typically, technical and cognitive skills are easy to inventory.  They manifest themselves in terms of degrees, credentials and certifications and often appear in print on resumes, job applications and in biographies.  Soft-skills are more elusive, rarely disclosed in print and most often vetted through relationships and interpersonal involvement.  Interviewers will be hard pressed to find a candidate having a degree in perseverance or plays-well-with-others, and yet it describes the primary intangible interviewers look for when searching for a “good fit,” … at least for those jobs where human interaction is a job requirement.

The complexity of measuring soft skills is further complicated by the inability of individuals to self-report emotional skills.  Self-reporting requires self-awareness – a soft skill.  Consequently, having a workforce with soft skills is a pre-requisite for accurately reporting and thus measuring this capacity with traditional self-reporting tools.

As mentioned previously, soft skills are often vetted through relationships and interpersonal involvement.  This reality provides a simple solution to assessing the emotional competencies of your workforce.   Instead of asking employees about themselves, you can ask employees about each other.  This approach fits well within a 360-degree feedback process model, which will ultimately identify improvement areas for your workforce and the individuals within it.  An individual wanting feedback will identify peers, direct reporting, supervisors, customers, and others to complete a survey that assesses the degree to which specific behaviors are practiced day-to-day by the individual.

Once the strengths and weaknesses of your organization’s workforce are identified, you can target improvement areas with creative solutions.  You can contract with private firms for training and development; or if you prefer in-house solutions, you can formalize a mentorship program that pairs individuals with weaker competencies with those having stronger competencies.  As with any organizational development initiative, choosing the right approach requires a complete understanding of skill needs and the value-added by addressing those needs.

References

1Hunter, J. E., Schmidt, F. L., & Judiesch, M. K. (1990). Individual
Differences in Output Variability as a Function of Job Complexity.
Journal of Applied Psychology, 75, 28-42.

2Goleman, D. (1998). Working with emotional intelligence. New York:
Bantam.

3Cherniss, Cary (2006).  The Business Case for Emotional Intelligence.  Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations.

4Ibid.

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