To succeed in the workplace, students must learn critical thinking, empathy, and other crucial skills.
Employers, students, academics, and practitioners all inquire after me as a business school professor: “What skills do I need for my future? Should I put my efforts into learning about coding, bitcoin, and fintech? Should I also focus on employee management, negotiation, and communication? They want to know which “hard” skills to invest in and which “soft” skills to work on, in other words.
What if, however, the skills of the future are “smart and sharp” rather than “soft and hard”?
The U.S. Army first used the terms “hard and soft skills” in 1972 to distinguish between individuals who excelled at operating machinery and those who excelled at managing others. I believe it’s time to update those classifications by using terminology that accurately describes the functions these skills serve in our daily lives. I wrote an article in 2019 suggesting that “smart skills” should replace “soft skills” and “sharp skills” should replace “hard skills.”
Lera Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California San Diego, concurs with my belief that semantics matter. According to her in a Scientific American article, “We can significantly alter someone’s perspective by how we choose to talk about and frame something.” We are “cueing others to think about it in a certain way” by using particular words and phrases.
While smart skills are also important for business graduates, they can occasionally be trickier to master, so I’m going to focus on those in this article. The saying “The job is easy, the people are not” is one I live by. People are sophisticated algorithms that are influenced by things like hunger pangs, mood swings, and environmental factors. In order to enhance our own humanity, we must improve our cognitive abilities.
Identifying 10 Key Skills
I send students from all over Southeast Asia and beyond to work on experiential learning projects to address business challenges as the faculty director for the Action Learning Program at the Asia School of Business (ASB) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I watch them struggle to handle a variety of peers and hosts, to control their emotions in a setting that is constantly changing, and to adjust to new situations. I believe that developing the following
10 smart skills will aid them on their travels:
1. Emotional maturity: the ability to understand and manage their own feelings as well as the feelings of others.
People who are emotionally mature are able to control their impulses and don’t let a conflict control them. They act empathetically, accept responsibility for their actions, and are aware of other people’s perspectives even when they are engaged in conflict. They understand that learning and self-improvement are activities they must pursue throughout their lives.
2. Validation: the ability to provide or ask for affirmation that feelings or opinions are worthwhile.
Working with people is a continual validation exercise. Validation can ease anxiety and worry, lessen or end conflicts, and motivate people to be open with others. “I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 had one thing in common: They all wanted validation,” media personality Oprah Winfrey said in a 2018 article. She continued, “Letting people know that you see them is a straightforward way to provide validation. You are heard. And it matters what you say.
3. Listening: the ability to focus completely on what other people are saying, understand their messages, and respond thoughtfully.
We should be aware that those around us experience the same things because we have all been in circumstances where we felt misunderstood or unheard. I advise my students to listen more and concentrate on the issues at hand before looking for solutions.
4. Followership: the capacity or willingness to follow a leader, a mission, or a cause.
Business programmes should emphasise good followership as well as good leadership because people follow more often than they lead. Although they don’t accept everything a leader says at face value, followers do actively contribute to the achievement of organisational goals. Even with a strong leader, an organisation will fail if its team members are incapable of implementing the leader’s vision.
5. Managing up: the ability to develop a good relationship with a superior; the ability to solve problems for a variety of stakeholders.
The first definition is the traditional interpretation, and the second is a more contemporary one. In their action learning projects, my students say that one of the biggest difficulties is juggling a variety of stakeholders, including their hosts, faculty advisors, faculty directors, business coaches, and other students. They frequently ask me, “Who should I listen to? My “boss,” who is he? The reality is that managing up necessitates juggling the demands of numerous conflicting stakeholders, frequently at once.
6. Humility: the ability to recognize your value and the value of others while realizing that we all are where we are because we are sitting on the shoulders of others.
People with humility understand that they can always learn more and accomplish more, and they also understand that others have the same capacity for development. The world is full of intelligent, conceited people, according to Charlie Fine, president of ASB. I want to collaborate with intelligent, modest people.
In actuality, most MBAs are ungracious. They must constantly remind themselves that as they learn more, they will become more aware of how little they actually know. They remain humble and are inspired to learn more thanks to this knowledge.
7. Adaptability: the willingness to change with changing conditions.
The only species that endure are those that are quick and adaptable, as stated by Charles Darwin. Have you recently seen any dinosaurs? Humans will vanish if they don’t evolve. Those in the workforce who are good at adapting will survive. The remaining individuals will likely pass their time in Jurassic Park.
8. Cultural and ethical literacy: the competence to recognize and respect differences among people.
Differences in background, race, religion, or nation of origin may be among them. Professionals need to be able to recognise moral and ethical contexts and dilemmas because every group will have its own set of attitudes and values. The need for this specific smart skill is greater than ever due to the workforce’s globalisation.
9. Strategic and critical thinking: the process of conceptualizing, analyzing, synthesizing, and applying information.
Critical thinkers assess and apply knowledge to achieve a goal and create an execution plan. In the absence of blueprints and standard operating procedures, they can resolve complex issues. Strategic and critical thinking are the abilities that employers cite as being most important.
10. Cognitive readiness: the mental preparation to sustain competent performance.
The ability to function in unpredictable environments requires a person to have certain knowledge, motivations, and character traits. In volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous situations, leaders and their teams must be ready to handle unforeseen and poorly defined challenges. This is a challenging skill to master, so experts must constantly be prepared.
Developing Skills Through Project Learning
How can these 10 crucial smart skills be taught in business schools? At ASB, we teach these skills through our Action Learning Program, in which students first work on-site to solve challenging problems before reflecting on what they learned.
The MBA programme lasts 20 months, during which time students engage in five incredibly diverse experiential learning opportunities. Plans for the economic development of indigenous people who live in the rainforest are among the projects that range from creating marketing strategies for multinational corporations. Students may believe that it will be difficult to make the trip to a remote region of the Philippines in order to create an integer programming model for scheduling at a factory that processes food. But trust me when I say that developing the smart skills necessary to collaborate with factory workers who may have very different backgrounds is harder for them than creating the programming model itself.
Students visit the site three times for each project: once to define the project’s parameters, once to gather information and start problem-solving, and once more to put their findings into practise. Every time they come back to campus, they meet with professors and consider their next moves.
Students learn when to listen and when to speak during their first on-site experiences, as well as how to control their egos, in my experience. No one of them is the smartest person in the room, they learn. And when they are forced to put in seemingly endless 12-hour days, they learn to control their emotions.
Students go through 360-degree evaluations that help them better understand themselves and others before their second on-site visit. The value of such assessments has been widely acknowledged; in fact, first-year MBA student Arun Chakraborty claimed that his experience caused a paradigm shift. It enabled him to comprehend the viewpoints of his teammates and how altering his strategy might help them comprehend him more, he claimed. Similar to this, Franco Bravard, a second-year MBA student, discovered “that receiving feedback does not constitute an attack on my identity, and I must recognize when the other person is attempting to assist me.”
When students come back for their second visit, they have already begun to identify obstructive behaviour patterns in both themselves and other people. They put in more effort to hone their critical thinking, empathy, and humility skills. They increase their cultural literacy and gain knowledge of various political and strategic stances as they continue the cycle of action and reflection. They have the chance to put their new abilities to the test in a variety of settings, businesses, and industries. By the time they graduate, they are ethical, employable leaders who are shrewd and quick on their feet.
Navigating the Future
Since ASB was only established in 2015, we are still in the learning process and have a long way to go. The complex ecosystems that power the modern economy, however, require the next generation of management practitioners to have a full set of smart skills.
