Master of Business Administration (MBA) has often been viewed as having more elements of soft skills than hard ones.
Some people even jokingly refer to it as Minimum Brain Activity (MBA).
This notwithstanding, before the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, MBA had been elevated so high that most of the job adverts indicated that having MBA was an added advantage.
And indeed when I opted for MBA it immediately gave me a managerial job at Housing Finance Bank in Kenya without working at any technical level in the lender.
Some companies, however, had different views.
Martin Oduor Otieno, a leading light on corporate leadership and governance in Africa, once explained that when he applied for CEO ship of Barclays Bank, it declined to give him the position reasoning that despite rising to the level of director at the bank, he had not really done banking.
Ascending to a CEO position at a banking institution without banking experience would therefore be a mistake.
This position arose because the type of competencies that business schools were asked to employ so as to help the world out of the financial crisis, were more technical (hard skills) than leadership at that time.
So, do soft skills trump hard skills or are the former simply overrated?
In a hard-hitting piece, one of the greatest CEOs of our time (name withheld), says she was applauded and rewarded for the leadership skills of managerial competence, decisiveness, negotiation and doggedness.
But she believes that the best leaders, even if they possess the above skills, still need a further six leadership skills that are more often than not, underrated.
These are humility, self-awareness, confidence, vulnerability, compassion and discernment.
Humility, which is the freedom from arrogance and the ability to understand one’s strong sense of identity helps us not to inflate our relevance.
Self-awareness gives the ability to see oneself clearly and objectively through sober reflection and introspection, and to tune into one’s feelings, thoughts and actions: - that is, emotional intelligence.
This leads to confidence: self-trust, belief in one’s own inner power, trustworthiness and reliability beyond intimidation by other people’s strengths.
But since a leader is not a superhuman being, we must be willing to be vulnerable:- to be emotionally exposed in front of those we lead.
And in all this, there must be compassion which is a willingness to suffer with and sacrifice for your team and those you lead.
And to crown it, we need discernment:- the ability to judge well, not just the good from the bad, but the better from the good and the best from the better according to God’s mind.
These six qualities, though underrated, make the best and greatest of leaders. They break down hierarchy and infuse trust and reliability.
At TrailBlazer Business Strategies, we recently undertook an empirical study on “leadership skills and company success”, aiming at assessing the qualifications of the current CEOs and/or other potential CEO candidates.
In addition to collecting and assessing ratings of more than 300 CEO candidates for companies at the Nairobi Securities Exchange, we contacted the firms to determine whether the firms had made the investment, whether the candidate had been hired, and whether the hired candidates had been successful.
Our finding was that CEO skills can be classified into two areas—“hard” skills like aggressiveness, follow-through and speed; and “soft” skills – like creativity, listening skills, and team skills.
Concerning skills we were surprised that CEOs who scored higher on harder skills, such as being “fast,” “aggressive,” and “persistent,” were more likely to be successful than CEOs who scored particularly high on softer skills such as being “good listeners,” “open to criticism,” and “team players.”
In other words, our results suggest that boards that hire CEOs with attributes of tough reputations like Jack Welch or Steve Jobs register more success than those with softer skills such as Jeff Immelt.
These results have two implications. First, CEO talent or skills appear to be measurable and those talents appear to matter.
Second, on the margin, soft skills appear to be over-emphasized in hiring decisions. However, it must be emphasised that our results do not necessarily mean that soft skills are unimportant.
In fact, they are important. Possibly, CEO candidates need a certain level of those skills so as to be credible candidates or to be hired.
However, once the candidates have that level of skills and are hired, greater soft skills may prove irrelevant or even negative on the margin.
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
