As technology continues to accelerate and we settle into the new world of work post-COVID, organizations are asking big questions about what factors lead to success. More and more businesses are reimagining their priorities around hiring and developing employees, implementing tactics such as upskilling, career pathing, and skills-based hiring practices.
A hot topic in this conversation is the concept of power skills—a new way of thinking about employee strengths and weaknesses that can have a huge impact on productivity, innovation, and profitability.
What are power skills, and how can you mobilize them both within existing teams and throughout your recruitment process? Read on to find out.
While the growth of technology has changed life and work in many ways, tech will always have its limitations—and that’s where power skills come in. Power skills are those abilities that make an employee successful at the human elements of their job—the interactive, communication, and leadership skills that a robot or computer could never replace.
Formerly called “soft skills,” power skills are gaining popularity and have even been heralded as the future of work. These are the hard-to-pin-down skills like problem-solving, communication and teamwork, creativity, empathy, and adaptability that help employees navigate a fast-changing and collaborative organizational ecosystem.
Their popularity as an HR buzzword has exploded as the fallout from COVID-19 revolutionized how Americans work. From a more mobile and hybrid workforce, to renewed commitment to DEI initiatives, to the race to maximize productivity in an uncertain economy, employers are realizing that graceful adaptability is a key trait for successful employees in countless roles.
In the new world of work, it’s clear that power skills are not just nice to have, but essential to keep organizations running smoothly. That’s why it’s so important to prioritize these skills when building your organization’s team.
Power skills are much more abstract and objective than technical skills, which can make prioritizing them in hiring easier said than done. After all, if you’re looking for an employee who is skilled at coding, all you have to do is ask applicants to code something. What if you’re looking for someone skilled at leadership, or innovation, or empathy?
One way of conceptualizing this problem, according to HR analyst Josh Bersin, is that “hard skills are soft… and soft skills are hard.” That is, the so-called “hard” technical skills are constantly changing with technology, and they’re straightforward (if not necessarily easy) to learn. “Soft” power skills, on the other hand, are more universal, harder to build, and often more demanding when done well.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for HR is that power skills are difficult to measure. Despite a wealth of anecdotal evidence, both job applicants and employers often struggle to find metrics that link power skills to their tangible impacts on organizational goals. That makes it harder for applicants to prove their skills, harder for hiring managers to assess them, and harder for HR to advocate for training and development to improve them.
Despite these challenges, it is possible to substantially improve power skills at your organization. Here’s how.
Start with your existing team members. It’s easy to get tunnel vision around hiring in this tight labor market, but it’s important to start at the source: your current team.
Once you have a system in place to cultivate power skills in your existing employees, work to prioritize them in your hiring practices as well.
Developing power skills in your current team and selecting new hires who have these skills is no easy task. But it’s necessary if you want your organization to be agile and resilient enough to prosper throughout the years. Technical skills are still important, but as times change, it’s the power skills of leadership, communication, creativity, and problem solving that will carry your organization forward.
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