A short talk by Simon Sinek arguing against the term “soft skills” and reframing them as “human skills” — teachable competencies (listening, feedback, effective confrontation, giving/receiving feedback) that improve leadership, teamwork, and personal relationships. Sinek says his organization, the Optimism Company, focuses on training these skills and that workplace training produces positive spillovers at home (better marriages, parenting).
Chapters
We talk about hard skills and soft skills. I despise the term soft skills because there's nothing soft about them. Number one and number two, hard and soft are opposites, and these are not. These two things are not working against each other. Hard skills are clearly the skills you need to do your job. You know, I wouldn't trust you to give me medical advice if you didn't go to medical school and pass some of the tests that they give you. Those are hard skills, right? I like human skills, not soft skills. And human skills are the skills you need to be a better human being. And human skills make you a better leader. They give you a better bedside manner. They make you a better team member and teammate. Right? And we don't teach human skills. We just don't teach them. So a lot of people are bad team members or substandard team members or substandard leaders. Not because they're bad people. They just have never been given the education. I would never expect you to know how to do surgery without training. How can I expect you to lead without training? It's a skill. And so we built the Optimism Company to fill that gap and teach human skills only. Things like how to listen. Things like how to have an effective confrontation, like somebody screwed up badly. How do you. Or you need to go up the chain of command, your boss is an idiot. How do you tell your boss they're an idiot in a way that they will hear the information rather than just be defensive? Right. And it goes in every direction in an org chart. How to give and receive feedback. I like to. We all give feedback the way we like to receive it. Turns out not everybody likes to receive feedback the way we like to get it. Turns out. So these are some of the skills where we're dedicated to teaching. And the amazing thing is when you talk about improving lives, like you're devoted to helping people improve lives. Turns out if you teach the skills at work in order to help them improve work, turns out once you have those skills, you have those skills. And you find that companies that make companies that do a good job of teaching human skills, the people who work at those companies tend to have better marriages, they tend to have better relationships with their kids because all those skills come home. If you get better at listening, guess what? You're better at listening to your spouse. If something goes wrong at home, and you learn how to give feedback or receive feedback, guess what? It works at home, too. So when you talk about improving lives, this is what I'm talking about. The ripples of our work.
