A recent article I found when pondering my own current issues in the workplace, along with some good point/counterpoint added below for the hell of it:
Social skills matter more than ever, so here’s how to get them
It’s hard to underestimate the impact of good social skills on your career. In fact, across the board, in a wide variety of businesses, people would rather work with someone who is likeable and incompetent than with someone who is skilled and obnoxious, said Tiziana Casciaro, professor at Harvard Business School, whom I spoke to on the phone. “How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not.” And people who lack social competence end up looking like they lack other competencies, too.
When it comes to holding down a job, social skills matter today more than ever. For people who want to break into a popular field like entertainment, for example, the only way to differentiate yourself at the bottom is to be likeable.
Many fields that used to be havens for loners, like programming, increasingly require exceptional people skills. “The jobs that are staying in the United States are those that require regular touch, face-to-face contact with clients or a manager,” says Erran Carmel, chair of the Information Technology department at American University. The people landing those jobs have great social skills because of the difficulty of “managing teams that are distributed across cultures.”
And as the need for social skills at work grows, the bar for good social skills gets higher. Until the 1970s, a smart child uninterested in playground politics was considered eccentric but okay. Since the 1980s, educators see the playground as essential training for the future, and kids who can’t navigate are often sent to experts for extra help with social skills.
“Today a variety of therapeutic approaches can teach a child social skills while their brain is still forming,” says Amy Berkman, a therapist working with New York schools. “Therapies we’re using now, like cranial sacral and sensory integration did not enter the mainstream until twenty years ago.” The result is that each year, those entering the workforce come in with a better likeability factor than the year before.
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Thank you for your article. I read it with interest. The importance of social skills do play an important role in the workplace, but I must say that competence is far more important.
With respect to your comment ” When it comes to holding down a job, social skills matter today more than ever.”
Well this is true but it results in a not so healthy attitude. This is the kind of attitude that has turned American schools into a popularity pageants and Americans into uncompetitive dolts in the world economy. While in graduate school, I met many foreign students who could barely speak English. This limited their opportunities for social interactions in the school with more “socially adept” Americans. However, their performance, even in a foreign environment using a non-native tongue, far surpassed their native-speaking counterparts. Quite frankly, I would rather have my children be more competent than they are popular. While I am not disparaging fitting in with the group, but often popularity becomes a trap, feeding one’s ego and vanity until one becomes so afraid or beholden to “fitting in” that s/he trades off the pursuit of truth and knowledge in order to fit in with the group.
Being liked is one thing, but not nearly as important as competence. often it’s a “one or the other” tradeoff. Americans naturally do not like someone who is more competent than they are, and groups maintain a dynamic that discourages individual performance above the rest.
This is jealousy, a human reaction and extremely prevalent in groups. It is like a virus, feeding and spreading throughout a group and becoming a barrier to high performance. However, my foreign friends have come from a culture that has a spirit of cooperation that pushes their group to cooperate and excel rather than those Americans who undermine and stifle each other’s performance.
So the answer is simple. When it comes to the worklife, competence is more important than popularity, and is a must in order to maintain our competitive stance.
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CT’s comments are spot the mark, IF we want to have a better std of living in the future.
Unfortunately, PT’s response is also on the mark. (”… in our reality social skills are highly valued. So if you want to succeed today, you need social skills.”) As testimony I know I have been let go because I was not social enough, (ie, socializing in the ofc, and/or drinking or partying after work), prefering to get things done and having accomplished more than those that remained.
I find incompetence in the workplace repulsive, regardless if the colleague is warm, friendly and empathetic. Apparently I wrongly assumed that we are paid to get a job done. This is no longer the case. Social ties are the “ties that bind”.
So how does CT’s comments fit in? Re-read the conditional clause. Our society no longer feels it is important to achieve higher stds of living. We have achieved Nirvana; unfortunately, we have been there and are now headed backwards. Today’s thirty-somethings have a lower std of living than their fathers. (See recent WSJ article). And this trend will continue until society changes its values.
It is very sad commentary that as a society we find it more important to have good social skills, than to be competent. This will only continue to diminish our std of living. We will complain about our failed policies, about the high cost of healthcare, gasoline, … and fail to see that it is of our own (un)doing. But we will enjoy it, because we are likable.
As I look back, it now makes sense. Our educational stds have plummented. HS is no longer a place for education, but rather for socialization (ie. learning how to socialize). Witness how poorly our HS students do in international comparisons. We require 12, and soon 14 yrs of education once pre-K is mandatory, to be at the bottom of the top 30 industialized countries; and they achieve this in 10 yrs. A few yrs back I saw a HS principal on a “news show” brag that imparting knowledge in the classroom was no longer important. He was proud however of the social skills that his students have learned in the student commons. If that’s all these students know (social skills), is it a surprise that this is what they value? People like people who think like themselves (see referenced HBR article).
My objective in life is to maximize the talents/abilities that have been bestowed upon me in order to make a better place for my kids and grandkids. (That must sound really trite to those 30-somethings.) And that takes effort, which is seen as unsocial. However this drive to achieve, learned in school, is what yields accomplishments, increased productivity and in turn a higher std of living. (ECON 101 … Oops I forgot. Nobody studies this anymore; it’s too difficult and offers no redeeming social skills.)
We will continue to see our std of living erode, and more quickly as the dollar continues its slide, until society changes its values. At least we can take comfort in the fact that we will be likable, as we huddle in the dark under the no longer used freeway overpass. (Guilty as charged of sarcasm.)
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