I have been thinking a little more about Microsoft´s successful cultural turnabout that I wrote about yesterday.
Historical Focus on hard skills
The key elements targeted for change at Microsoft were so-called “soft-skills” which are what undoubtedly make culture but, in my experience, not where companies typically spend most of their training buck. In my own skill acquisition history,
- I am used to learning new “hard” skills in the workplace;
- the emphasis in interviews has typically been more on what I have done; and,
- my workplace has typically been more interested in my systems and processes and the outputs they create in how I have been evaluated, than on my soft skill performance and what that may have yielded
As a result, because those “hard skills” have been measured and rewarded more, I have spent more time developing these attributes because they have had currency in my role as an employee and that emphasis has had resulted in greater value to me, financially and developmentally. Whilst every workplace I have been in has had some degree of soft skills training, I always had an uneasy feeling we were just doing it to appease some political correctness somewhere higher up, rather than it being a deep commitment on our organisations part to truly improve emotional behaviours. That attitude is changing — and needs to — to deal with the increase we will see in machines doing what humans used to do.
Unconscious bias about me
I know we are all born with similar ingredients but in different quantities but I think I have unconsciously been guilty of assuming (a little) that the the “other” side of my skillset are “my personality”, “me”, “just who I am”, rather than traits that can be developed. And I think that maybe I am not alone, that many of us dangerously accept things as being “just the way they are” in ourselves. Just as it´s easy to have unconscious bias about others, so it is as easy to have it about ourselves. Not exactly blind spots (but of course those as well) but just a higher level of acceptance for things we believe we cannot change than perhaps we should have.
Training our emotional muscles
Whilst I accept it is as theoretically possible to develop emotional competencies as it is mental (mindfulness, anyone?) or physical, it´s not an area I have spent much time exploring. Yet the fact that Microsoft can take certain behavioural tendencies in a culture and turn everyone around to a completely different set is quite a revelation for me. The scale and audacity of that change is intriguingly unusual. That corporate culture, with a little application of determination and skill, can be so dramatically changed in so short a period shows me that my personality is capable of improvement and development on the emotional front in a way I had never thought about before. It turns out there is a relatively simple way of teaching this stuff too: behavioural skills training.
I know my curiosity is in good shape. I know my empathy is a little flabby. The future of work demands I spend some time figuring out how to get in better shape as a human. And then committing to the training!