Some months back, several standing banners appeared in the offices of Arkansas Business Publishing Group — quotes from JFK, Vince Lombardi and the like. At first I dismissed them as the kind of rah-rah stuff aimed at salespeople, not cynical journalist types like me, but some of them have started to grow on me.
One of them is an unattributed list of “10 Things That Require Zero Talent”: being on time, work ethic, effort, body language, energy, attitude, passion, being coachable, doing extra, being prepared.
Now, the cynic in me wants to point out that there are people — even people who have boasted of great success and developed large popular followings — who display few of those abilities. The kind of person who isn’t coachable because he’s already the greatest at everything, even things he’s never attempted. The kind of person who can’t control his body language even when it matters, who finds it impossible to prepare even for the biggest tests of his life.
For the rest of us mere mortals, these are known as “soft skills” — learned behaviors that are important in all business settings and which add tremendous value to harder skills and innate talent.
Most of us who have been in the workplace for a while have encountered the most frustrating kind of co-worker: the one whose hard skills are good, or good enough, but whose soft skills create tension. Years ago, I worked with a talented reporter whose attitude was so poor, so combative, so toxic that several of us literally cheered when our editor announced that he had been fired. The news product suffered slightly and temporarily while his replacement got up to speed, but the work environment improved tremendously and permanently.
In this issue, we’ve taken a look at the problem of the “skills gap,” the catch-all phrase being used to describe the problem employers are having in finding the right employees to fill the jobs that are available. While nothing we’ve written is remotely like “breaking news,” the experts our reporters consulted with may at least validate what the Arkansas Business audience is experiencing on the front line. And maybe there are some tips here that can help you find better candidates in the first place and then make them more productive sooner.
One of the articles, No Surprise: Higher Pay Helps Attract, Retain Employees, is the one that managers are most loath to accept: You get what you pay for. During the Great Recession, people only left jobs involuntarily. Few businesses were hiring, so you could count on keeping your best people without having to fight off poachers. Or, if you were hiring, you could count on having the field wide open. (I personally waded through 105 resumes for a single job opening on my reporting staff a few years back, a truly humbling exercise.)
But those days are over, thank goodness. Unemployment is low nationally and even lower in Arkansas. The Census Bureau’s report that median household income surged by a record 5.2 percent in 2015 has been heralded in ways that make me uncomfortable — most Americans did not get a raise that big — but it certainly is more evidence that the fundamentals of supply and demand are changing the job market.
Which reminds me of another one of the signs in our office, a quote from John F. Kennedy:
“Change is the law of life. Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.”
My favorite of the signs is a long quote from Theodore Roosevelt, one I’ve read many times before but which has taken on new meaning in this ugly political season — and in an age when those of us who put our names on our work are regularly attacked online by those who have only the fierce courage of anonymity:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |