You need both in varying proportions for different jobs. The more you have of each, the better off you’ll be. There are plenty of jobs that require very little of either one also, but maybe not enough for the number of people are very weak on one side. Unless you are the best in the world at something, it’s a good idea to have some other skills to balance out any imperfections you might have. But having very good social skills, or very good ‘hard’ skills puts things in your favor.
Job interview performance has been found to be negatively correlated with job performance, when done in an unstructured way. People tend to overestimate their ability to tell good workers from bad workers and underestimate their tendency to be influenced by social factors during face to face interviews. Thats what I got taught in org psych years ago anyhow.
It was one of the major drivers for more formal psychometric testing and structure in interviews, which means its probably much less true today than it used to be.
Otara
In general, you’re a lot more likely to get a job on the basis of an interview, as opposed to say, being able to demonstrate your work ability. Sure, you might be able to get promoted into a new job, but by and large you’re going to get a new job on the basis of how well you make the hiring person like you.
Now, keeping your job is arguably different. But even there, your social skills can play a large part alongside your actual work ethic.
If people believe that social skills matter, then social skills will matter. This isn’t an area where things are true independent of us.
Not quite sure what you mean by that. There are specific personality traits and specific strengths and weakness that are both definable and measurable. When that is the case then outcomes can be defined and measured as well even if those outcomes are the reactions of others who believe one thing or think they do and behave in another way.
“Social skills” is just not a specific enough entity however to define or measure in a way that makes “hard research” available. Which is okay as this is IMHO. Maybe there are specific traits that the trait psychologists have explored and correlated with high income (the op’s presumed measure of success) that might be proxies of “social skills” but I’d doubt it.
Personally MHO is that a threshold level of whatever “hard skill” is required, depending on the field. You can’t get the grades and test scores you don’t get into medical school no matter how socially agile you may be. Likewise to engineering school and so on. Among the universe of those who meet that threshold “success” belongs to the best at sales. Sometimes they are selling themselves, sometimes ideas (either their own or the team’s), sometimes behaviors, and sure sometimes even product. Some fields, some very highly paid ones, may be more those social (managerial) skills than “hard” ones … some CEOs come to mind, so as a hard rule this is going to be more notable for its exceptions than for its predictive value.
If that were true, salespeople would be technical whizzes.
Fact is, there are various levels of soft skills. Sure someone who doesn’t know to take a shower before an interview is not going to get a job, but I’ll hire someone with mediocre soft skills and great hard skills over someone who is a great shmoozer but doesn’t know much any day. If I were hiring salespeople the opposite.
Even for internal customers, we had some really great engineers who you know never to let talk to customers unsupervised (if ever) and some who did really well. There can also be a big difference between one-on-one social skills and presentation skills. I don’t consider myself great at social skills, but I do really good presentations, which I can back by the evidence of salespeople wanting me to do technical presentations to their customers.
The answer is, it depends. It also depends on who you are taking to. VPs need very different types of interactions from engineers.
Imagine this scenario: I’m a manager, and I believe that social skills matter. Therefore, I’m going to reward and promote the people who I believe have good social skills, and as a result, social skills matter in my organization. If most people believe as I do, then social skills matter. We may not be able to nail down precisely what they are, but there’s pretty widespread agreement as to who has good social skills and who doesn’t.
What you’re talking about makes sense for biology and medicine (you’re a doctor, right?), but those are areas where human interactions and beliefs don’t come into play. When they do, you need to have a pretty different way of looking at things.
Looking around and I’ll give a big ‘it depends.’
I work for a software company. We have people who run the gamut of social interaction. We have very quiet super-nerds and more outgoing types.
The vast majority of the people who work here are highly intelligent (I’d say 10% are at or below average) but we all have different levels of social skills. So, we naturally migrate to the parts of the company that fit our personality. People who have good social skills who are programmers either get promoted to management (where there is customer interaction) or move to support (again customer interaction) if managing isn’t their thing. If they are majorly socially impaired, they stay in the office and code and we make sure they never go near clients.
The one thing we all (with a couple of exceptions but I am working on that) do is our jobs very well. Frankly, if you like coding or designing or talking to customers or whatever and are good at it, I don’t care that you are weird or even don’t talk in anything but grunts.
The biggest problem is that it takes a wee bit of time to find out if people are good on paper or actually good. This is why people either work for us for a couple of months or more than ten years.
Perhaps the chess club kids caught up socially. I was precocious and awkward as a kid, but with the right motivation, I learned to compensate and change. I am less obviously different than I was when I was younger, which seems to make a huge difference.
Human interactions and beliefs come into play a lot in medicine, actually. In my day to day I am more of a salesman for behaviors than anything else. But that has little to do with the issue.
You seem to be arguing that human interactions and beliefs cannot be systematically and scientifically studied. That is clearly a false statement. It is however important to understand what is being measured and to have meaningful means of measurement.
In the case you present you hypothesize that managers will hire and promote based on the belief that what they believe represents social skills will lead to better performance and that such will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Will their beliefs remain static those they hire fail to deliver by any metric other being hired and/or promoted? If they don’t have the sales numbers or produce the new ideas or pick the winning stock portfolio or deliver divisional efficiency or whatever is the job’s output?
The hard research would be possible IF that which was being labelled as “social skills” had some reproducible and meaningful metric and some specific measurable and meaningful outcome was defined. Your hypothesis that a perception of social skills would lead to hires and promotions above and beyond documented hard skill level in those who identify with the belief that social skills matter and not in those who do not explicitly endorse that belief is also testable. And it might be true. I wouldn’t just accept it as true however: our behaviors are often at odds with our expressed beliefs, even if we devoutly believe we believe them. Read up on the research regarding implicit vs explicit racism for just one example of that.
Human behavior is amenable to study by the scientific method. But the scientific method is poorly equipped to study something that cannot be nailed down as to what it is. Not impossible though btw. A study could be done that had a large panel representative of the broad population just rate people on how they perceived their social skills even if they could not say why and then check on that rated group in a decade for outcomes. Did higher ratings correlate with long term success? You’d also need to measure potential confounders: does that perception correlate with raw intelligence perhaps or education level or some other factors? A difficult study hardly worth the effort to undertake, but not impossible to do if the question was important enough.
I’m arguing that in order to study human behavior, you need methods to take into account these sorts of feedback loops, and that the sort of research methodology that works for studies on a given treatment is not appropriate because it ignores that unique aspect of the problem.
I definitely agree that you need to define what you’re talking about to make a precise claim, but I’m just pointing out that there are reasons to believe the general claim even if the absence of such precision.
Apparently there are attempts to define and study the issue, one just has accept that the basis for “social skills” is what gets defined as “emotional intelligence” (EI): “the ability to identify, assess, and control the emotions of oneself, of others, and of groups”
No surprise though that there are disagreements over how to define and to measure EI, and whether it is an innate ability or an application of intelligence or a learned skill. That wiki link does have this to say to the op however:
FWIW.
I find all of that interesting, but I think EI is not a good metric for social skills, at least in this context. There are people whose social skills are an advantage in the workplace, but if you sat them down and gave them an EI test? Or had them evaluated by a psychologist? Disordered, through and through.
Some of these folks have anti-social tendencies or might be pegged as borderline or narcissistic. Depending on the lighting in the room, they may look very confident and self-assured (positive) or arrogant and self-absorbed (negative). They feed on attention, so depending on how they sway, they may do positive things for attention (take everyone out to lunch) or negative things (create workplace drama). And they cultivate relationships, which can be good in the workplace (best buds with the boss AND the secretary) or bad (having sex with the boss AND the secretary). The oppositions can exist in different individuals with the same underlying traits, or in the same person at different times.
People are a composite of overt and covert attributes. EI reveals the covert+overt, but in the workplace, it’s really the overt that matters.
In my experience, that line has an absolute shitload of merit to it.
If I make three mental lists of people I work with, the list of those with good social skills lines up better with the list of how much people make than does the list of those with good technical skills.
Also, often it’s not a linear thing–social skills combined with technical skills can project a person into the stratosphere, whereas a person with only technical skills will forever languish at the lower levels.
To make the conversation more specific, what are the particular social skills that you’ve found most helpful, besides the basic “wash, dress nice, notice when you’re boring your interlocutor etc”?
So, is there some definable low level of “social skills” below which it becomes impossible to get a job (or a girl/boyfriend), and it becomes more cost-effective to just give up trying and go live in a hollow tree instead?
20 years in corporate America.
I have never seen anyone fail on hard skills. Careers that failed to get going or which crashed and burned did so because of soft skills.
Just my take.
Let’s put it this way, do you want to work with/manage a dick who can code like a wizard or do you want to work with/manage a guy who can do an okay job coding, but is totally fun to be around?
Given a certain level of technical mastery, the person with the good social skills will be the one who advances, all things being equal. There, of course, are exceptions. By reading the Jobs biography, he was clearly a dick, but he was such a genius that he managed to get past his poor social skills.
In my industry (oil and gas) I’ve seen a ton of capable people go far because they enjoy meeting with people, cultivate a wide circle and are open to new challenges and experiences. I’ve seen capable people who don’t enjoy socializing do fine in their career, but not reach the heights of their more social peers.
Returning to my first paragraph, people want to be around fun, friendly people. That’s just a fact. And as long as a person has the necessary skills, the friendly person is usually the one who moves up.
I work as a programmer and have interviewed at least a hundred people. I’ve rejected a ton of people with great social skills but whose hard skills weren’t up to scratch. I’ve also rejected a ton of people who may have had great technical skills, but I’d never know it because their social skills were so poor that we were unable to establish a rapport during the interview (reasons might range from true language difficulties to abrasive personalities).
My opinion is that for an industry like mine, there is a threshold effect: you need a certain level of social skill, but beyond that point hard skills matter more. Of course more is better on both sides.