Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era Proposal for the 21st Annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference David Holzmer, Ph.D. Candidate The Union Institute & University Cincinnati, OH

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era Proposal for the 21st Annual Kravis-de Roulet Leadership Conference It is hard to ignore the growing concerns that we now live in a time of deep, disruptive change. For many, this period in our history has become characterized by

pervasive fear and uncertainty as long-held cultural assurancessuch as the reliance upon enduring economic progress (Heinberg, 2011; Krugman, 2009; Reinhart and Rogoff, 2009) or a dependence on the our planets ecological resiliency and the Earths ability to furnish us with unlimited natural resources (Gilding, 2011; Gore, 2009; Senge, 2010)sway and falter in the face on ongoing turmoil and mounting breakdowns. This is a time when many people, including leaders and those who study leadership (Hendrickson, 2010; Stames, 2010; White and Shullman , 2010) increasingly find themselves confronted by the gnawing question Are we going to be OK? A notable response to this wide-spread anxiety can be found in the words of Vaclav Havel (1995) who wrote that there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transition period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itselfwhile something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble. (p. 46) This presentation will discuss that which I will argue are critical new perspectives leaders will need in order to facilitate this multi-domain transition from breakdown to rising from the rubble. This idea, here articulated by Havel (1995), that one way of life is deteriorating while another is gaining form and substance, is calling growing legions of leaders and scholars of leadership (Fullan, 2005; Gardner, Avolio, and Walumbwa, 2005; Scharmer,

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era

2007; Senge, 2010) to closely question many of leaderships underlying presumptions and practices while also pondering how a new way of thinking and action could assist in the development of more sustainable social (Gilding, 2011), ecological (Cafaro, 2011) , and economic (Kallis, 2011) systems. In this presentation I will argue that a careful reconsideration of the leadership skills and capacities known as soft skills is crucial to formulating a framework that will help leaders to effectively address the most complex challenges they are facing more and more frequently. I will assert that, while many problems may still be adequately addressed by leaders current skills and thinking, a new, more integrated conceptual framework can play a central role in effectively responding to present breakdowns while simultaneously nurturing the emergence of more generative systems. By employing an interdisciplinary lens this presentation will interweave ideas derived from models employing a more reflective and psychologically-attuned orientation of leadership (i.e., Goleman, Boyatzis, and McKee, 2001; Heifetz, 1994; Scharmer, 2007) with the integrative perspectives found in later stages of cognitive development (Joiner and Josephs, 2007; Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Torbert, CookGreuter, et al., 2004). Such a synthesis supports my assertion that our present confounding, systemic challenges call for a more integrated conception of leadership praxis than that typically afforded by the rigid segmentation (Urciuoli, 2008) and, what I argue is, a subtle but pervasive paternalism that permeates traditional approaches to hard and soft leadership skills. Furthermore, by employing a vision of distributed skills and capacities based on the traditional notion of the social commons (Pisano and Shih, 2009), I will propose instead that leaders and followers alike are better served by

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era an approach that privileges commons competenciesthose skills and capacities,

such as empathy and collaborative problem-solving, increasingly considered essential (Benkler, 2011; Rifkin, 2009) to the highly networked and minimally-hierarchical structures now seen (Watt, 2011) in a greater number of organizational environments. Throughout most of the 20th century, both leaders and leadership thinking bore the influence to two dominant streams of thought: Carlyles (1870/2007) Great Man theory with its claim that leaders are leaders because they were, in some key way, superior to those being led; and Frederick Taylors (1911/1967) model of scientific management. In the latter case, workers were understood to be little more than soulless automatonsmechanized elements in the production process. Consequently, managers designed work environments to focus maximum attention on routinization and speed while giving little concern to workers input or satisfaction. In these settings workers were valued only as sources of physical labor, while thinking, feedback, design, and planning were strictly relegated to the management class. In fact, this ideology wherein design and execution were viewed as two separate and independent disciplines is, according to Morgan (2006), often seen as the most pernicious and farreaching element of Taylors approach to management, for it effectively splits hand and brain (p. 25). Morgan also points out that in many workplaces this thinking still hold significant influence up to the present day (p. 23). One of many critical byproducts of this split between hand and brain was the bifurcation of skills into the broad and mutually-exclusive domains of hard skills and soft skills. Throughout a majority of the twentieth century the primary focus was on hard skills which Coates (2006) defines as those technical or administrative

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era

procedures related to an organizations core business. As Coates explains, these skills are typically easy to observe, quantify and measure (p. 1). But the growing influence of the cultural, economic, and technological shifts in the 1960s and 1970s fueled a resistance to the mechanistic rationalism that underscored the dominant models of leadership and helped launch a growing trend toward greater humanism in organizations along with the knowledge that, for workers, greater productivity and effectiveness resulted from increased appreciation for the whole person. This turn then spawned the need for a set of competencies that could function as an affective complement to the technical capacities of hard skills; thus, leaders slowly became introduced to soft skills. In turn, these have been described as skills associated with group management, for example the ability to relate to others in a meaningful way, effectively communicate with others or the ability to foster a positive learning environment (Cavins and Thompson, 2003). As the industrial era passed into the information age, creativity, collaborative problem-solving and highly interdependent networked intelligence became critical dimensions of many organizational environments. This transformation also impacted the fundamental nature of leadership which, according to Rost (2008), was now predicated on, a relationship wherein leaders and followers collaborate because they are mutually invested in a direction and because they are inherently interdependent in a common process (p. 56). In these environments, where the opportunities and challenges are far more nuanced and contextualized than during the industrial age, leaders need to demonstrate competency with a wide array of soft skills while developing high levels of emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998) as to ensure workplace cohesiveness and

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era facilitate atmospheres of trust, creativity and collaboration (Goleman, Boyatzis, and

McKee, 2001). Throughout the 1990s into the first years of the twenty-first century, the economy boomed as organizations rooted in technology and other information-intensive industries generated unprecedented profits partly as the result of the collective synergies generated through leaders development and application of soft skill technologies. Yet, despite the many rewards and benefits of this new era, a disarming series of more sophisticated challenges began to spread across the globe and threaten the health, well-being, and security of many of the Earths inhabitants. Threats such as global warming, world-wide financial collapse, desiccation of the planets food supply, sophisticated terror organizations, and the depletion of fossil fuel energies gave rise to dangers and instabilities more profound than anything witnessed by previous generations; moreover, these crises have also proved to be confoundingly immune to many of the emotionally-intelligent problem-solving strategies practiced so successfully throughout the information age. Because of the exceptional nature of these challenges leaders are called to look more deeply at what now are revealed to be ineffective strategies and instead to discover the fundamental imbalances in their own meaningmaking and problem-solving systems. This is why leaders and scholars of leadership alike are best served to look closely at the underlying presumptions of soft skill strategies as to find heretofore unexamined flaws and shortcomings. As noted above, the development and application of soft skills represented a significant move forward in leadership thinking and practice. Even today, these same skills and ideologies will continue to prove an innovative and beneficial sign of progress

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era in many settings. However, in a growing number of situations, particularly those

contending with the most sophisticated and perilous challenges, leaders and scholars of leadership will have to confront and reconcile at least four fundamental weaknesses that can potentially destabilize the efficacy of the soft skill approach. As I will demonstrate in my presentation, these weaknesses are, briefly stated, (1) an approach to organizational functioning that artificially bifurcates the processes of production and innovation into physical labor and intellectual labor; (2) a legacy of paternalism that continues to privilege hard skills over soft skills as the more essential and legitimate of leadership and management practices; (3) an hierarchical orientation that infers a direct relationship between insight and emotional intelligence with political authorization; and (4) an underlying antagonism toward the emotional life of an organization as a source of danger and disruption unless structured and sanctioned by those in positions of authority. In response to these challenges I will present an alternative approach to soft skills based on principles that underscore two well-known stage-based models of leaders psychological development (Kegan and Lahey, 2009; Torbert & Cook-Greuter, 2004). In the late stages of these models, increasingly sophisticated challenges call for the unification of experiences and conceptions, that in earlier models were viewed as separate or antagonistic. In the later stages many one-time dualities are reconceptualized through higher-order thinking as now being unified in a way that resolves once-vexing polarities. This resolution, in turn, opens the door for new thinking that more effectively addresses the heretofore baffling issues. In this spirit, I will advance a framework for organizational skill sets based on the enduring construct of a

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era

social commons. As Pisano and Shih (2009) have pointed out, the idea of a commons comes from traditional societies, referring to the land where animals belonging to the people in the community would graze. The authors go on to point out that through such an arrangement, the land was not the privilege of an elite class but fell under collective ownership and all were better off for having access to it (p. 116). In their examination of the deterioration of Americas manufacturing base, Pisano and Shih argue that by developing a network of local industrial intellectual commons America can revitalize manufacturing bases and its economy from coast to coast. In much the same spirit, I am arguing that organizationsrather than relying on leaders as the sole guardians of organizations hard and soft skill setsembrace more distribute practices that leverage the idea of commons competencies. By so doing, most interpersonal skill sets and competences can be re-integrated with relevant hard skills and, thus, restructured as components in a domain belonging to all organizational members rather than just those in leadership. Meanwhile those in positions of leadership would serve as stewards of the commons to ensure the effectiveness and integrity of the collective skill domain. In summary, this presentation will attempt to unite scholars, practitioners, and students by opening discussion and inviting opportunities for ongoing theoretical exploration for how the soft skill construct can be further developed to best address the extreme nature of the challenges facing us. In addition, this presentation will also serve as a starting point for designing practical application of the commons competencies model. It is hoped that by promoting discussion and further research on

Commons Competencies: Rethinking Hard and Soft Skills for a Disruptive Era

this subject, we may all take small steps toward the realization of Vaclav Havels (1995) vision of a new order rising from that which is now falling away, its time having passed.

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