"Soft Skills": A Phrase in Search of Meaning

Soft skills are a collection of people management skills, important to many professions and job positions, including academic librarianship. Yet the concept of soft skills lacks definition, scope, instrumentation, and systematic education and training. This literature review explores the definition of soft skills; contrasts skills with related concepts, such as personality traits, attitudes, beliefs, and values; and compares a set of soft skill typologies. We discuss a number of conceptual issues associated with soft skills and suggest several lines of research to help clarify and strengthen librarians’ understanding of and development of soft skills. Introduction and Problem Statement Soft skills, people skills, intangibles—these words are frequently used to describe a set of skills that most would agree are important in any work environment. Articles on soft skills appear in a variety of disciplines as a trendy, but fuzzy, topic. We often refer to these skills when we observe them missing in someone—a colleague, a supervisor, a customer, or a service provider. There is something appealing about a set of nontechnical, domain-independent skills that underpin our behavior in the workplace. We universally recognize that soft skills are important, but when pressed to describe particular soft skills, the concept becomes murky. In the library and information science (LIS) literature, among many other disciplines, writers address directly and indirectly the importance of developing soft skills. Professional documents, such as the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers, implicitly suggest that soft skills connected with communication and interpersonal skills are essential if librarians are to be approachable, to listen to customers, and to show interest in their information needs.1 Articles from the LIS literature name flexibility, “Soft Skills”: A Phrase in Search of Meaning 72 initiative, empathy, planning, and leadership ability as important skills to be used in the library workplace.2 Although the usefulness of such soft skills is not new to the profession, the need to develop them has become more pressing in academic librarianship. Virtually all reports on the future of academic libraries and librarianship declare that roles are changing and requiring new and different skill sets, with an emphasis on leadership, outreach, collaboration, and the ability to communicate library value.3 Less obviously related, though equally essential, is the argument made by R. David Lankes in his 2011 book The Atlas of New Librarianship, in which he defines the mission of librarians as work done “to improve society through facilitating knowledge creation in their communities.”4 That knowledge creation happens, he argues, when librarians facilitate conversations with community members. Lankes devotes a portion of the Atlas to discussing the many traditional technical skills that will continue to be required for what he calls New Librarianship, such as organizing information, developing collections, seeking information, serving the public, warehousing collections, and administering organizations. But a significant requirement not fully explored in the concept of New Librarianship is the deployment of people skills implicitly assumed to facilitate knowledge creation. This raises some interesting questions. What important soft skills should academic librarians develop? More fundamentally, what precisely are soft skills? How do we measure them? How do we train people to improve them? Because academic librarians’ roles are changing, we need to deconstruct the skills that support their redefined roles. Successful performance of these roles requires proficiency in skills long considered “soft.” Most training and preparation for librarians has focused on the technical or “hard” skills required for the field. Yet in the workplace, librarians are often evaluated on skills or abilities that fall under the concept of soft skills. In short, strong interpersonal competencies are expected of all library professionals. It is insufficient to hope that academic librarians naturally possess soft skills or will develop them somewhere along their professional paths. Academic librarianship centers on developing relationships with faculty, students, and administration, endeavors that require high levels of interpersonal skills. However, if those discrete skills are not clearly articulated, and if targeted training in developing them is rare, how are librarians to reach their fullest potential in offering high-quality service? We are better served as a profession if we investigate what we mean by soft skills by clearly identifying differences between skills, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs. After doing so, we can then create meaningful methods to train and develop academic librarians in these areas. Soft skills connected with communication and interpersonal skills are essential if librarians are to be approachable, to listen to customers, and to show interest in their information needs. In the workplace, librarians are often evaluated on skills or abilities that fall under the concept of soft skills. Miriam L. Matteson, Lorien Anderson, and Cynthia Boyden 73 In this literature review, we will demonstrate the inconsistent treatment of the concept of skills and argue for the importance of clarifying the idea of soft skills. We further suggest several lines of research to effectively measure soft skills and to explore the links between soft skills and organizational performance. Conceptual Framework To meaningfully define soft skills, we must first establish what skills are and how they differ from related concepts, such as attitudes, beliefs, dispositions and traits, and values. Tim Peterson and David Van Fleet define a skill as “the ability either to perform some specific behavioral task or the ability to perform some specific cognitive process that is functionally related to some particular task.”5 They suggest three distinct components of skills: (1) a domain-specific knowledge base, (2) the means to access that knowledge, and (3) the ability to take actions or thoughts using that knowledge to carry out a task. The first two components, they argue, are necessary precursors to the third component, which is what, in common practice, we think of as the “skill.” Citing Richard Boyatzis’s work on managerial competencies, Frederick Evers, James Rush, and Iris Berdrow define skills as sequences of observable behaviors or sets of actions that relate to reaching a goal.6 Scott Hurrell, Dora Scholarios, and Paul Thompson’s conception of skill echoes and expands Peterson and Van Fleet’s division between prerequisite processes and their execution, explaining skills as a complex knowledge practice involving cognition of knowledge bases, dispositional characteristics, context-specific knowledge, and prior experience.7 A skill, according to Hurrell and his coauthors, is something that “develops over time, with practice; involves cognitive processes and manipulation of knowledge . . . and includes an element of discretion that allows performance with economy of effort.”8 Paul Attewell notes that although, at the most basic level, a skill is the ability to do something well, he finds ambiguity in even that simple definition.9 Is a skill merely a competence or ability, or does the word skill also imply a level of quality, such as mastery or excellence? Attewell also raises interesting questions about the sociological nature of skills. Reviewing the concept of skill through four different lenses, he distinguishes between seeing a skill simply as an action toward a task (a positivist view) versus a “relational” idea of skill (ethnomethodologist and [Max] Weberian views). Here, skills are understood as an array of tasks for a requirement and an awareness of who carries out those tasks (that is, whether skilled or unskilled). The usefulness of this analysis lies in demonstrating that a basic concept such as skills can have larger social meanings, with much ambiguity across different contexts. Researchers, Attewell argues, should be aware of their own preconceived ideas about the nature of skills if they are to facilitate better understandings of the concept. Among the various definitions of skill, the concept of execution is central in all of them. That is, skill implies the prerequisites of having and accessing certain knowledge, processes, or sequences of behavior leading to a specific performance. However, for something to be considered a skill, it must contain an element of action. In addition, Among the various definitions of skill, the concept of execution is central in all of them. “Soft Skills”: A Phrase in Search of Meaning 74 Evers, Rush, and Berdrow suggest that skills fall on a competency continuum from low to high, are associated with knowledge and values, and can be developed, moving from basic to more advanced.10 Several psychological concepts are related to the definition of skill. At times, the distinctions among these concepts tend to blur. The relationship between skills and dispositions or traits is particularly difficult to ascertain. For example, although Irena Grugulis and Steven Vincent warn against defining personal attributes and behaviors as skills, examples in the literature show that traits, goals, motivations, and preferences have all been considered soft skills. In fact, these are personal attributes, not skills.11 The terms trait and disposition—functionally synonymous—are individual qualities. Relatively stable over time, traits affect behavior.12 Owing to that stability, they differ from skills, which inherently involve performance, action, or change. Essentially, dispositions are qualities people possess; they inform what people do using their skill sets. Discussion of skill also takes into account the interdependent concepts of attitude, belief, and value. In the same way that skills imply action, attitudes necessarily incorporate some sort of evaluation toward an outside element. Stephen Kosslyn and Robin Rosenberg describe attitude as “an overall evaluation about some aspect of the world—people, issues, or objects.” Attitudes consist of three components: affective, that is, feelings about an object or issue; behavioral, that is, intent to act in a particular way regarding the object or issue; and cognitive, that is, beliefs or knowledge about the object or issue.13 Susan Fiske corroborates, defining attitude as a positive or negative judgment of an object or entity.14 Scott Lilienfeld, Steven Lynn, Laura Namy, and Nancy Woolf describe the intersection of belief and attitude by stating, “A belief is a conclusion regarding factual evidence, whereas an attitude is a belief that includes an emotional component.” An attitude, they add, “stems from a variety of sources including our prior experience and personalities.”15 While beliefs may be grounded in some factual evidence, the beliefs people hold are informed by their values. Defined by George Theodorson and Achilles Theodorson, values are “abstract, generalized principle[s] of behavior to which the members of a group feel a strong, emotionally toned positive commitment and which provides a standard for judging specific acts and goals.”16 Fiske emphasizes that personal values typically apply across situations, further differentiating them from attitudes and beliefs, which people hold about specific people, issues, objects, or facts.17 To more precisely delineate these terms, we offer up these operational definitions of the central concepts associated with soft skills: • Skills: The ability to access knowledge from a domain-specific knowledge base and use that knowledge to perform an action or carry out a task. • Dispositions: Individual qualities, relatively stable over time, that influence behavior and actions performed as part of an individual’s skill set. • Attitudes: A positive or negative judgment, based in part on emotion, about an outside entity. • Beliefs: An acceptance that certain factual evidence is true, informed by an individual’s own values. • Values: General standards or principles that guide behaviors among varying situations and to which individuals feel a strong commitment. Miriam L. Matteson, Lorien Anderson, and Cynthia Boyden 75 Soft Skills Definitions, Research, and Typologies