Newsletter / August 8, 2022

By Greg “GW” Weismantel, President/CEO
HGC – The High Growth Consulting Group

The 3 Key Reasons Your Company Needs Hard-Skills Development  

This week I read an article by the Learning Management System pro, Craig Weiss, regarding “Assigned Learning – an Outdated Modality.” His research in checking every LMS site that had assigned learning also used completion rates as the metric of success.  Being modal means relating to form and not substance, and therein lies the  problem with soft skill learning.

 

The first reason your company needs hard-skill development: Substance not Form!

Hard skills are all substance, and soft skills are not.  Soft skills are all form, I call fluff, and that is what form is all about.

Most everyone who has taken a course on the hard-skill of decision making knows that there is a tremendous amount of wasted time and energy by your team when you only address the “apparent problem.”  There is an Axiom on that issue.  We go into a high degree of case study to demonstrate that the apparent problem is the symptom to the real problem, and most inexperienced leaders go off half-cocked to resolve the symptom.

It is one good reason why your training dollars need to be spent 90% on developing hard-skills in your leaders so they can become Leadership Managers, and then executives.

 

The second reason your company needs hard-skill development:  ROI!

We keep coming back to the fact that a CEO can see and feel the hard dollar return from his or her executive team when they know all the hard-skill competencies of management.

Let’s take delegation, a truly hard skill that is associated with accountability. When a CEO sees an executive properly delegating objectives and metrics to a direct report, she knows that two objectives will be completed at the same time that an executive who does not know the proper axioms of delegation will only accomplish one.  That’s double the ROI, and hard dollars can be calculated.

 

The third reason your company needs hard-skill development: Competencies!

It is a proven fact that the more competencies that a management team masters, the more productive and efficient that the entire organization finds itself. If “words are like loaded pistols,”( Jean-Paul Sartre, French Philosopher) then “competencies” are like loaded cannons!

The best CEOs know the competencies required to be a solid executive, so when he sees the multitude of competencies in everything from Strategy, to Planning, to Control, he knows his team understands how they all interlink in achieving the mission of the company.

I always say that every Leadership Manager must master the competencies of the six functions of management in order to become an executive, and it’ true. Mastering the hard-skill competencies of leadership management is what breaks glass ceilings!