How to Leverage Power Skills

The term “soft skills” was officially introduced by the U.S. Army over 50 years ago in 1972. The idea was to identify skills that did not employ the use of machinery and were necessary to leadership, motivation, and winning wars.

The Army realized that “soft” skills had not been documented or fully studied. As the term gained momentum, research reinforced the importance of soft skills in the effective execution of work. One Harvard University study revealed that 80% of career achievements are determined by soft skills and only 20% by technical or “hard” skills.

Over the decades, “soft” skills have taken a lot of heat as being “warm and fuzzy people skills” or intangible and innate human skills that were “nice” to have. However, these non-tangible traits and behaviors are predominately what makes the difference between two equally qualified technical or, for that matter, non-technical people.

Fast forward a few decades and Dartmouth University professor and now President Philip J. Hanlon coined the term “power skills.” Hanlon described these skills “as hard-won skills which were indeed powerful.”

The motivation was to raise the profile. The term “soft” discredited the value of these skills and prompted decades of them being perceived as less important than “hard” skills.

Dartmouth even walked the talk by creating the STAR Academy with the objective to provide Dartmouth's administrative professionals an opportunity to develop their technical and power skills. The value of “soft” or “power” skills cannot be overlooked as studies continue to provide evidence that soft skills boost productivity, retention and offer significant return on investment.

Why is a power skills strategy for the connected worker important?

While power skills are gaining credibility in terms of their traction and impact, there remains confusion on the idea, intent, and strategy.

Google the term “power skills” and you will find all types of iterations promoting various power skill frameworks: power skills for women, top power skills for 2022, power skills for administrative assistants, etc.

Like competences, power skills make you distinctive and relevant within the context in which you operate and work. They are the skills that the most successful performers possess as underlying abilities, demonstrate in more situations, and apply with better results.

What makes power skills relevant is that they are distinctive to success in relation to specific environmental context. Therefore, a category of power skills for one context will not be as powerful in another context.

READ: Lessons From the NFL to Improve Employee Learning and Development

When this happens, they give workers a legitimate base of power in terms of predicting their success in the context of their operating environment.

The general framework for power skills relates to skills that fall under three categories of human ability: cognitive skills, creative skills and collaborative or social skills.

For connected knowledge workers the idea of power skills is that they give workers back power to move forward in the face of automation. Workers in middle class industrial environments are concerned about displacement due to automation and wonder how they can compete despite continued advances.

A connected worker power skills framework should focus on empowering workers in evolving and excelling with connected technologies as automation and AI advance. Connected worker power skills focus on leveraging the unique human capabilities that today’s robotics and connected technologies lack.

Let us look at these in the context of the skills where humans excel over machines and how they can apply distinctively human abilities to sustain relevance in a connected world.

Human Cognition

Machines are impressive at producing and interpreting data but only humans can apply critical thinking and creative skills to find ways to profoundly understand what the data means in the wider context and how to apply it for competitive advantage.

Even with endless computing power and probability predictions, humans are still needed to make judgment and critical decisions in real time scenarios with unfolding circumstances. Humans are needed to apply short term strategic and extended thinking to make real time decisions, solve complex problems and formulate strategy.

Machines are great at making decisions that would take a human a second or two, but they are not good at longer term and extended thinking. Machines cannot set strategy, problem solve, or troubleshoot in situations where choices must align with organizational culture, unfolding context, and other intrinsic and interpretative factors.

Another consideration is that robots cannot install or maintain themselves. They also can’t act as a third party to observe and evaluate their performance and make judgements based on relevant evaluative criteria to drive creative and innovative improvements.

Human Creativity

Humans excel over machines at providing creative, innovative, and inspiring choices, especially in areas where there are ethical tensions, challenges, and dilemmas.

Sure, seeing a computer write music is an interesting novelty, but to truly feel the human connection you want to hear a real person play the piano. Machines simply cannot easily interpret context or make meaning out of how humans experience the world. Machines are logic based and lack imagination and vision as these are not programmable skills.

Today’s connected workers add value by displaying the creative skills that offer the greatest potential gains in the context of their connected environments. Industries that can see where the creative power of humans add distinctive value for their operations in conjunction with their automation capabilities will excel in the era of mass personalization and dynamic innovation.

READ: The Rise of the Connected Knowledge Worker

Human Collaboration

The skills related to cooperation, collaboration and collective progress are growing in importance as the world gets more complex with technology and complicated with greater inclusion and diversity of human viewpoints.

This is just one of the areas where machines fail in terms of possessing any level of emotional intelligence or competence. They cannot establish strong personal connections or dynamic human networks. They are limited at understanding the nuances of genuine human emotion and cannot sympathize or empathize. They cannot model human behaviors, provide emotional assurance, show respect, or contribute to shaping a positive work culture.

Power skills such as sensemaking are relevant as machines are limited in recognizing context and making sense out of a portfolio of human related factors.

Even if machines could excel at sensemaking, they lack the ability to formulate and tell a compelling story.

Human skills are critical to influencing and mobilizing a case for action with a sense of urgency. Human translation is required to convey passion to a purposeful cause.

Making Power Skills Distinctively Relevant

Any organization looking at their connected plant ecosystem, should look at where they are leveraging Industry 4.0 capabilities and where humans offer the greatest value to the plant’s established human-machine mix.

Power skills will continue to evolve, but the challenge is in selecting the vital few that close an organization’s skill gaps in the context of organization’s Industry 4.0 journey. A power skill at one connected plant may not be relevant in another connected plant.

For example, there are nine (9) advances or “pillars” in technology that form the foundation for Industry 4.0. One of the pillars is big data and analytics. Technology is enabling more powerful analytics based on large data sets. Companies that are investing heavily in big data and analytics will need operators with power skills (short term strategic and extended thinking) that enable them to apply big data and analytics in a way that meets the organization’s goals.

The organization may want to use this pillar to help smart operators achieve better forecasts, fuel continuous improvements, or drive the right response to prevent mistakes. Another site may want to leverage big data to optimize production quality, save energy, and improve equipment service. If operators can’t extract value from Big Data, it results in the marginalization or deceleration of the technology infrastructure.

Power skills can focus an organization on the most distinctive human skills that predict successful performance within the context and goals of their unique connected plant ecosystem.

Artificial Vs Human Agents

Surveys show that most people would prefer to talk to a robot counselor than their manager about workplace stress, anxiety, and mental health. However, when something breaks in high-risk operations you want humans at the helm. 

The response after an oxygen tank explosion on the Apollo 13 spacecraft illustrates why you want humans with power skills at the helm. Surely, the fate of the crew would have been different with just robots in charge.

Do we think that robots would have displayed the same sense of urgency and commitment to creative problem solving and collaboration as those fellow humans did?

I know that in any of my most challenging situations I always wanted perspective, empathy, relatedness, and cooperation.

Power Skills for the Industry 4.0 Operator

Upskilling, reskilling, and redefining jobs in the face of Industry 4.0 are some of the top threats to both business and human growth. Research abounds depicting the rapid shift in the types of skills needed to remain competitive under dynamically changing market conditions as can be seen by the emergence of the Operator 4.0 concept, which aims to create trusting and interaction-based relationships between humans and machines.

As automation displaces routine and labor-intensive tasks, humans must evolve to meet the challenges of new work that depends on skills that represent the unique strengths of human potential.

The intent of power skills is to give humans back power in the face of advanced automation and evolve the skills that make people distinctively human.

The fascinating aspect to automation is that it serves as a catalyst to empower workers to evolve new skills that will offer them greater levels of purpose, relatedness, and fulfillment in a world where being human in past industrial settings was a disadvantage.

The removal of routine, mundane tasks create more time for people to think, collaborate and create. This is of critical importance as in the new industrial economy organization’s need human creativity as the pressure to innovate is intense. 

Organizations need social skills as worker expectations for a healthy and fulfilling work experience grows. Organizations also need people with power cognitive skills to work with more intensive data sets and cyber physically connected systems.

This means flourishing in abilities such as complex information processing and interpretation, abstract thinking, synthesis, and deductive reasoning.

Organizations need to appreciate the distinctive value of power skills, treat them as strategic assets and appreciate that they will consistently flex based on what the organization needs to remain competitive as the organization’s connected plant ecosystem advances.

Interested in Learning More? 

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