How do you measure soft skills?

In our case we use a set of key points that we sent to specific people to take feedback of other people. For example, some people will receive the items to answer about me. We use this type of evaluation because what matters is the perception or our clients (for us client is the next in the process chain) in the first time.

My belief is that soft skills are best measured by the footsteps you leave behind and like leadership is not something with a 'measure'. Obviously I know this not to be the case since there are many psychometric tests and tools being used to evaluate character, where soft skills originate. So whenever I had to access soft skills I would always go by what I see and experience i.e. communication, interactions etc.

I also believe this is the approach most used by companies via 360 reviews, as Sergio mentions it is about perception so I'm not too sure how successful it is.

BTW I agree that soft skills are more valuable than hard skills.

Dear Lori
Very interesting question
Thanks for sharing

I had the opportunity to attend the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People training course

Prior to the training, all participants are asked to:
1- Do the assessement by completing a questionnaire with 64 questions.
The answers we give to these questions correspond to self-assessment, or self-perception if you like.
2- Ask people in your circle (family, friends, co-workers, subordinates, bosses, other people such as trainees) to complete the same questionnaire
To get a closer idea of what people think of us, it is suggested that at least 30 people get the answer
In my case, I got the answer from 120 people
The results obtained allow us to make an analysis about what others think about us, a comparative analysis about our self-knowledge and what others think about us.
We are also provided with the results of all persons who completed the questionnaire.

From these results we can talk about our skills in the field of soft skills and also, if we want, develop a personal development plan.

Regarding Linkedin we can ask people in our circle to fill out our skills and / or make testimonials

Great question Lori!

Effectiveness with soft skills is subjective and is situational. A leader might be extremely effective in one particular context but be horrible in another. This is one of the reasons why turnaround CEOs often leave once a turnaround has been achieved.

Stakeholder satisfaction tools such as surveys are one of the few ways of assessing this effectiveness but the context within which the work was done has to factor into the overall evaluation.

Kiron

Hi Lori,

Soft skills are not on the quantitative scale but on a qualitative one.

According to Dictionary dot com. Soft Skills is: "personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people".

So the best way collect data on soft skills would be to interview the people who have interacted with the person of which you would like to study. Of course, you would need to make sure the study it wasn't bias in any way, making sure that you speak with a broad selection of people who have interacted with the person (preferably with different perspectives).

Also, like Kiron said, surveys are a good way to determine how good someones soft skills are.

Thank you Lori, definitely a timely call unfortunately am seeking some insights from the community. Interesting to see what are the 41% recruiters’ assessment metrics, do you think it includes ‘trustworthiness’ as softskills, this seems to be a hot metric claimed to be missing in mosts companies, am sure many of us have seen this, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4dyADuYfbg

You might want to check out the link below...

https://www.canada.ca/en/treasury-board-se...cy-profile.html

Thank you for sharing, Sergio - this is very helpful. Do you select who will provide the feedback, or is this done randomly?

Not exactly. We have 360 evaluations too. It is focused on people soft skills aligned with organizational values and strategy.