I’m fully into Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success by Adam Grant, which I will present at this Friday’s First Friday Book synopsis (June 7, 2013).  Though he is using different vocabulary, he is raising again the issue that there are two (at least two) totally different kinds of skills.  These are now identified by many labels:  soft skills vs. hard skills; traits of Emotional Intelligence; people skills vs. technical skills.  (Here’s a good quick-read article about this:  Emotional intelligence can help you get the job).

In the book Give and Take, Adam Grant divides the world into three types:  Takers, Matchers, Givers.  And, in his view, the Givers are the ones to observe, and emulate.  We always have a bunch of different kinds of skills to work on, to develop.  And if we are deficient in one area, that might be ok, if we find the kind of work that requires the specific skills we do have.  But I think the evidence is mounting that the “soft skills/people skills” will add value to what any person brings to the table – any table.

Here is an extended except from Grant’s book.  It is about what kind of “intelligence” is needed in the burgeoning service professions.  This specific excerpt is about what kinds of “skills” are needed in medical school, and then medical practice.  It’s worth a close look:

The rise of the service economy sheds light on why givers have the worst grades and the best grades in medical school.
In the study of Belgian medical students, the givers earned significantly lower grades in their first year of medical school. The givers were at a disadvantage—and the negative correlation between giver scores and grades was stronger than the effect of smoking on the odds of getting lung cancer. But that was the only year of medical school in which the givers underperformed. By their second year, the givers had made up the gap: they were now slightly outperforming their peers. By the sixth year, the givers earned substantially higher grades than their peers. A giver style, measured six years earlier, was a better predictor of medical school grades than the effect of smoking on lung cancer rates (and the effect of using nicotine patches on quitting smoking). By the seventh year of medical school, when the givers became doctors, they had climbed still further ahead. The effect of giving on final medical school performance was stronger than the smoking effects above; it was even greater than the effect of drinking alcohol on aggressive behavior. Why did the giver disadvantage reverse, becoming such a strong advantage? Nothing about the givers changed, but their program did. As students progress through medical school, they move from independent classes into clinical rotations, internships, and patient care. The further they advance, the more their success depends on teamwork and service. As the structure of class work shifts, the givers benefit from their natural tendencies to collaborate effectively with other medical professionals and express concern to patients.
This giver advantage in service roles is hardly limited to medicine.

Notice especially this line:

…their natural tendencies to collaborate effectively with other medical professionals and express concern to patients.

Collaboration, expressing concern… these are more ”soft-skills,” “emotional intelligence, “giver” traits.  And in today’s service economy, expressing concern and then collaborating with others to fix whatever problems are found are pretty crucial to professional (and personal) success.

So, if you have a “natural tendency” toward such skills, nurture them.  And if you don’t, either go into warp speed mode to develop them, or find a job that requires no human interaction.  (And these days, good luck with that).