the treacherous language of capability
What emerges in your mind when someone describes another person as “hard”? Perhaps you imagine someone unyielding, resolute, with firm convictions and a direct manner—someone who doesn’t easily reveal vulnerability or emotion. In most professional contexts, these attributes confer advantage, garnering respect and advancement.
Now consider a person described as “soft”—likely someone lacking vigor, easily influenced, perhaps indecisive or frivolous. The professional landscape offers few territories where such softness represents an asset rather than a liability.
This isn’t innocent linguistic coincidence. Words carry histories, connotations, and subtle hierarchies of value. The psychoanalytic elephant in our politically correct china shop warrants acknowledgment: these terms’ sexual connotations hint at why hardness receives valorization while softness suffers devaluation—in a world where power’s pendulum still swings toward masculine attributes without serving justice or fostering fulfillment.
Interestingly, even in non-English speaking countries like Portugal, these terms remain untranslated in professional contexts. We don’t say “competências moles” e “competências duras” in everyday business conversations—we use the English “soft skills” and “hard skills.” When I reveal the literal Portuguese translation to audiences, it typically provokes laughter and moments of realization. This linguistic peculiarity reveals how thoroughly we’ve internalized these problematic categories, adopting them wholesale without examining their implications. Business English has colonized professional discourse globally, making us blind to the metaphorical baggage these terms carry across linguistic boundaries.
When we transfer these loaded terms from describing personalities to categorizing professional capabilities, their connotative baggage travels with them. “Hard skills” inherit prestige and concrete value, while “soft skills” absorb connotations of secondary importance, despite countless corporate proclamations to the contrary. The linguistic frame itself undermines what it claims to elevate.
The term “soft skills” reportedly emerged from 1960s United States military training, designating capabilities that didn’t involve machinery operation. Military strategists recognized that these less tangible abilities often determined mission success or failure. From the beginning, these attributes occupied a paradoxical position—simultaneously crucial yet resistant to precise definition, measurable standards, or systematic development.
Decades later, little has fundamentally changed. These nebulous capabilities—rebranded as “interpersonal,” “behavioral,” or “emotional intelligence” skills—still defy clear categorization while being universally acknowledged as essential. The list expands endlessly: charisma, influence, authenticity, listening, sensitivity, wisdom, eloquence, clarity, sincerity, leadership, collaboration, openness, flexibility, vision, presence, humor. One begins to wonder whether these are truly “skills” at all, or something more fundamental—qualities, virtues, or ways of being.
the false dichotomy
The troubling aspect of this binary isn’t merely linguistic but philosophical. It reinforces the Cartesian split between mind and body, between reason and emotion—dualisms that modern neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy have thoroughly dismantled. Our cognitive capacities don’t function in isolation from our emotional intelligence; they’re intricately interwoven systems.
Consider the theater director’s concept of the “it factor”—that ineffable quality that makes certain performers magnetic. The business world, increasingly resembling performance art, similarly mystifies this quality, attributing success to possessing certain “soft skills.” Yet this framing fundamentally misunderstands how human excellence manifests. The great performer, like the exceptional leader, doesn’t simply possess discrete skills that can be isolated and transferred—they embody an integrated way of being.
The boundaries between these supposedly distinct domains dissolve under scrutiny. Reading a financial statement requires technical knowledge (hard) but also pattern recognition and intuitive sense-making (soft). Leading a team discussion demands emotional awareness (soft) alongside systematic problem-solving (hard).1 The metacognitive ability to reflect on one’s own thought processes—supposedly a quintessential “soft skill”—often proves more challenging than mastering technical knowledge.
This artificial division creates practical absurdities. What advantage comes from analyzing complex data without the ability to communicate its relevance? What benefit lies in eloquent communication without substantive content to convey? Excellence emerges not from accumulating separate skill categories but from their seamless integration within a coherent human being.
The hard/soft dichotomy represents another attempt to render the messy complexity of human capability manageable through oversimplification. Like other binary structures—left/right, liberal/conservative, thinking/feeling—it promises clarity while delivering division. It fragments not just our organizations but our understanding of ourselves, creating internal borders where integration should reign.
the references that define us
To illuminate how profoundly this dichotomy misleads us, I invite you to participate in an exercise I’ve conducted with thousands of participants across diverse contexts over more than a decade. The results remain remarkably consistent across cultures, organizational levels, and professional domains.
Begin by identifying someone who serves as a personal reference point—an individual whose example has significantly shaped your development or understanding of excellence. This might be a family member, teacher, mentor, colleague, or even a public figure whose work has deeply influenced you. Recall specific interactions or observations that left lasting impressions. Now, list five to ten distinctive characteristics that make this person significant in your life—what specific qualities or capabilities do they embody that you find most valuable?
With this list before you, categorize each attribute as either a “skill” (something they know how to do) or a “quality” (a way of being or characteristic of their personhood). When faced with ambiguous cases, make your best determination.
Across hundreds of iterations of this exercise, the pattern emerges with striking consistency: when identifying what we most value in those who influence us, we overwhelmingly name qualities rather than skills. We admire integrity more than technical proficiency, wisdom more than specialized knowledge, compassion more than strategic thinking—though these aren’t mutually exclusive. What impacts us most profoundly is who people are, not merely what they can do.
