A corporate CEO once said to me – “I don’t do the soft stuff”-“I just do the hard stuff.” In other words he was most comfortable performing the financial engineering and the command and control functions. The tools of that trade are the spreadsheets, power points, personnel manuals, and lengthy company and product narratives, leading board meetings etc.
Doing “the soft stuff” just did not come as easy. It was not as important. The intangibles of communicating vision, motivating a staff, customers, and partners, showing empathy, learning and active listening – in other words sustaining all of the human, emotional energy that it takes to propel a company forward – those are the skills of “the soft stuff.”
Doing “the soft stuff” means asking for “buy-in” and being a good steward of people’s careers and customers’ business. It isn’t about command and control.
At the time I thought to myself, “” The “soft stuff is the hard stuff”. Getting “the soft stuff” right is at the heart of entrepreneurial success. You can learn or commission, or salary people who can do the hard stuff. You can’t teach people how to do “the soft stuff” – to have empathy and compassion, and to try to help everyone win. You have it or you don’t. You think that it is important or you don’t.
As Daniel Pink[1] and Daniel Ariely[2] are helping us to understand, intrinsic motivations are the heart and soul of modern behavior. As an entrepreneur – that makes the “soft stuff” the most important stuff.
In this section I am going to share a few of the behaviors that I have learned to get “the soft stuff” right.
[1] See Daniel H. Pink, Drive, The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.
[2] See Daniel Ariely, The Upside of Irrationality
