Strategic communication, the queen of soft skills
How interpersonal skills continue to be crucial despite the advancement of technology
3' min read
3' min read
Although it sounds paradoxical, as technologies related to Artificial Intelligence grow, the demand for soft skills by companies increases. There is plenty of research to highlight this, not least a study published by the World Economic Forum in the "Future of Jobs Report 2023". Erik Brynjolfsson, a professor at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred AI, points out that, although Artificial Intelligence performs extremely well in technical and analytical tasks, it is in tasks that require the ability to communicate, to lead a team or to collaborate with other individuals that it reveals all its limitations. The analysis is reassuring: on the relational skills the leadership of humans continues to hold an important competitive advantage.
In a complex, uncertain, unstable and increasingly liquid professional environment, quoting the paradigm of the well-known sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, it is precisely these transversal skills that make the difference. To succeed in business, institutions and organisations, building relationships between people is an imperative that cannot be escaped. Although it is a common tendency to attribute the success of large companies to individuals, the reality is quite different: there is no professional, no matter how talented or ingenious, capable of tackling truly challenging objectives alone. Sociologists and psychologists call this propensity to overestimate the impact of a single (outstanding) person a 'fundamental attribution error'. In essence, it would be like attributing Amazon's success exclusively to its founder, Jeff Bezos, while leaving out the work of its nearly one hundred and fifty thousand employees.
Therefore, the time saved thanks to the extraordinary support of new technologies should, if anything, be invested in strengthening those skills that still differentiate humans from machines, the so-called soft skills.
The first 'official' use of the word soft skill dates back to 1972 in a US Army training manual. The term has spread in Italy especially in recent years, often generating confusion due to the overlapping of different names used to define them: soft skill, character skill, behaviour skill, non-cognitive skill. With the intention of bringing clarity to this concept, I gave a formal definition in the book From talent to success, published by ACS Editore and published in 2021: 'The set of all the characteristics of a person that favour his or her relationship with others'. This description makes explicit the pivotal element of soft skills: relationships.
This is why the most appropriate Italian translation is 'strategic-relational skills', and the most advanced of these is Strategic Communication, which can therefore be defined as the 'queen of soft skills'. This discipline was created with the aim of supporting entrepreneurs, managers and professionals in the pursuit of increasingly challenging objectives in complex contexts by building solid and lasting relationships.
