Soft Skill KPI’s

In an article in the current issue of CSCMP’s Supply Chain Quarterly the authors show that companies need to measure both business performance and employee interpersonal effectiveness when evaluating supply chain performance. And it makes sense that if we are going to measure one side of the business that we need to measure the other dimensions as well. While I agree with the idea that employee soft skills like leadership and communication can’t be measured in the same manner as fill rates and instocks, I believe there are significant issues when it comes to measuring these soft skills.

Evaluating interpersonal skills is difficult and frequently open to a wide range of interpretations. It’s hard to have an unbiased view of another’s behavior, especially if it deviates from what we might expect or how we might act in similar situations. A person who is demanding and harsh may actually need to act this way to get his/her job done to meet the business expectations. In this case saying that this behavior is not appropriate may be more a measure of the pressure to meet business goals than a valid interpretation of interpersonal skills. When push comes to shove, companies will care more about meeting their business goals and shareholder expectations than they will in developing nice people – even if nice people are more productive in the long run.

So what is the answer? In my view getting an accurate view of a person’s soft skills takes a lot of time. We need to observe the individual over an extended period of time and in a variety of situations. And we need to be experienced in objectively evaluating other’s behavior. In most cases the cost of doing proper evaluations is beyond the reach of most companies, and is usually reserved for the top levels of the company.

What about the rest of the employees? Here’s where I believe we have a structural problem: most managers are so busy trying to meet the expectations of their managers that they have little time to get to know their direct reports. And you can’t evaluate what you don’t know. To me this is a larger issue than how we evaluation soft skills, since these evaluations require a great deal of time and experience. If we make our managers’ jobs so demanding that they can’t take the time to develop the people under them, then I don’t see how we can expect these people to develop their soft skills. They will be too busy worrying about meeting the company’s financial and business goals.

Until this structural problem is resolved, I don’t see how we can expect much improvement in employees’ soft skills. Short-term business goals will always trump these, since business goals can be more easily measured.

You can read the article here:

http://www.supplychainquarterly.com/topics/Strategy/201104people/