Do we practice what we preach?: the association between Judgements of soft skills and performance evaluations over time

Recent articles in the popular press stress the importance of soft skills in leader performance evaluations, noting a shift from organizations’ earlier focus on hard skills. Despite the popular belief that organizations have shifted to valuing soft skills over hard skills, it remains unclear if managers have shifted to rely on assessments of soft skills in their leader performance evaluations. This study drew from archival data from an extensive, non-for-profit healthcare organization’s feedback process for managers. We hypothesized that soft skills would predict leader performance above and beyond hard skills in recent years, but that this finding would not hold in earlier years. We used multiple regression analysis to test if soft skills significantly predicted leaders’ performance above and beyond hard skills in a dataset collected between 2009 and 2013 and in a dataset collected between 2014 and 2018. In support of our hypothesis, we found that evaluations of soft skills predicted performance evaluations above and beyond hard skills in the 2014–2018 cohort, but soft skills did not predict performance evaluations above and beyond hard skills in the 2009–2013 cohort. These findings suggest a successful bridge between research and practice, and demonstrate that the increasing emphasis on soft skills in popular press articles is reflected in leader performance evaluations.