David Boelens (guest)
00:00:04.000 - 00:00:34.620
You want to bake a cake or make enchiladas or do whatever, right? You break out everything by task, and then you combine them to achieve the objective, not the reverse.

And so in learning and development, the more we can break those down into individual skills and define what skills are, that empowers you to really, truly make anything and get better at it. Every single iteration. Just like, hey, the first time I bake a cake, maybe not so good.

The hundredth time I bake a cake, it's gonna be pretty dang good.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:00:36.460 - 00:01:46.730
Hi there and welcome to the Step Up Expert Voices for Leadership Growth. I'm your host, Kent Knievel. Every week I talk to experts who focus on helping leaders step up their leadership game.

If you're new to the show, then on whatever platform you're using, I encourage you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. One last thing.

As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, I have a particular interest in supporting recent internally promoted leaders.

If that's you, or if you support a leader who has been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Playbook and download a free copy of my 90 day blueprint filled with practical advice for you or the leader you support in hitting the ground running and truly stepping up to their new leadership level. Without further ado, on with the show. Welcome, everybody.

Today we are going to be talking about soft skill training and hard skill training, but specifically the lessons that hard skill training has for soft skill training and vice versa, the lessons that soft skill training has for hard skill training. And with me for this conversation today is David Bolens. He is the leader of the integrated talent development group at Raytheon. Welcome, David.

I'm so glad to have you here today.

David Boelens (guest)
00:01:47.050 - 00:01:49.210
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:01:49.850 - 00:02:09.100
Yeah.

Well, before we get into our topic, I think, you know, as excited as I am for the topic, I think it's your background that makes me super excited for.

For our topics, I would love, with whatever depth you want to get into, I'd love for you to sort of share, you know, what your career journey, career arc has been that got you to what you're doing today.

David Boelens (guest)
00:02:09.580 - 00:02:27.020
Yeah, sure. So I grew up my.

My, you know, army family, moved around my whole life, experienced different cultures all around the world, told myself, you know, not gonna join the army. And I ended up getting into college and saying, hey, you know what? I'm gonna go join the army.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:02:27.400 - 00:02:28.840
Army thing sounds kind of nice.

David Boelens (guest)
00:02:29.640 - 00:03:59.220
Yeah. And so got into it because I just had this just Love of.

You know, I grew up in a bunch of different places and I just loved all the equipment that they used, all the different, you know, leaders that I read about. And eventually kind of got to a point where I was like, you know, I want to understand some of that firsthand.

And so was in the army for a few years and got to deploy to Iraq. I was a scout platoon leader.

And then after that was over with, I saw an opportunity to kind of do a life change, got out, went back to school and then applied to Raytheon, which is the company I'm at today, and had a. Have a. Have had a wonderful career thus far.

While my degree was in supply chain, I got to experience certainly some supply chain roles, but just given the size and scope of the company, I've gotten to experience operations, it plenty of project management roles.

And even in what I'm in right now, which probably to folks in other industries, other businesses would be considered somewhat of an HR talent development, learning and development role, which has been really, really fun.

And so, so across that whole span of my career, I've gotten to experience, you know, a ton of different looks at how you develop hard skills and soft skills.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:04:00.180 - 00:04:27.960
Yeah, nice. And so I love hearing about people's different journeys to where they're at because there's no real one path ever.

And so you're one of these folks who sort of my, my. From our previous conversation, you came into talent development via sort of the hard skill training. Right.

So I'm guessing you must have been noticed or identified as someone who was good at like teaching people how to do their job or, or something like that.

David Boelens (guest)
00:04:28.200 - 00:05:43.580
Yeah, so it was funny. One of the, you know, past few roles I've kind of been able to develop myself.

And so I've had a project management, what was called like a transformation role. And so it was all. All about kind of like trying to move the direction of a very large organization, you know, in a different way.

And it's a lot of, kind of helping empower people to, to meet their potential and, and kind of engaging the workforce to, to really do like a cultural shift, which was extraordinarily difficult. And so when 2020 happened, right. And 2020 happened to all of us, there's, there's significant shifts.

And so in that shift, I had the opportunity where, hey, the org's changing, you know, the situation's changing. David, what, what next? And fortunately for me, I had a great boss at the time who was like, hey, you know what?

I think you'd be a Great fit for essentially this learning and development, talent development type role within the ops supply chain function. And you know, at the time, I mean, I would say, oh, you know, okay, I mean, I'll do whatever you need me to do.

And, and I've grown from that to where it's like, I love it. It's really a cool opportunity.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:05:44.780 - 00:05:56.700
Yeah.

And like you said, I think you, you've been able to sort of experience the gamut of sort of hard skill and even kind of gotten into sort of soft skill leadership development in that journey as well.

David Boelens (guest)
00:05:56.700 - 00:07:31.160
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. So, like, you know, I would say, like, so, like when I was in the army, right, you kind of build up your skill sets and the way I.

It was structured and forgive me any of my army buddies who are listening, it's been a few years since I've been in. But you work at soldier skills, right? The individual soldier skills, and then you get proficient in that, right? You're trained in that.

And then how do you work in a team and how do you work in a squad, in a platoon, in a company, in a brigade? Right. It continues to stack and stack and stack. And so. But also we got to learn a lot of leadership through experience.

And so it's been kind of this unique situation there where all of a sudden, right, I went into the business world, I'm like, oh, how do we do leadership development here? How do we do hard skill training here? And what I learned is it's a very different scenario a lot of times, different companies.

Some of it's just compliance, right? And then push you off in the deep end and say, hey, best of luck.

You're going to be a, you know, production operations manager or, you know, buyer or whatever. You're kind of learning on the go.

And so that's, that's a very scary situation to go from this one culture where it's like, hey, everything's a little bit prescribed in a way to like, hey, it's a wide open world, figure it out. And, and I think there's pros and cons to both unique opportunities, I'll say.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:07:32.200 - 00:08:11.660
Yeah, yeah. Well.

And so I think when we were chatting about the topic for today, I think what struck me was your thoughts on how sort of both sides of this coin, so to speak, of soft skills and hard skills, which nobody likes those terms, but anybody who's listening to this podcast knows what they mean, so we're going to use those terms today.

And what's interesting, right, is I think, you know, in most recent years, I'VE heard more people say, you know, why do we call them soft skills when they're so much harder to learn? So I, let me start there. I'm curious, have you heard that saying? And what's your reaction?

David Boelens (guest)
00:08:13.019 - 00:11:16.920
Yeah, so I was, I was one of those people. I was, I was kind of like, you know, I think a lot of the soft skills are the hardest to learn.

And I think, you know, it's, it's, there's a reason why there's a whole industry out there, people publishing books on different, you know, different styles of leadership, different ways to communicate, conflict resolution, you name it. And so it's, it's really, it's a, it's a wide, wide world.

And what, what's been interesting is in those, in that, that soft skill arena, if you notice the people who've been really successful in writing the books or doing the conferences or whatever, they start to structure it, right? Anybody can say, hey, I want to get better at leadership. Cool. Well, what's that mean? Right?

And so on the, on the hard skill side, it's a lot easier because it's easily definable. And so when you and I were talking earlier, I talked about a structure of like, how do we break that out?

So for those listening, right, like my team, and I'm very lucky, I have some very, very, very talented and smart people on my team.

But we started looking at skills, not just as hard skills and soft skills, we started looking at breaking out a little bit more into what we call, like. And it gets, it's going to sound very familiar to many folks listening.

It's, you know, people skills, AKA soft skills or tool skills or process skills. And it sounds very simple. It's a just slight tweak.

But what we realize is when we break it out into those three groups gives us a little bit more bandwidth. And here's what I mean.

So on the people skill side, yeah, that, that is probably going to be owned by like the HR function within a big company, right? It's the leadership is communication. It's how we want to, you know, develop our people.

But then there's a, there's a middle ground where it's tool skills.

And if, if you're in, you know, any industry, any company, you're going to have tools that are common that you work with, let's just say SAP or Kinaxis or whatever.

And there's going to be those, those manuals that you have to learn and you have to know, but then you also have to kind of translate it into the language that's applicable to your company. And then the last skill, that's process skill. Hey, your company owns all of that. And usually it's the function that's on it.

So like for me, you know, ops and supply chain, we fully own that. We architect that up. Tool skills, it's kind of half and half. And then people skills, it's a little bit.

We try to rely on, you know, those other functions to help. Help do that. What's really challenging about all of that is you have to have kind of the end objective in mind. And it's like, you know, structure.

Structure or not, like what's your end objective?

So it's, we, we've kind of gone down a little bit of a learning curve, but we've, we've really found some benefit into thinking about it in terms of people skills, process skills, and tool skills versus just hard skills and soft skills.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:11:17.800 - 00:12:30.140
Okay, so we lost a little bit of a connection here. But let me, let me come back to. You were talking about people skills, tool skills, process skills, and you were saying, you know, people skills.

We were sort of leaning on HR for, to say, you know, leading, you know, what is the. I'll pick on something like feedback. Do we have a specific way that we want people provide or leaders providing people with feedback here? Right.

So we're looking to HR to help sort of drive some of the people skills. And the process skills are owned by your functions. You were saying supply chain as an example. Right.

Supply, you know, supply chain, processes, things like that. That's like solely owned by supply chain. Then the, the tool skills.

My understanding from what you were saying is there's maybe some joint ownership there. Kind of probably depends on what the tools are. If it's a common tool like SAP, that's probably owned by whoever owns SAP.

But I'd imagine in the functional spaces. Right. If, if you're dealing with machinery, I guess that's maybe even a question for you.

If you're dealing in kind of manufacturing machinery, the literal tools, you know, that might be.

David Boelens (guest)
00:12:30.460 - 00:12:32.380
It's a little bit more prescribed. Yeah.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:12:32.620 - 00:12:33.580
By the function.

David Boelens (guest)
00:12:34.140 - 00:15:21.740
Yeah. And I think, I think so. So by breaking it down that way, it's at least a little bit more digestible.

And then from there, you know, what you find is that most organizations don't break it down far enough. So here's what, you know, here's what I'm saying. So like, most companies or most organizations will say, hey, David, you're going to be a buyer.

And you know, here's the main stuff that you need to know, and they may give me a couple classes and it feels good, but maybe it's not deep enough. Right. I don't know from that training necessarily how to place a purchase order or you have it, it's not telling me step by step what to do.

And so there's this gap between, like, what a buyer is or what a sell lead is down to, like, how do I do it? And so over time, our team, we use a lot of analogies.

And so what we've actually figured out is, you know, the training kind of stops at what we'll call the role level or the process level. And what we don't do is we don't break it down a few levels lower into, like a task. Okay, great. You're a buyer who must place a purchase order.

What's that mean? Right. What screens do you use? What tools do you need? How do you do it?

What, you know, like all this different sort of stuff that is helpful for the end user. And when you. When you find out, you break it down a few levels lower. It's kind of like Legos, you know, why has Legos gotten to be what it is?

It's because at the very DNA level, ultimately it's just a bunch of pieces that fit together. And we think about learning in the same way and our skills in the same way.

You can start building, like, hey, if David's a buyer, he needs all of these different skills, which then turns into skill sets, which then turns into competencies, which then turns into the role of a buyer, which then turns into a career of somebody in supply chain.

And so if we think about it in that logical kind of building block way, the power of it is that each skill, now it doesn't matter if I'm a buyer, I can still take, like, how do I place a purchase order? And all the different tasks that go into that. Well, you know what, Our production control people need to know some aspects of that.

Our material program managers need to know some aspects of that. Strategic sourcing group needs to know some aspects of that. And I don't have to recreate training for every single role.

I just use that skill and I plug and play just like you would Legos. And so, you know, it's just kind of thinking through the architecture is what we found to be so powerful.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:15:22.700 - 00:16:17.230
Yeah, nice. Well, and we were talking about.

So I want to start with the part that wasn't as surprising to me, and then I want to get into the one that was maybe a bit More surprising to me from your point of view because I think as you're breaking that down, that makes tons of sense from a hard skill perspective.

As we were talking prior, I said I'm guessing there's some lessons there that hard skill training kind of has to teach those who are designing soft skill training. So let's start there because my guess is part of, part of it is what you already talked about. Have we broke, have we actually broken.

Let's even maybe, maybe it's feedback. I don't know if you want to, what kind of use case you'd want to use, but maybe it's providing feedback.

Have we actually broken that down into the clear enough steps for people to truly learn and be able to implement practice? What are, what are your thoughts there on the lessons that hard skill training kind of has to teach? Soft skill training?

David Boelens (guest)
00:16:17.630 - 00:19:24.710
Yeah, absolutely.

So I think there's a lot of different lessons but like if we go down into a skill of like providing feedback, I would say, you know, it's such a target rich environment, we'll never get there. By the way, this is just kind of like what's our objective? What do we want to get? But if we say, hey, providing feedback is an objective.

Here's how, how we've tried to do this in the past is we think about the life cycle of somebody going through a bunch of different, you know, of our systems. So we, we link it together. That's part of why like my team's called Integrated Talent Development. So here's, here's an example.

We would hire on an intern and in that internship process we actually have a variety of different instances where we have that internal, specifically provide feedback. And it's not just to like their, their, their, their, you know, team or supervisor, but we look at them as like a link in a chain.

So they're going around and they're providing feedback perhaps to their own school about like, hey, this is what the Raytheons of the world or the Lockheed's or the bell helicopters or L3s of the world want in terms of skills. We're encouraging them to do that and we're giving them the tools and resources to do that. The intern then graduates.

Let's say they get an opportunity with us. They're in a rotation program. We do the same. We say, hey, you're a Rotator now. You have a little bit bigger shoes to fill.

You know who you need to provide feedback to? It's your interns that are right behind you. And we have mechanisms in place to like fully structure that.

And then, hey, you're done with being a rotator. You're, you know, at a next level and next level. And we kind of implement that. And so over time, people are learning through experience.

But we, we have checks and balances in place to ensure that that's happening, that there's examples in there. We provide virtual mentoring, right?

Like as an example, we'll, we'll record somebody who's done feedback, maybe seen as the expert in feedback, and we link that to a skill in our system so they can get virtual mentorship, they get the experience. And then last but not least, the lesson is, does their manager actually think they're good at giving feedback? So we continuously rate them.

We continuously say, like, hey, you know, David's an intern and he says he's a master at providing feedback. Is that how you feel? And a lot of times the supervisor is like, well, you know, they're an intern or they haven't been.

There's no way they can be a master at it. Right.

And the reason why they can do it is not just because it's the gut feel of the supervisor, but we also put criteria around it, confirmation criteria around that skill. So we may say, hey, in order to be a master, bare minimum, you got to have at least five years of demonstrated experience doing xyz.

Or here's an artifact that you can provide that shows you've demonstrated xyz, right? You've done X amount of things.

So we try to take away the subjective on skill development and make it more, keep pulling it, you know, to the left on making it more objective.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:19:25.350 - 00:21:01.240
Yeah.

So I want to dig into a couple things you said, because I think what you're highlighting here is there's a natural need, job based need to implement what's being learned on the hard skill side, right. That you are literally being taught how to do your job. You will be using these skills, you know, you will be using what we're teaching you, period.

This just, it's how you do your job. And what I'm hearing is sort of building in the expectation of using what you're learning.

The sort of assignment of you will be using what you're learning here or with this person. And then sort of the feedback structure of then having someone evaluate, you know, are they doing it right, Which I would say we don't.

Historically, I don't know that there's been a lot of that in leadership development. In my, you know, in, in my experience, a lot of what I design, I try to build that in it's, you know, here, let's learn this thing.

Let's, here's your assignment. Go do it. And then we will talk about, you know, what you learned, how do you rate yourself? What are you going to do differently the next time? Right.

Which is all about, you know, how we learn. Right. It's. It's knowing what needs to be learned, caring to learn it, learning it, and then the final stages of doing it and being evaluated. Right.

So I, I, you know, I would say, if there's one. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's 1. 1. One of the big lessons from hard skill training to soft skill training is you gotta use it.

David Boelens (guest)
00:21:01.800 - 00:21:22.080
Gotta use it or else you lose it. And it was kind of like another analogy that we use a lot is a kitchen.

So, like, I will go and I will talk to somebody and like, you know, anybody listening, you can confirm I've never been to your house. Right. Never been to your house. Right. But.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:21:22.080 - 00:21:23.400
But I've never been to my house.

David Boelens (guest)
00:21:23.480 - 00:21:43.320
Never been to your house. But I can also guarantee you, even though I haven't been to your house, that you probably have a utensil drawer in your kitchen.

One or two, one or two spoons, knives, forks, you name it. I can also confirm that you probably don't have a cabinet that's just solely dedicated to making enchiladas.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:21:47.240 - 00:21:49.960
Fun fact, I have an enchilada cabinet. No, I don't. You're right.

David Boelens (guest)
00:21:50.040 - 00:22:48.480
See, and I had, I had, it's funny, I did have one. One time where somebody was like, you know, hey, you know, I make. Okay. But for the most part. Right, right. We don't do it that way.

We break it out into where we have, like, utensil drawer. And it's by task, it's not by the end state. And so I always ask people, and we use that analogy all the time.

It's like, well, why do we do learning any different if all of us innately understand, right? If you want to bake a cake or make enchiladas or do whatever, right.

You break out everything by task, and then you combine them to achieve the objective, not the reverse.

And so in learning and development, the more we can break those down into individual skills and define what skills are, that empowers you to really, truly make anything and get better at it every single iteration. Just like, hey, the first time I bake a cake, maybe not so good. The hundredth time I bake a cake, it's going to be pretty dang good.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:22:49.040 - 00:24:17.340
Yeah. So let's use, just for fun, let's use the feedback training analogy or use case for a moment. Right.

So that might be not just sort of showing someone, here's the, the broader steps, but it's really breaking it down and saying, you know, the very first thing is even just how you sit down with someone to engage in and sharing that we're about to have a feedback conversation.

So let's really break that down and get, get clear on that or even practiced on how do you just start the feedback conversation, let alone then, all right, you, you've shared your, you know, intent to give feedback.

Then maybe there's even the breaking down for someone, the, like, why you care enough to, you know, let's also share why you care enough to give feedback. Right. And, and, you know, which, you know, is a critical component of like, partnership. Right.

Like, I care enough to give you this feedback because I want you to get better and I want to help. Right.

And then there's the, whatever method, you know, popular method that I've been using with a group that I work with quite a bit this year is the SBI model. Right. The Situation Behavior Impact model. Right.

So, you know, walking someone through how to use that model and then perhaps there's, well, how do you actually close down the conversation? Right. And if you. As I'm, as I'm kind of thinking through this here, right. The.

There's components of this that could easily be pulled out and used in other contexts.

David Boelens (guest)
00:24:17.500 - 00:24:48.840
Absolutely. Heck, you can even go even further, right? Like timing, right. Is. Is feedback best, like immediately, hey, I just noticed you did this.

Like, let's, let's, let's have a quick discussion on that or, hey, I'm not going to say anything, but I'm going to do it all at the end of a year in one full, like, annual review. And it's going to be a surprise. Right. Obviously that's not, that's not good. Right.

So like all of those things that you can teach people and break those out into little chunks, just like you said.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:24:50.360 - 00:24:50.840
Yeah.

David Boelens (guest)
00:24:50.840 - 00:26:10.290
It's so powerful because while we're just talking breaking down the structure of skills for soft skills and hard skills or what we're calling, you know, people skills, process skills, tool skills, the real power of this is it's not just structured to have structure. It's. It's truly. We want to have the right skill to the right person at the right time. And what's, what's all the rage these days, right. It's AI.

Right. We, we thought you could get through a whole podcast without saying AI once, right?

But, like, it's truly right using the chat GPTs, where you can go in, you ask a question, and you get it. Automatic response. That is all happening because you have that. And it's. It's successful in companies when it's on top of structured data, right?

That's maintained and accurate and all that sort of stuff. And it's, It's. It's. That's why it's so, so important, because when you have that, you can increase time to productivity.

You can literally drop me into a role and, you know, if I have the answers in the right context with the right standards, right skill, right person, right time, you have an agile workforce. You have a confident workforce who can essentially take on any challenge, regardless of whatever's coming.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:26:11.170 - 00:26:43.520
Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So let's go into the other side. And we haven't had this conversation. And when we were.

When we were talking about planning, you know, for our conversation today, I was like, oh, that sounds interesting. I can't wait to hear about that.

So you had also said, well, because I guess intuitively to me, I was like, well, I don't know what soft skill training really has to teach. Hard skill training, like, in my head, right? And you were like, well, actually, I have some thoughts on that. So I'm really curious. What.

What are your thoughts on that? What are the lessons that soft skill training has to teach?

David Boelens (guest)
00:26:43.600 - 00:27:05.230
Hard skill training, I think you have to understand. It's kind of like back to the baking the cake example, right? You can have. Well, I'll use a. Maybe an example that I'm more familiar with.

I love to smoke meats. I smoke, you know, pork butts. I will smoke brisket.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:27:05.630 - 00:27:07.070
You have to do brisket. There we go.

David Boelens (guest)
00:27:07.070 - 00:29:38.780
You have to. Have to. You got to smoke. Smoke turkey for Thanksgiving, right? I smoke everything.

But what you'll notice is, like, anybody can take the process and you can say, hey, Turn it on 250, add these ingredients x amount of time, right? Like, and you go through it, and you might get different results, even though everybody's kind of following it the same.

And what, what that is is it's, you know, just time and experience where you kind of learn, like, well, okay, the temperature's out a little bit differently. And, you know, there's. There's a stall thing where maybe there's a trick to get through the stall. You got to wrap it in tinfoil.

And just like, the tips and tricks of the trade that you just developed develop over Time and what, what I think is unique and can be leveraged in the, the hard skill thing is, yes, while hard skills are very much like, you know, a little bit more process and structured and everything, there's the nuances that you can certainly glean from the soft skill side of the house that are just gained with experience and a little bit of flexibility. And, you know, hey, we, we don't want to teach people necessarily what to do. We want to teach them how to think.

And so, so that's been a critical thing for us. Like, we don't want to take away that, that critical thinking throughout the whole process.

We don't, we don't necessarily want to create a work instruction and be like, hey, you know, while, while helpful, we want people to understand the larger context.

And so just that, that's a big thing that sometimes can be missed when you get so wrapped around axle of like, hey, I know I have to, you know, complete X process or do X job and you forget, like, yeah, but, but throughout that whole thing, it's, it's good to understand maybe the intent of why you're doing it. I'm a big intent guy. And so just infusing intent into all of this stuff and saying, hey, well, why, why are you doing this?

It helps force the workforce or the employee to think and maybe come up with a better process in the, in the, in the, in the interim. Right? Because, like, hey, they, they understand, yeah, I can follow these 10 steps, but oh, my goodness, why am I doing these 10 steps?

Why not shave off the last two? Because we can still accomplish what your intent is with eight.

And now we've saved a bunch of, you know, the company time and money and maybe increase the quality of the product. You have, you name it. So, so that's one big lesson that.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:29:38.780 - 00:30:34.400
We'Ve taken that's interesting, right, Because I think it's implied in leadership development that, yes, I'll keep picking on feedback training.

I don't know why that's in my head today, but it's implied that we're going to teach everybody this model, but we know not everybody's going to do it the same way.

So we sort of, there's at least some implicit acknowledgment, if not explicit acknowledgement that says you're going to have to make this your own and it'll get easier over time. You'll come up with your own, probably even your own method over time. Right.

That's what I'm hearing you say too, is it's also building to your point, right, if steps A through D were supposed to be done exactly the same, no ifs, ands or buts or deviations, then it's probably also ripe for automation. If it can be right.

David Boelens (guest)
00:30:34.400 - 00:30:38.240
And that's just a work. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:30:38.240 - 00:31:08.400
If you have a human involved, right, you, and you're not automating it. Clearly there's a reason and probably some of that reason is, is what's, you know, in our, what's, you know, in between, in between our ears. Right.

So part, part of what you're needing to teach people is pattern recognition and problem solving from a general, you know, perspective. So they can say, hmm, well, I know this thing, here's this problem I'm facing. It looks a lot like this other thing. Right, Interesting.

Maybe I can just apply this same approach over here.

David Boelens (guest)
00:31:09.760 - 00:33:19.670
It's, it's, well, you know, what's unique is.

And we just kind of, I mean, I wish I could say I searched it out, but I just stumbled on it a few months ago, I mean, actually about a year ago on LinkedIn. But it was like the World Economic Forum, the future of jobs. There's a whole report, hundreds of pages, tons of stats.

And it's just all that you would ever need to know about industries, skill development, what it looks like. And an interesting takeaway based on what you and I have just talked about is the, it says, hey, here's what today looks like 2025.

And what does, what do we, as this group of experts think 2030 is going to look like? And you want to know the number one skill for 2030? Actually, the number one skill that's today.

And then what's, what's needed is analytical thinking today and then AI and big data in 2030. And so the linkage there, I think is right in L&D's wheelhouse where it's like, hey, we need to teach people how to think today.

And then how does that thinking translate into, well, how can we leverage this at scale, just further empower the human experience to again, tighten that, that, that OODA loop, the, the decision making loop to say like, okay, you know what, used to take me two weeks to understand how to do X, Y and Z?

Now it may take me, you know, a minute because I can just type it in and I have, you know, based on the structured data I have in terms of all my skills, here's exactly what I need to know how to do and when to do it. And oh, guess what?

Because we already know the role I'm in and the tools I use, I've already taken that training and had those experiences and had that feedback six months ago before this problem even came up. And it's so, it's an exciting time, I think, to be in the field that we're in. Right.

And helping leaders equip their workforce to truly like, you know, just kind of lean into this, this, this, all the changes that are going on in the world.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:33:20.470 - 00:34:10.590
Yeah, yeah. It's a wild time. So part of it, right, is the, the. From what, what does soft skills have to teach hard skills. Right.

Part of it is the pattern recognition, you know, the probably willingness to deviate from process and then knowing when and how. Part of what I'm hearing you say as well is the adaptability component. Right. Which is maybe that's kind of undergirding everything anyway.

And I'm now just throwing the umbrella over it, which is, you know, the, the ability to adapt or the need to adapt. Right. So are there, are there other things that you see soft skill, you know, soft skills getting right and how they do.

We do soft skill training over here that we need to be thinking about in hard skill training as well.

David Boelens (guest)
00:34:12.870 - 00:36:46.580
That's, that's, it's tough. I would say that the, the biggest thing I've, I've experienced is like, like, like what we were saying, hard skills, right.

You can probably tie those to business value in some sort of way, shape or form, just like you said, hey, if I can really structure this, I know the amount of data or the, the amount of money that, that, that that cycle time takes or the quality that that's going to impact or you name it, soft skills, not so much. But if we think of soft skills in terms of like, well, it's, it's a force multiplier. Right.

Anybody can do process X or process Y, but if, if we really tie that and think of it in through business value, like you get a really good leader or a great communicator or an incredible change agent, mean that that's, sky's the limit. So just structuring it in a way that truly makes sense is, is, I mean, it's going to drive results for your company. Yeah.

And so for, for us, it's just saying, well, in this, the soft skill arena, and this is how we've, we've done this is we'll say, well, where do you consistently see the need as an example for soft skill implementation? And so we'll say, and this is an example, we'll say, well, guess what?

Every year, you know, we have supervisors, regardless of what actual functional role they're in. They. They have to, let's say, take on a rotation program person or they're taking on a new employee or they're taking on an intern or whatever.

And they have to be able to, you know, communicate effectively what the standards are, you know, kind of show them around, you know, you name it. There's a ton of soft skills that are embedded in that, but we can structure that again, those skills into a skill set.

Skill set into a role, new employee, supervisor, and then build that up. And so now you. It's just, you know, on repeat every, you know, every time somebody gets a new employee. Oh, I'm just going through this process.

And soft skills are structured in a way that, you know, I don't even have to think too hard. It's like, oh, oh, yeah, I remember. This is important. Right.

I need to be communicating proactively in the gap time that I hired my employee before they start. Right. There's like, let's say a couple months. How about communicator?

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:36:47.300 - 00:37:01.250
You were talking about value too, Right. Which is really hard to prove or talk about on the soft skill side. Which.

What's fascinating about that is I was previous guest on my podcast who coaches founders.

David Boelens (guest)
00:37:01.970 - 00:37:02.370
Yeah.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:37:02.370 - 00:37:55.270
And you know, she's really passionate about helping founders scale their business from either just a solo founder or very small team to, you know, multiplying that team out. And, and we were talking about, well, she was talking about the skills, right.

So to speak, or what have you that are needed to sort of maintain or, or create, you know, the culture that's needed as this company is growing. And she was describing things that I talk about that are simply about like when you step from a maybe supervisor to manager or manager to director.

She was describing just leadership skills. Right.

And I just kind of paused and I was like, gosh, you know, we're talking about leadership skills, but you're talking about it as culture building skills. But, you know, if you think about it magnified in this small team that is the company, you know.

David Boelens (guest)
00:37:57.030 - 00:37:57.390
It.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:37:57.390 - 00:38:45.420
It really shows how clear the impact that that founder or leadership team's leadership has on the company. Right. And. And sure.

So I think that that's the one thing I'm kind of, how do we take some of those lessons and how do we apply those in bigger companies? Like, like you work in or I used to work in. Right. Because that. It's so big, it's hard for us with.

To say, you know, what any individual manager's leadership Skills and how they, you know, how they're impacting results. Right.

But it's when you look at those exact same skills on such a smaller scale of a really small company, you know, a leader who can't get out of their own way in a small company, the, the impact of that is, is you can't hide, you can't hide it. Right?

David Boelens (guest)
00:38:45.580 - 00:38:46.020
Yeah.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:38:46.020 - 00:38:46.700
So obvious.

David Boelens (guest)
00:38:47.660 - 00:41:09.520
It's to your point, from a. Evaluating the impact of those soft skills on the, the business, it is difficult.

I flip it right now into, you know, and there's a ton of different ways, like as an individual, you can say, how, how am I doing doing on this? You're right. You can do 360 reviews. You can ask for peer feedback.

You can, you know, do after action reviews after major programs and say, hey, we're, you know, all this different sort of stuff and you could probably figure out some stuff.

I think the challenge that we we've really kind of been around from a learning development perspective is to say, how do we get somebody from I don't know what I'm doing in my job, I'm not confident in my role to, I'm fully confident and I can operate independently. And measuring that has been incredibly difficult. But again, kind of tying back to the skills. If you fully define a skill, you know, what is it?

How do you confirm that the person has it? What's the, you know, the confirmation criteria, all that, all the different sort of stuff, what's the knowledge associated with it?

If you can structure that, then what you have is eventually you can, you can have the, you know, a young employee or an experienced employee who takes that skill and they say, okay, you know, to really, truly learn this skill, on average across our, that, that, that person, it took them five days or 10 days or you know, three weeks and across the workforce it takes two weeks. Okay, you can start measuring the effectiveness of those leaders based on the time to productivity of folks in those different roles.

It's, it's not there today, but, but right.

At least for us, we're trying to get to a place where we can start truly more objectively stating like, hey, in order to be in this role, it takes about this time and what, hey, Supervisor X, why is it taking your people twice as long?

Are you just not equipping them appropriately or is it truly something within your environment where we need to give you more resources to help equip you?

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:41:09.520 - 00:41:09.840
Right.

David Boelens (guest)
00:41:10.080 - 00:41:18.410
And so I think it's just a unique, dynamic kind of conversation in, based on the company and the industry Nice.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:41:18.570 - 00:41:32.810
Well, so maybe next time we have you on, we can talk about measurement. So we're going to put our tray tables up and our seat backs in the upright position and start to land this plane.

So, David, what's one piece of advice you have for leaders out there?

David Boelens (guest)
00:41:33.850 - 00:42:16.800
I would say, you know, I think everybody talks big game about like wanting to develop our employees. My challenge would be if you're in a senior leader position. And I've been very lucky in that we've gotten to experience this.

And you see night and day difference is involve your learning and development teams. So often, right? When you're setting goals for the next year and we're kind of in that season right now, like, what are goals for next year?

If you pull in your leadership and development team in that a lot of times you'll find out you don't have to recreate the wheel. Maybe the solution's already in place and you just weren't aware of it. So I think just involving those teams in your goal alignment talks is huge.

That really helps develop your workforce.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:42:17.520 - 00:42:37.000
Yeah. So I often say, what's one piece of advice you have for those who support leaders? Right. So that could be L and D, who's supporting leaders?

That could be other HR partners who support leaders. That could be senior leaders. Right. Because leaders manage leaders too. So what's one piece of advice you have for those who are supporting leaders?

David Boelens (guest)
00:42:37.480 - 00:43:38.680
I would, for, for me, I, I think of like the, the piece of advice is like, you can take ownership of your own skill development journey and help others behind you. Right? So like there's, we have a, we have a saying that everyone has something to learn and something to share.

And so here's, here's an example, right? We can have an intern who at the very end of their internship will say, what's the one thing you wish you had known at the start of your internship?

That now you know at the beginning. And we actually encourage them to create their own two minute video on it and post it. And we align it to a skill.

And so, hey, the next intern that comes the next year, they don't have to figure that out the next time. And so I think just supporting leaders is like saying, hey, raising your hand. I didn't understand this.

Would it be okay if this doesn't exist, that I help create kind of a quick instruction, help the person behind me? I think that's just a huge thing that shows initiative and shows that you're kind of thinking beyond just your own four corners of a cubicle.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:43:40.360 - 00:43:51.800
Nice I love it. Well, David, this was very fun. I can't wait to continue our conversations either, you know, on the record or off the record.

Really appreciate you being here today. Thank you so much.

David Boelens (guest)
00:43:52.120 - 00:43:56.210
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. And, yeah, talk soon.

Kent Kniebel (host)
00:43:56.770 - 00:44:20.940
All right, take care. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thanks for listening.

I'd encourage you to head on over to my website, Kent Coach, and start a conversation with me there. Or check out my promotion playbook at Kent Coach Playbook.

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