Brand Blog

It’s commencement time, so what job skills are corporate CEOs seeking most among candidates today? Engineering? Technology? Finance?

None of the above, according to a recent IBM report and some recent conversations with local CEOs. The most-sought skills are the “soft skills,” such as the ability to collaborate, to manage projects and – most appealing – to lead teams. In fact, IBM’s 2012 global CEO study noted “collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees,” with 75 percent of CEOs citing it as critical.

The CEO of a 100+-year-old public company in Cleveland told us the shortage of effective project leaders is so severe he’s had to delay launching several new initiatives. Why is there such a shortage of these skills among our employees and new graduates? Here are a few thoughts to ponder:

People aren’t really trained in soft skills like collaboration, team building, project management and group conflict handling. So if collaboration is the top skill we’re seeking, we are wre hiring people with no formal training in that area, and why aren’t companies providing in-house seminars/skill-building programs to address it?

People feel they don’t have time to collaborate. The downturn has forced people into roles where they’re juggling what used to be the responsibilities of two, three or even four jobs. They can’t keep up with email, let alone find the time to build teams and collaborate. There’s far too much stress in organizations today and far too much focus on responding to the deluge of incoming emails.

Younger employees may not be as familiar with face-to-face collaboration as older ones. This generation of employees is often far more comfortable with sending a text or an email than in engaging in dialog. Collaboration and leadership can’t be accomplished in 140 characters.

It’s sometimes common for executives today to diagnose themselves as having ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder, when they appear forgetful or impatient. But the truth is, particularly with young people, we live in a world that is increasingly based on doing two things at once. We do email during meetings. Talk on the phone while driving. Read something else when we should be listening to a speaker. Some even (gasp) can’t resist texting while driving!

As communicators, we have to accept that giving someone your “undivided attention” is rapidly becoming a thing of the past – and that communications are often better packaged in short, scannable, “Twitter-sized” bursts and videos rather than in longer blocks of prose, no matter how beautifully crafted. The explosion of online video isn’t necessarily due to us becoming too intellectually lazy to read. It’s just a reflection of the way we’re being conditioned to communicate – short, fast, to the point, and with the understanding that there will be something else distracting our audience from the message we’re trying to share.

My daughters gave me the book Scorecasting for a birthday present, which talks about the surprising patterns that determine who wins games – applying a bit of the Freakonomics approach to sports. In the book’s first few pages, the authors identify four themes that drive sports, and they are amazingly similar to the same success factors behind most businesses:

- That which is recognizable or apparent is often given too much credit, whereas the real answer often lies concealed.
- Incentives are powerful motivators and predictors of how athletes, coaches, owners, and fans behave – sometimes with undesirable consequences.
- Human biases and behavior play a pivotal role in almost every aspect of life, and sports are no exception.
- The role of luck is underappreciated and often misunderstood.

Go Tribe!

The way b-to-b marketers are using social media is evolving but gaining steady acceptance and growing budgets, according to a new study by B2B Magazine. We’re still in the early adopter stages of social media, in most cases, and few are able to measure impact and sales conversions from the new tools. However, companies have recognized that it’s an important marketing channel that deserves the growing investment it’s receiving. Key findings from the study:

- LinkedIn and Facebook are the “platform” sites for social media marketing for b-to-b companies. Twitter follows as a close third.

- When the question is changed to “what’s the one MOST IMPORTANT method used,” blogging rises to the #3 ranking (followed by LinkedIn and Facebook). Blogging assumes an even higher priority among tech companies than b-to-b companies as a whole.

- Branding, website traffic and the promotion of products or events are currently the three most common uses of social media marketing. The main metric that marketers look for in gauging the performance of a social campaign is website traffic.

- YouTube reached “effectiveness” faster than any other social media channel. Forty-two percent of marketers using YouTube said it achieved effectiveness within a quick two- to six-month period.

A side note from another piece of research: we’re all getting older, and that includes the people using Facebook. A Pew Research report shows the average age of a Facebook user is now 38 years, and half are 35 and older. Fifty-six percent are female. Teens and young adults concerned about being friended or followed by parents have every right to be worried! (Facebook is now up to 750 million users, rapidly approaching the billion-user mark.)