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Soft Skills Revealed:An Examination of Relational Skills in Librarianship

Miriam L. Matteson, Matthew McShane, and Emily Hankinson*

IntroductionVirtually all reports on the future of academic libraries and librarianship emphasize the need for librarians to be highly effective at leadership, outreach, collaboration, and the ability to communicate library value. For example, librarians must be able to advocate for resources, negotiate with vendors and administrators, and build relation-ships and provide social support for students and faculty. All of these roles require relational or “soft skills”—the non-technical, interpersonal abilities used to facilitate work and achieve goals. The idea of soft skills, however, is not conceptually clear. What are “effective interpersonal communication skills”? How do you develop, measure, or reward for them? How do you get better at “building relationships”? The lack of a clear definition and classifi-cation of soft skills needed in librarianship hinders us from fully diagnosing and developing our own skills sets. This paper presents an exploratory, qualitative research study that examined academic librarians’ self-reported soft skills and how they employ those skills in the workplace.

Literature ReviewThe concept of “soft skills”, though compelling in its simplicity, lacks construct clarity in published literature. It’s a phrase most people know of, but can’t define. Soft skills are considered to be the non-technical abilities required to facilitate interpersonal interactions to achieve specified goals. What makes a soft skill a skill is that it is a demonstrable, applied action based on a particular knowledge base.1

Historically, the phrase emerged in the mid-20th century in the context of studying United States Army training procedures. The phrase first appeared in a 1972 conference report by U. S. Army system engineers. In a set of three reports, Drs. Fry and Whitmore define soft skills, articulate a behavioral model tool to analyze those skills, and discuss methods of implementing training on soft skills.2 They write (p. 12):

We can specify what a machine operator ought to do if we know the situations or environments in which he works, the purposes of his work in these situations, and the theories of operation of the machines he uses. Now suppose we were dealing with a supervisor or a leader or a counselor. He is not a machine operator; rather, he is a people operator. He directs the activities of people toward the accomplishment of specified purposes in specified situations.

Since then, and throughout the transition observed in US business and industry in the last half of the 20th century from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, there has been a steady rise in the interest in un-derstanding the non-technical, people-focused aspects of work.

* Miriam L. Matteson, Associate Professor. Matthew McShane, Emily Hankinson, Kent State University, School of Information.

No universally agreed upon taxonomy of relational skills exists in the literature. An overarching framework of 20 competencies, including knowledge, skills, self-concepts and values, traits, and motives was developed by Spencer and Spencer (See Table 1).3 Their framework, they believe, includes the set of competencies that predict a significant percentage of performance excellence; that is, employees who exhibit many or most of the compe-tencies in the framework tend to be the highest performers in an organization.

The Spencer and Spencer competencies list is a helpful model from which to develop a more nuanced un-derstanding of soft skills, by properly identify which are skills (applied knowledge) and which are motives, knowledge, attitudes, or traits. Rainsbury et al.4 used the Spencer and Spencer framework to compare current and graduated students’ perceptions of skill importance. They found that graduates deemed all the skills in the list to be more important than the current students did, but there were no differences in importance between the hard and soft skills.

Researchers in the hospitality and tourism field carried out a set of studies exploring the soft skill com-petencies important to their industry. They first conducted an extensive review of the literature extracting a list of 107 competencies which they grouped in seven categories: communication, performance management, self-management, leadership, interpersonal, political/cultural, and counterproductive. They next organized a Delphi panel to consider the list, resulting in the panel adding nine additional competencies. The complete list, grouped by the seven categories was then circulated to a convenience sample of members of the Society for Hu-man Resources Management who were asked to rate the relative importance of each competency. The results of the exploratory factor analysis supported a five-factor model of soft skills, which the researchers then labeled and defined as:

• Team developer—build trust, rapport, and cooperation• Coach—provide training, evaluate, provide recognition• Destroyer—micromanage and aggressive management• Problem handler—respond to customer problems• Influencer—provide feedback to improve performance

TABLE 1Spencer and Spencer (1993) Competencies

Hard Skills Soft Skills

Analytical thinking Conceptual thinkingTechnical expertise

Achievement orientationConcern for order, quality, and accuracyInitiativeInformation seekingInterpersonal understandingCustomer service orientationImpact and influence on othersOrganizational awarenessRelationship buildingDeveloping othersDirectivenessTeamwork and co-operationTeam leadershipSelf-controlSelf-confidenceFlexibilityOrganizational commitment

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This framework is interesting in that it includes negative skills (the destroyer category) which the research suggests are skills that contribute to a negative work environment. As with the Spencer and Spencer framework tested in Rainsbury et al., the initial set of 116 items is not exclusively a set of skills, but also includes traits and attitudes and roles.

Robles5 explored the soft skills most desirable for success in the workplace as determined by business execu-tives. Students in a business communication class interviewed 90 executives who were asked to provide a list of the 10 most important soft skills. An initial list of 517 skills was deduplicated and merged thematically to a list of 26. The top ten skills named most frequently by the executives were:

• Communication—oral, speaking capability, written, presenting, listening• Courtesy—manners, etiquette, business etiquette, gracious, says please and thank you, respectful• Flexibility—adaptability, willing to change, lifelong learner, accepts new things, adjusts, teachable• Integrity—honest, ethical, high morals, has personal values, does what’s right• Interpersonal Skills—nice, personable, sense of humor, friendly, nurturing, empathetic, has self-con-

trol, patient, sociability, warmth, social skills• Positive Attitude—optimistic, enthusiastic, encouraging, happy, confident• Professionalism—businesslike, well-dressed, appearance, poised• Responsibility—accountable, reliable, gets the job done, resourceful, self-disciplined, wants to do well,

conscientious, common sense• Teamwork—cooperative, gets along with others, agreeable, supportive, helpful, collaborative• Work Ethic—hard working, willing to work, loyal, initiative, self-motivated, on time, good attendanceRobles is clear in his approach that soft skills include more than just behaviors. He writes, “Soft skills are

character traits, attitudes, and behaviors—rather than technical aptitude or knowledge. Soft skills are the intan-gible, nontechnical, personality-specific skills that determine one’s strengths as a leader, facilitator, mediator, and negotiator.”6 Of course, the difficulty in this more expansive definition of soft skills is that it conflates traits—which are largely hard-wired in individuals and stable over time with behaviors, which are be developed, changed, and en-hanced.7 Suggesting that to be a high performing requires possessing certain innate personality characteristics risks discrimination. It also makes it less important for employees to identify and develop their own malleable skill sets.

Finally, from the field of construction project management, researchers identified six categories of essential soft skills: communication, leadership, conflict management, achievement motivation, teamwork, and cogni-tive.8 Interesting in this set of skills is the inclusion of cognitive skills such as decision-making and problem solving, which are sometimes considered a separate category of soft skills.9

In spite of the lack of standardization, soft skills are important across industries and work settings. The rise of a service economy is one factor contributing to an increased awareness of and importance for soft skills.10 Service industries prioritize personal relationships, which requires a workforce adept at personal interactions. Further, soft skills are seen as the set of skills that enable an employee to stand out among their peers positioning them for advancement. While technical know-how may be required to get the job, the ability to effectively man-age relationships may be the skills that help an employee advance in their career.

Soft skills remain an area of interest today. Adecco, a staffing services company, polled 500 senior executives about the preparedness levels of new hires. They found that 92% of those polled believe there is a skills gap in the workforce and that 44% believe that gaps exists in soft skills as compared with only 22% who believe there is a gap in technical skills.11

Because soft skills are both ubiquitous and not well understood, there is value in exploring how librarians understand and make use of them. With greater construct clarity, better resources can be created that help indi-

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viduals understand their own skills sets and provide processes for developing them further. This is particularly important given how frequently and easily skills and personality traits are conflated. By clarifying the set of soft skills that are essential to success in the workplace, and decoupling them from personality traits, librarians have a fair and clear target for their own individual growth that separates who they are from what they do. This clarification can help remove the quite problematic notion of “fit” from the workplace, which is frequently and erroneously used to separate out employees on the basis of traits, not abilities. This research is a step toward bet-ter understanding the range and depth of librarians’ soft skills and how they are used in the workplace.

MethodsThe study reported here explored how academic librarians understand soft skills, guided by three research ques-tions: 1) What soft skills do academic librarians report using on the job? 2) In what situations or contexts do they use them? and, 3) How does the library organization establish and evaluate those skills? The findings reported in this paper focus on the first research question.

The study adopts a constructivist interpretist epistemological stance. This understanding acknowledges that there is no single reality or truth in the world, and therefore reality, defined and understood as a person’s lived experience, is explored and interpreted.12 Such a stance points to qualitative methods and for this study inter-views were used to collect in-depth, personal accounts of how participants understood and used soft skills in their work life.

Participants were recruited through a 3rd party recommender process where librarians were asked (via a listserv and a conference session) to recommend other librarians who they felt exhibited strong soft skills. Self-nomination was also accepted. The initial announcement yielded 51 nominations and each of those people were invited to participate in the study. 26 people responded resulting in 24 completed interviews.

The participant group included 21 people identifying as female and 3 identifying as male. All participants held an MLIS degree. 20 participants identified as Caucasian, three as Asian, and one as African-American. Ten participants worked in institutions with fewer than 10,000 students while 14 worked in institutions with more than 10,000. The majority of participants (14) were in their 40’s; five were in their 30s, four in their 50s, and one in their 20s. Participants were asked to indicate which functional areas of librarianship their work encompassed. Nine listed a single area while 15 listed two or more areas. The areas included Public Services (17); Administra-tion (15); Technical Services (7) and Information Technology (5).

One day prior to their scheduled interview, the participant completed a brief online questionnaire to collect demographic data and was presented with a basic definition of soft skills. Each of the interviews was conducted online using Webex video conferencing software. The interviews were recorded and transcribed.

N-Vivo software was used to carry out the coding and assist with data analysis. We followed the practices of thematic analysis to identify expressions of definitions of soft skills and passages where participants named discrete soft skills across the transcripts to create an initial coding scheme. We then re-read the coded data, com-paring responses within and across coding categories to further identify more granular patterns and themes. The multiple rounds of coding and interpreting themes were carried out by the researchers together and discussed at length to check for alternative interpretations, and to increase the accuracy and thoroughness of the findings.13

ResultsThe initial analysis of the transcripts resulted in 10 categories of soft skills. Tables 2 and 3 present those 10 skill areas by number of mentions by participant and times mentioned (Table 2) and then with interpretations of the meaning of each category (Table 3).

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The initial categories that emerged from data reveal two interesting findings. A first thing to note is the un-evenness of the distribution across the categories of soft skills. When looking at both the number of participants who named a skill in a category, and the number of times skills in a category were named, three tiers of skill catego-ries emerge (see Figure 1).

The top tier consists of the skills of People and Commu-nication which were named by a majority of participants (20 and 19 respectively out of 24) and were also mentioned mul-tiple times by participants (59 and 48 respectively). Clearly the skills within these two categories were shared among participants as soft skills and were readily accessible to them when asked to name them. We draw a second tier for the cat-egories Emotions and Social Self-Awareness. These two cat-

egories were mentioned by over half of the participants with multiple mentions, but were not as prevalent as the tier 1 areas. The third tier encompasses the remaining six categories, Customer Service, Group, Problem-solving, Traits, Beliefs, and Leadership. These categories were named by roughly a third or fewer of participants, with significantly fewer mentions overall. In general, these results suggest participants held a shared understanding of a subset of soft skills (People and Communication) but that there were other skill categories that were not as universally agreed upon.

A second point of interest in these data is the inclusion of a few, though not many, mentions of traits and beliefs, which are not skills. Given how frequently people tend to include non-skills in their understanding of soft skills it is notable how little that occurred in this study. The traits that were named all relate to traits that facilitate positive interactions with others, and particularly those used in service settings: friendly, patient, nice, approachable, polite, kind, non-judgmental, respectful.

TABLE 2Soft Skill Categories by Number of Mentions

Area Participants References

People 20 59Communication 19 48Emotions 16 22Social self-awareness 13 21Group 9 12Customer Service 6 12Problem solving 6 9Traits 6 7Belief 2 2Leadership 2 2

TABLE 3Interpretations of Soft Skill Categories

Area InterpretationPeople Used for mentions of interaction with others (emphasis is on the personal relationship,

but not the communication) (e.g., get along with people, understand people, make people comfortable); also includes mentions of conflict or conflict resolution

Communication used for mentions of communication acts or mechanisms (e.g. listen, talk, non-verbal, write)Emotions Used for mentions of emotion-related work, or feelings (e.g., emotional intelligence, labor,

regulation)Social self-awareness

Used for mentions of cognitive, sensing (e.g., anticipate needs and reactions, assess, gauge, read people and situations)

Customer Service Used for mentions of interactions specifically with customers (e.g., approachability)Group Used for mentions of skills involved in small groups of people (e.g., work in a group,

collaborate, consensus, cooperative)Problem solving Used for skills involved in problem solving situations (e.g., deal with problems, problem solving)Traits Used for mentions of things that are innate within people; not skillsBelief Used for things that beliefs people hold (ex. self-efficacy)Leadership Use for mentions of being a leader, or aspect of leadership

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Because of the size and agreement around the tier 1 categories, Communication and People we carried out further analysis within the categories. These two broader codes broke out into 11 (Communication) and 10 (People) more specific sub-codes reported in Tables 4 and 5.

Within the category of Communication, we see an interesting subset emerge that in effect mirrors the formal construct of interpersonal communication. Participants named behaviors within interpersonal communication such as listening, questioning, and interpreting, as well as characteristics of interpersonal communication such as tone, clarity, concise, and effective. They also mentioned forms of transmission of interpersonal communica-tion (non-verbal, written, and oral). These subskills are largely congruent with the structure of interpersonal communication.14

FIGURE 1Three Tiers of Soft Skills

TABLE 4Communication Soft Skills

Area Participants References

Listening 11 16Non-verbal 7 7Oral 4 6Tone 5 6Written 5 5Interpersonal 3 4Concise 2 3Effective 1 3Questioning 3 3Interpret 2 2Clarity 1 1

TABLE 5People Soft Skills

Area Participants References

Supervision 2 11

Motivation 6 8

Accepting 5 7

Conflict resolution 3 6

Relationship building 5 6

Setting 1 4

Comfort 3 3

Consideration 3 3

Trait recognition 2 2

Adaptability 1 1

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The breakdown of the People category is more complex when compared with the Communication category. As a reminder, the overarching People category was used for mentions of interaction with others where the emphasis is on the personal relationship, but not the communication, including getting along with people, un-derstanding people, or making people comfortable. We also used the People category for mentions of conflict or conflict resolution. Within that category we saw further distinctions made about the skills related to getting along, such as accepting people, recognizing others’ strengths, being able to adapt to different people, and mak-ing people feel comfortable, heard, and appreciated. Also revealed in this deeper dive into the category is the notion of building relationships, expressed as the skills involved with establishing rapport and good feelings with someone in order to have a foundation on which to create a positive relationship. We also saw several responses that related to the ability to motivate people such as praising people, setting them up to succeed, and creating enthusiasm or excitement in people. Lastly, we noted references to resolving conflict as a subset of the People category. The additional analysis within the People category reveals expressions of what is required to better relate to people, however, unlike the sub-structure in Communication that closely aligns with the discipline of interpersonal communication, the notions expressed with People do not form as cohesive a set. Further, they may also not all express skills (applied knowledge) but rather lean toward traits or attitudes.

We assigned the categories of Emotions and Social Self-awareness to a second tier in our dataset. Slightly over half of the participants named skills in these categories and there were multiple mentions across the transcripts. We classified skills related to emotional intelligence, emotional labor, and emotional regulation within the Emo-tions category along with the multiple references to the specific skill of showing empathy. Social Self-awareness was used to capture what are largely skills related to cognition; taking in information and processing it, sensing a situation, reflecting on a situation, etc. Tables 6 and 7 show the skills included in these two categories.

Within the Emotions category, empathy emerged as a shared concept for a third of participants, with other concepts within the area of workplace emotions receiving fewer mentions. Expressions related to the ability to understand were most pronounced in the Social Self-awareness category. For participants understanding could be applied to other people or to a context or situation. Several participants used the phrases “sensing” or “read-ing” to describe their ability to take in and make sense of an event or situation.

The remaining categories make up a third tier. The skills assigned to these categories were less prevalent in the minds of the participants as based on the number of people who offered them and the number of mentions in the dataset. Further, as indicated earlier, they include a few mentions of concepts that are closer to beliefs and attitudes then demonstrable skills. Two points should be highlighted about the categories in tier 3. First, several participants mentioned the exact phase “customer service skills” or named specific skills within that category such as “helping people” or “handling complaints”. We chose to keep those mentions all together in a category for Customer Service because of the specificity that emerged from the data, and also because of the importance of

TABLE 6Emotion Soft Skills

Area Participants References

Empathy 8 10Emotional Intelligence 6 7Emotional Labor 3 3Emotional Response 3 3Appreciation 1 1

TABLE 7Social Self-awareness Soft Skills

Area Participants References

Understanding 9 12Analyzing 4 4Self-awareness 3 4Observing 1 2Knowing 1 1

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a service culture to the practice of librarianship. We do recognize, though, that those same references could also logically be assigned to the People or Communication categories, or that the category of Customer Service could perhaps be a subcategory nested within People or Communication. Such is the nature of qualitative data analysis and following best practice, we offer up the details of our thinking and analysis and leave it to the reader to judge the relevance for their own understanding. A second point to make about the categorization of tier 3 is the near absence of skills that were classified as leadership. Though we are apprehensive to draw any conclusions about the absence of a concept, it would seem that at a minimum, participants in this study did not link leadership skills such as creating or articulating a vision or influence or persuading people with an understanding of soft skills. This may be worth future exploration.

DiscussionImportance of People and CommunicationAlthough soft skills are not a clearly defined concept, the data in this study reveal that participants did have a decently shared notion of some of the skills that could be considered soft. Most participants named skills within two categories, People and Communication, as skills they find themselves using, forming a basic understanding of soft skills in academic librarianship. We believe the large margin of responses contained within these two codes indicates they are the most prominent aspects of soft skills. Our model positions these skills as tier 1 skills to represent their essentialness and salience. Communicating and interacting with people are immediate parts of everyday life in the library workplace. These soft skill categories cover over half of participants’ citations, and were cited by the vast majority of participants. The number of mentions under these skill categories points both to their importance to and presence in the minds of the participants.

The saliency of Communication and People also corresponds with Klein et al.’s framework for interpersonal skills.15 Based on extensive literature review Klein, DeRuin and Salas developed a taxonomy of interpersonal skills that is similar to the tier 1 categories that emerged in our study. Their framework contains 12 interpersonal skills separated into Communication and Relationship-building categories, and as shown in Table 8, both the categories and at least some of the skills within each category align with the Communication and People catego-ries and skills in our current data.

Divergence within the Second and Third TiersOne possible interpretation of the divergence of skills in the second and third tiers of our model and the lesser degree of shared understanding of those skills across the participants is that those skills may not be as universally perceived as the skills associated with Communication and People. It could also be that those skills represent skills that are considered to be “nice to have” but per-haps to rise to the level of essential (both in nature and in importance) soft skills. A third possibility is that the skills, particular in tier 2, might be cogni-tively harder to understand and articulate through an interview setting. It could be that the skills as-

TABLE 8Klein, DeRouin, and Salas’s (2006) Interpersonal Skills

Category Skill

Communication Active listening*

Oral communication*

Written communication*

Assertive communicationNonverbal communication*

Relationship-building

Cooperation and coordination†

Trust*

Intercultural sensitivity*

Service orientation†

Self-presentationSocial influenceConflict resolution and negotiation*

*Denotes a skill observed in our dataset in the parallel category.†Denotes a skill observed in our dataset coded in a different category.

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sociated with handling emotions and sense-making in the workplace activate a portion of our brains that is less accessible to meta-cognition.

Discrete versus HolisticThe thrust of this research was to discover the specific soft skills used by academic librarians in their own words as related to their lived experiences. The results point to a complex set of skills that share some alignment with other soft skill taxonomies, but also add some unique skills into the mix. The value in this approach of demysti-fying a fuzzy concept is to arrive at concrete, discrete, and clear skills that can be understood by many and used for help guide individual development. However, there is also merit in taking the opposite approach to under-standing soft skills. Rather than focus on the discrete, researchers instead could shine light on a holistic set of workplace elements such as contextual and situational details, individual traits and differences of people, and the nature of the tasks being performed. It is likely that the combination of all those influences will point to different skills, needed by different people, in different moments, and so perhaps the best set of soft skills to develop is the ability to read a situation and adapt accordingly. Nevertheless, as Fry and Whitmore articulated as early as 1974, working with people requires a whole range of abilities distinct from technical, functional, and operational skills. Continuing to advance an understanding of what those skills are remains an important pursuit toward achieving individual and organizational goals.

Future ResearchThere is much yet to explore in this area of inquiry. For one, are there key antecedent traits that predict a person’s ability to master soft skills? Klein et al point to some individual differences that contribute to the execution of soft skills such as general personality, team orientation, emotional intelligence or other intelligences. The pose a practi-cal model that depicts how individual and situation differences may influence our perceptual work that informs how we demonstrate soft skills. At the other end of the spectrum, how can the value of soft skills be measured, either in terms of individual or organizational performance? For libraries, do soft skills result in increased service quality? Greater number of users? Higher internal productivity, work engagement or organizational commitment? More work that explores the wider framework of soft skills including antecedents and outcomes would be useful.

Research on soft skills in librarianship would also benefit from a taking critical theory approach. With critical theory in general, the researcher seeks to understand the phenomenon of interest with an eye toward uncovering inherent power structures that inhibit liberation for affected parties. In this instance, critical feminist theory might be usefully applied to soft skills in librarianship to uncover any gender inequalities inherent in the use of soft skills. For example, do we expect men to be less adept at soft skills because of the strong relational ele-ment? Do we require greater practice of soft skills from women, or do we hold women more accountable if they fail to exhibit such skills? Critical race theory may also shed light specifically into the “whiteness” of soft skills. Are people of color expected to exhibit more soft skills that whites? Data from our study when viewed within the racial breakdown of our participants points to rather distinct experiences utilizing soft skills based on the race of the librarian. We intend to explore this particular finding in greater depth in subsequent analysis. Finally, how does mental health play a part in the awareness of and practice of soft skills in a library workplace? Is there an ablest component to our perception of “good” soft skills?

ConclusionsThis research is a first step toward understanding how academic librarians use soft skills in the workplace. It adds empirically derived knowledge to a body of literature that has largely understood soft skills from a theoretical,

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abstract lens. The results suggest that academic librarians are aware of their use of a set of relational skills around interpersonal communication and interacting with people that to a real extent align with other conceptual models of soft skills. Further, many of the skills identified are behavioral competencies which can be used for diagnostic, training and development, and recognition purposes. The findings here help move the field toward clearly naming and defining the relational skills that contribute to workplace success. This is an important step toward developing teaching and continuing education materials for librarians as they move through their careers.

AcknowledgementsWe wish to thank the participants in this study for sharing their experiences with us. We also thank Lindsey Gibson and Brittany Brannon for their help transcribing the interviews.

Endnotes1. Matteson, Anderson, and Boyden, “‘Soft Skills’: A Phrase in Search of Meaning.”2. Whitmore and Fry, “Soft Skills: Definition, Behavioral Model Analysis, Training Procedures.”3. Spencer and Spencer, Competence at Work.4. “Ranking Workplace Competencies: Student and Graduate Perceptions.”5. “Executive Perceptions of the Top 10 Soft Skills Needed in Today’s Workplace.”6. Robles, 457.7. Matteson, Anderson, and Boyden, “‘Soft Skills’: A Phrase in Search of Meaning.”8. Zuo et al., “Soft Skills of Construction Project Management Professionals and Project Success Factors.”9. Katz, “Skills of an Effective Administrator.”10. Sharma, “Soft Skills.”11. Adecco, “Analysis of the American Workforce.”12. Schwandt, “Three Epistemological Stances for Qualitative Inquiry: Interpretivism, Hermeneutics, and Social Constructionism.”13. Cornish, Gillespie, and Zittoun, Tania, “Collaborative Analysis of Qualitative Data.”14. Hargie, Dickson, and Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Communication: Research, Theory, and Practice.15. Klein, DeRuin, and Salas, “Uncovering Workplace Interpersonal Skills: A Review, Framework, and Research Agenda.”

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