Soft skills such as analytical thinking, resilience and flexibility are rising in demand, according to the Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.
Yet many businesses need to get better at measuring and teaching these skills, according to Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.
Grant joined the Forum’s Meet the Leader podcast to discuss this, the future of work, and the workplace conventions he believes should be left behind.
본 내용은 세계경제포럼이 분석하여 2025년 2월 28일 세계경제포럼 홈페이지에 게재한 내용을 옮긴 것입니다.
Soft skills are increasingly recognized as vital for today’s business leaders. So how would a top organizational psychologist grade today’s workplaces in that area?
C-minus. That’s the view of Adam Grant, a bestselling author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school, where he teaches courses in leadership and teamwork, negotiation, and organizational behaviour.
So why the middling grade for soft skills in business? Grant joined the World Economic Forum’s Meet the Leader podcast to share his thoughts on this, the future of work, and some of the workplace conventions he believes should be left behind.
In-demand skills
“I think we could be doing a lot better,” says Grant. “When I walk into organizations, one of the things I see is people are measured only on their individual results. They get rewarded and they get promoted.”
What many businesses are forgetting, he says, is that they need people who are both individually excellent but who also elevate the team members around them.
Soft skills such as analytical thinking, resilience and flexibility are vital to this. And they are rising in demand as the labour market is shaped by factors including technological change, geoeconomic fragmentation and economic uncertainty, according to the Future of Jobs Report 2025 from the World Economic Forum.
“Most organizations don’t have a clue how to measure them,” Grant says. “Let alone how to teach them.”
Building “better practices”
Workers can expect that two-fifths of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated between now and 2030, the Future of Jobs Report says. This will call for a significant amount of upskilling and reskilling.
Workers’ skill sets are expected to need to change significantly over the next five years.Image: World Economic Forum
For Grant, this will mean scrapping current best practices and trying to build “better practices”.
He recalls how Google co-founder Larry Page once shared that his biggest fear was the company standing still and admiring past successes as if they were in a glass case in a museum.
“He told me: we can’t afford to do that – we need to smash the glass case and we need to invent new artifacts and practices,” Grant says. “I think that’s more true now than it was then.”
Evolving traditional processes
So what are some of the practices and conventions that businesses should consign to the past in order to move forward?
Grant believes companies should start by getting rid of morning meetings because they are often unproductive and can leave employees feeling frustrated. Meetings should be about bonding, learning and creativity, which doesn’t need to happen every day but rather around once a week, he says.
Alongside, he thinks that companies should investigate moving to a four-day week, citing an emerging body of evidence suggesting it could boost wellbeing without affecting productivity.
In a recent study in the UK, more than half of bosses taking part in a trial in which staff worked 100% of their output in 80% of their time said the move had a positive impact on their organization. In Japan, the Tokyo Metropolitan government is set to trial a four-day work week to help employees with their work-life balance.
Traditional interviews, meanwhile, could be overhauled by both allowing candidates to demonstrate their skills and giving them a second chance if they don’t perform well in the first interview. This will show their agility and capacity for learning and progression, he says.
Brainstorming could be made more effective using a technique known as brain-writing, Grant says, where people generate their own ideas in advance before a group comes together to build on these ideas. This could help overcome groupthink or falling victim to what he describes as the “hippo effect” – where people defer to the highest-paid person’s opinion.
Traditional hierarchies can stifle innovation, Grant continues. Another solution could be replacing the corporate ladder, where people always defer to their own manager, with a “corporate lattice”. Here, employees are free to pitch ideas to anyone in the hierarchy above them – if it gets a green light they are free to move forward with it.
“It’s a great way to make sure pilots happen,” Grant adds.
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