The Softer Side of Leadership - Heidi Kraft, Careers Coach

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Tough times require "softer" leaders.

This is the perspective of careers coach Heidi Kraft, who says that today's senior leaders need to focus more on emotional intelligence and other "soft" qualities to be able to better recruit and retain quality employees.

In an exclusive interview, Kraft discusses:

Kraft is a Leadership and Career coach and founder of Kraft Your Success Coaching and Consulting.

Prior to launching her business, she spent 17 years on the agency side of the advertising industry, developing and implementing media strategies for high-profile clients such as Microsoft, Intel, Intuit, Siebel Systems, 24 Hour Fitness and Harley-Davidson. Her last role prior to launching her business was as SVP Media Director for Hill Holliday, a mid-sized Boston based agency.

She holds a CPCC (Certified Professional Coactive Coach) and is a graduate of the Coaches Training Institute's Leadership Program. She is also a member of the International Coaches Federation. She also serves on the BAARC board (Bay Area Advertising Relief Committee), a non-profit organization that helps individuals who are having severe difficulty after job loss.

TOM FIELD: Hi, this is Tom Field, Editorial Director with Information Security Media Group. We are talking today with Heidi Kraft, a leadership and career coach and founder of Kraft Your Success Coaching and Consulting. Heidi, thanks so much for joining me to talk about this today.

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HEIDI KRAFT: Thank you, Tom, for having me. It is great to be here.

FIELD: So I have read your blog, I have looked at your site; you talk a lot about the softer side of leadership. Help define this for us, what are the soft skills in leadership?

KRAFT: Well, the softer skills ironically are the ones that are a little bit more difficult to define. So when you think about hard skills, it is easy to say that some one is great in math or they are a really great project manager, or they are increasing sales by "x." The softer skills are the things like sympathy, could be confidence even. You know, you hear this term "being a people person," so they are not necessarily things that people can measure as easily, but they are things that are really, really critical for leadership.

FIELD: So Heidi, particularly in financial services where we spend a lot of time, it has been a hard year and hard skills really have been talked about. Tell us why the softer skills are so important now of all times?

KRAFT: Wow, perfect question. So I actually think about this in a couple of ways. In what you are pointing to in terms of what is happening now is a leadership challenge, right? So I think about this as how leadership has changed and the need that is necessary in order to have a new kind of leadership. So if you think in the past about what it has been like, which is really the sort of hierarchal telling people what to do as opposed to working with people. So I really believe that there is a shift that is happening right now, and that people need to be more collaborative, they need to be more innovative, and they really need to be focused on developing that rapport. Let's face it, we all love working with people that like us and we like, right? So there is something that is really important about it. Even if you think of President Obama, which whether or not you agree with his politics, people are describing him as calm and open and empathetic and yet commanding. So if you think about that kind of energy, and those are things that are usually not easy to measure, but you sure know it when you feel it. So that is one reason. And the other thing I think about is just how we are so pressed for time, sort of this information overload with instant message and email and twitter and facebook and all of those things that are going on, we are working 24/7. What tends to be happening is that that human connection is missing more, and so I think there is a real opportunity for leaders, in any discipline, to really take that as an opportunity to do some things differently. When I think about some of the ways that I work with my clients, I would challenge them. For example, five times a day when you are typically going to send an instant message or an email, do something as simple as picking up the phone or have that communication face to face. .