When I was about 8 years old, in response to the ubiquitous question of what I wanted to be when I grew up, I responded, “I want to be happy!”
The adults chuckled and my inquisitor did not ask any follow-up questions. But my mother later pulled me …
When Anna, a 32-year-old IT professional, started her first job, it wasn’t long before she found herself facing a bad case of job creep. “They said, ‘Hey, can you do this other thing too for a little bit? It’ll be like 10% of your time.’ But that turn…
There is a scene in The Devil Wears Prada 2 where legendary fashion editor Miranda Priestly, played by Meryl Streep, is walking alone through Milan’s fashion district.
Her influence has been built on instinct and staying ahead of the culture. But i…
In the late 1960s, the U.S. Army made a distinction between the skills necessary for machinery operations and those used in service of people management. Hard skills, as the Army framed it, were the competencies that involved working with hardware—operating tanks, repairing radios, or what the lead researchers Paul G. Whitmore and John P. Fry called “weapons of aluminum and steel.” Soft skills, on the other hand, were the ones that involved working with people, such as inspecting troops, supervising office personnel, and other social matters. The army wasn’t making an evaluation between the two skillsets, per se, but rather, delineating what mastery was required for each.
However, somewhere between then and now, this delineation became a hierarchy, where the half of the work that didn’t use machinery somehow lost half of its importance, despite Whitmore and Fry’s intentions. This might very well be one of the most consequential misnomers of modern work because, in fact, the hardest skills in leadership are the ones we’ve spent 50 years calling soft. So, we invited Dr. Becky Kennedy onto the latest episode of the FROM THE CULTURE podcast to help us appraise the value of soft skills, and tally the cost of undervaluing them.
Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and the founder of Good Inside, one of the largest parenting platforms in the world. Her work in parenting provides a useful proxy for the application of “soft skills” in management. As she reports, Good Inside members who join the community to manage their three-year-old’s tantrums, for instance, often realize months later that these same skills helped them become better managers in their work. Not because the skills transfer, but because they are essentially the same. Helping people feel seen and validated are core tenants of Dr. Becky’s work and, as it turns out, the mainstays for the not-so-soft skills of leadership.
Her business case is sharp, and any CHRO reading this should sit with it for a minute. Dr. Becky described the hiring pattern every leader has watched play out. You recruit for the hard skills: the cohort analysis, the AI workflow, the P&L chops, whatever the role’s machinery might be. The candidate demonstrates them. The offer goes out. Six months in, the team is somehow worse. Not because the new hire couldn’t write a deck but perhaps because they are defensive when receiving feedback. They blame others when things get hard and, consequently, the culture around them quietly shifts in a direction nobody planned. None of those issues were measured as a part of the interview process but, eventually, they show. And that’s the rub, we hire for one set of competencies that are easier to evaluate (the hard skills) and undervalue the ones that disproportionally impact the business (the soft skills), not because it’s unimportant but because it’s harder to measure.
The truth of the matter is that these soft skills become increasingly more paramount as a leader ascends in their career. The more senior the leader, the less of the hard skills they use. They’re no longer responsible for the operations of the machinery; they’re now responsible for the operators. Their work scales as does their impact.
Be that as it may, when MBA students enroll in prestigious business school programs to acquire the critical skills of management, they come looking for the hard skills—finance, accounting, and strategy—and tend to blow off the soft skill courses. They want frameworks, equations, and calculations. Important as these skills may be, I have never once in the almost twenty years since I graduated from business school called a classmate to ask them about how Little’s Law worked. I have, however, reached out to bemoan the challenges of navigating a manager who didn’t seem to recognize my contribution or a direct report who won’t step up or a team member who’s been quietly checking out for the last three months. There are no frameworks or equations to quantify these scenarios, yet they make all the difference of how work actually works.
These skills are intangible, yes, but by no means are they soft. They are hard because they’re difficult to master. They’re hard because they aren’t easily detected—of course, until it’s too late. They’re hard because they are often unspoken, unlearned, and underappreciated, so we ignore their import, erroneously, and, therefore, suffer from the repercussions.
Fifty years ago, the folks who invented these labels—hard and soft—warned us of the distinction’s folly. The least we can do now is finally listen and get to work on the real hard skills. In the meantime, check out our full conversation with Dr. Becky Kennedy on the latest episode of FROM THE CULTURE here.
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Below, Benoit Denizet-Lewis shares five key insights from his new book, You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation.
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No matter how likeable you (think you) are, you won’t get along with everyone. Chances are, you can think of at least one colleague that you just don’t have a good relationship with. If that relationship has gone bad over time, you may want to figure …
It’s become an unfortunate yet well-documented truth that having a baby can impact a woman’s career. A 2025 survey found that 87% of working mothers say they’ve missed promotions or opportunities due to becoming a mom, while 90% of mothers said they had to adjust their career path because of parenthood with 59% changing industries altogether.
Enter: family influencing, an immersive and sometimes lucrative career path that is surging in popularity among women post-baby. According to a 2025 review published in Sage Journals, over the past five years, there has been a 101.6% increase in mom-influencers on social media. Journalist Fortesa Latifi explores the phenomenon in her new book Like, Follow, Subscribe: Influencer Kids and the Cost of a Childhood Online. She told Fast Company that, given so much is stacked against women who have children when it comes to their work, the baby to influencer pipeline makes sense.
“I think women are drawn to influencing because it’s so difficult to be a working mother in this country,” the author explains. “Statistically, many women return to work within weeks of having a baby and childcare costs can often outpace an entire salary. Mothers have lower salaries than women without children, on average,” she adds. (One study found that mothers see their incomes decrease by an average of 50% after having children.)
Aside from costs, which are crushing (families report that around 23% of their paychecks go straight to childcare), working and child-rearing can leave parents, particularly mothers, feeling pulled in two separate directions.
Women’s careers suffer disproportionately after a child comes into the picture. Just last year, around 400,000 women with young children left the workforce—the largest exodus in about 40 years, according to a report from the University of Kansas’ Care Board. Meanwhile, the same report found that fathers’ labor force participation has remained consistently above 95% for decades. According to Pew Research, while women do more household chores and childrearing, men spend more time on leisure activities.
As such, influencing can seem like “a dream career,” Latifi says. “It promises that your career can unfold alongside your family life as opposed to in contention with it. Ideally, you can stay home with your kids and make more money than you were making before. It’s a decision I can understand why people make,” the author adds.
Influencing can bring in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands in earnings each month. Latifi says she found that the “highest strata of mom influencers & family vloggers make millions of dollars a year.” One family she interviewed for her book, who goes by the name Family Fun Pack online, makes $8 million yearly. And according to a 2026 report from the digital marketing agency Influize, popular influencers can earn $7,000 for a single Instagram reel.
Regardless of how tough it is to juggle work and family, influencing is hard work. Setting up phones or recording devices, not to mention staging and lighting, to meticulously editing content, takes time. Like anything, you’re bound to be more successful the more you do it. But being constantly online can be draining and it can damage your happiness. According to the 2026 World Happiness Report, life satisfaction is highest among those with low rates of social media use and vice versa.
When it comes to having your kids online sharing everything from pregnancy announcements to birthdays to personal milestones, comes with a heavy emotional cost. In her book, Latifi highlights one influencer who says she became utterly burned out with negative comments and online cruelty. “It all just kind of freaks her out and it’s even made her have fleeting moments of wanting to stop being an influencer altogether,” the author writes.
Latifi also questions whether kids can really give meaningful consent when they don’t fully understand the gravity of having their entire lives documented online. And in a recent Yahoo post, she explained that many parents are countering the influencer trend by deciding to take their children offline altogether.
Still, the influencer in Latifi’s book who was burned out was torn about quitting because she was supporting her family from the comfort of her home and the paychecks kept coming. “But how else could she make $500,000 a year?” Latifi asks. Because the truth is for most working mothers, especially in the U.S. where so many women feel utterly unsupported post-birth, that kind of money is life-changing no matter how you earn it.
Latifi says that in order for women to have a fair shot, we need the essentials. “Let’s start with generous and federally mandated maternity leave,” she says. “Let’s stop forcing working moms to work as though they don’t have children and then mother as though they don’t have jobs.”
She continues, “Let’s lower childcare costs (while paying workers well for the incredibly important job they have). But mostly, let’s start with generous and federally mandated maternity leave.”
The looming SpaceX IPO has drawn renewed attention to the astronomical pay that Elon Musk has secured through his companies.
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