Power Skills and Profit: What 1,600 L&D Leaders Found

A note on sources: we found these figures in secondary news coverage and have not reviewed the full report. Treat the seven-point figure as indicative and check the original before quoting it. The interpretation for training teams is ours.

Why "Soft" Is the Wrong Word

"Soft skills" was always a poor label. Try running a negotiation, a difficult performance conversation or a cross-team escalation without them. The outcomes are very hard indeed: a lost deal, a resignation, a project stuck for six weeks.

"Power skills" is a better name because it points at the effect. These are the capabilities that decide how much of everyone else's technical work actually turns into results:

• Communication: making a decision understood the first time.
• Influence and stakeholder management: getting agreement without authority.
• Emotional intelligence: reading a room, a customer or a stressed team member correctly.
• Critical thinking: questioning an output, human or AI, before acting on it.
• Coaching and feedback: raising the performance of people who do not report to you alone.

Correlation, Cause and a Fair Doubt

A sceptic will say: profitable firms can simply afford more training. That is a fair objection, and the study as reported cannot rule it out.

But consider the mechanism. Margins are shaped by rework, attrition, slow decisions, customer churn and failed handoffs. Each of those has a people-skill root cause. A manager who cannot give clear feedback produces rework. A team that cannot disagree productively ships late. A salesperson who cannot listen discounts too soon.

So even if profit and power skills rise together partly because both reflect a healthy company, there is a plausible line from skill to margin. Which suggests a cheap, useful test: measure it in your own business rather than trusting anyone's average.

The AI Twist

There is a second reason this matters now. When AI drafts the report, writes the code and summarises the call, the remaining human work concentrates in exactly these skills: deciding what to ask, judging what comes back, persuading others to act, and keeping a team steady through change.

Teams that treat AI as a tools-only rollout tend to find that the bottleneck moves to people. That is why we pair AI literacy with human-skills practice rather than treating them as separate tracks.

A 5-Step Way to Test the Link in Your Own Company

1. Pick one business metric a power skill should move. For example: sales discounting, project rework, regretted attrition in a team, or customer escalations.
2. Baseline it for a single function over the last two quarters.
3. Diagnose before you train. Use a skill gap analysis or a behavioural assessment to find the specific gap, not a generic "communication" need.
4. Train on real work. Short role-based sessions, then practice on live tasks with a manager or coach reinforcing it.
5. Re-measure at 90 and 180 days against a comparable team that did not train. Share the result with finance.

If the link holds in your data, you have a budget argument no survey can give you.

How Bodhih Helps

Bodhih programmes are private and tailored to your teams, and can run from diagnosis to reinforcement.

• Leadership Skills Training for first-time managers through senior leaders.
• Soft Skills Training and Communication Skills Training built around your real scenarios.
• Emotional Intelligence at the Workplace for self-awareness, empathy and conflict handling.
• Coaching for Managers to make new habits stick on the job.

See how these fit together on our corporate training solutions page.

The Bigger Idea

For years the question was whether companies could afford to invest in people skills. The more useful question now is whether they can afford the cost of leaving them to chance: the rework, the exits and the slow decisions that never appear on a training invoice.

Frequently asked questions